TAKEAWAYS:
Human intuition is vital for generating unique and genius-level output, distinguishing it from electronically assimilated information. Our understanding of reality is shaped by accumulated experience and shared knowledge, but humans tend to bend new information to fit their existing paradigms, sometimes leading to myths and misconceptions.
It's essential to differentiate between human and electronically manipulated activity within the total recorded human experience. While humans created AI, defining and separating human contributions from AI-assisted activities is crucial to preserving human agency.
An example from the past illustrates the power of human creativity and intuition. The speaker developed a successful counseling program for anorexia nervosa by focusing on restoring hormonal cycles rather than traditional dietary approaches, highlighting the value of innovative thinking and unique human contributions to problem-solving.
The question of assigning an ethic to the interface between human thinking and using the entire recorded electronic history of mankind may be the idea that human intuition, rather than electronically developed assimilation, is the difference in capacity for specific output that we call genius. I am reminded that Aristotle said the “real” reality is always before us. So that we do not discover nature’s secrets, we finally, with accumulated experience shared, begin to grasp how nature does its thing. And, to punch through our natural defenses in coping with something new, we bend reality towards our previously acquired paranoia, mindset, misconceptions, experience, and convictions. What results is an easier way of comprehending the “new” but can create myth, legend, fairy tales, religion, propaganda, and lies to ease the pain and discomfort with accepting the “new’. We may look but not see; we may listen but not hear. The specific contribution made by human beings to allow the total of recorded human experience to be manipulated may need a definition that separates human activity from manipulated electronic activity. Humans created AI, just as we created an iron lung to keep humans breathing when their system fails. But, yes, an AI-assisted refrigerator can produce a shopping list of expendables used up (missing) and print it every five days by remote transmission to your digital printer. Great, except my diet and cooking variables would be challenging to keep up to date. (Yeah, I know, re-boot).
A personal example, if I may. Around 2000, I was working on my doctorate in Counseling Psychology, and it was severely suggested that I start working on my dissertation subject. My advisor was kindly ruthless. So I took on anorexia nervosa. Karen Carpenter recently succumbed to the disease, and I saw nothing in the offing to help. Not even Hilde Bruch, a psychiatrist at the time. Not being a medical practitioner, no drugs were available to me, but I read and read and nearly died in the stacks looking for stuff, this before computers and good search engines and all that. I realized that anorexics lose over 12% of their body fat, and their menstrual cycles stop amenorrhea. When they eat enough, their cycles reappear—a natural signal between healthy and unhealthy.
I devised a counseling program that never discussed food, utensils, recipes, shopping, cooking, kitchens, food preparation, fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, cooking shows, diets, portioning calories, or body shapes. The crux of the focus was: Do you want to be a fully functioning woman to be able to have children, enjoy sex, have regular hormonal cycles, marriage, social and family life, and working career? The study I ran proved that 83% started their cycles before ten weeks of one-to-one therapy once a week. Each had their clock and proof when they were falling behind and took appropriate diet strategies to get back on track.
Three of the first clients I could contact were still successful five years later. Hhmmmm, was I the first to think of this? It was too radical for the time (more than 40 years ago), and I moved on to other things.
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