On Psychology and The Love of Learning
Out there in the oceans of unknown, there are secrets we cannot fathom, yet sailing in it has been the inherent nature of humankind since the time when Adam curiously ate the forbidden fruit, the repercussions of which were pernicious, which we know as the infamous Judgement Day. This act is the exemplar of our penchant for curiosity — it elucidates no matter what the consequence, we humans will always strive to learn something which we don’t know.
There are many such discernible moments in history which qualify as examples of this. Thompson’s discovery of the electrons, Dalton’s discovery of the atom, Newton’s discovery of gravity, Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen. All these discoveries might seem like writing fiction, an act of penning your imagination on a piece of paper, but these discoveries and alike are what dictates our day to day life. And who can forget Oppenheimer’s quote after the success of the Manhattan project that ultimately led to the creation of the atom bomb, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Renaissance set us on a path towards questioning everything and Reformation helped us shattered the dogmas of society. Purporting these concepts of the 15th century to the 21st century is a remarkable achievement of humankind as a species, for there have been many times in history that a particular set of beliefs has been lost in the rapidly changing societies.
The previous centuries which were about knowing the unknown, the current century is about creating the unknown. By unknown I mean our mind. We know the biological intricacies of our brain but still we haven’t drenched ourselves in the psychological knowledge of the supercomputer that is behind all the revolutions. Psychology provides us a way to look into our thinking machines and figure out how and why an individual or a group or a society reacts to certain things. This leads to formation of emotions, feelings, differentiating right from wrong, how we learn and gather information and pass the same methods to our progeny.
All of these factors are essential in understanding how artificial thinking can be gifted to computers. For when we look into the deep understanding of our mind, then only we can create systems that can behave as if they are an offspring of our own psychology.
Psychology is an eclectic subject — it is a love of learning what is unknown. Not only learning, but understanding the deep thought process behind everything and constructing various imaginable scenarios to put the theory to test. Psychology allows us to question everything — our death, the meaning of life, the veneers of thoughts, structure of societies, history, politics, sciences and even gives us an insight into the future.
I believe it is when we have fully decoded and delineated our psychology, then only we will be able to make some distinguishable foray into Generalist Artificial Intelligence. The problem that comes there is that we cannot discount the psychology biases that are formed unbeknownst to us. This pollutes the data we might use to train the GAI systems, and we have come a long way ahead to purify it. Nonetheless, this bias of thoughts and choices is what has led us to this point where science can create everything imaginable.
Though the ocean of psychology is vast and unknown but it has an end, and it is only a matter of time when we find this end. Probing into this abyss is a spectacular thing in itself and what will happen after this is still unclear and uncertain. No one can predict the future. Whether this will be another onset of Renaissance and Reformation where our societal and scientific foundations shift, or whether it will be Judgement Day, only time can tell. Until then as Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”, our reason being the pursuit of knowledge.
