Psychology and The Love of Learning
Out there in the oceans of the unknown, there are secrets we cannot fathom, yet sailing in it has been the inherent nature of humankind. Even the history of Christianity begins with Adam eating the forbidden fruit, representing the curious nature of humans. No matter the consequences, The Judgement Day in this case, we humans will always strive to learn something which we don’t know.
There are many such discernable moments in history that qualify as examples of this. Thompson’s discovery of the electrons, Dalton’s discovery of the atom, Newton’s discovery of gravity, and Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen. All these discoveries might seem like fiction, an act of penning your imagination on a piece of paper, but these discoveries are what dictate 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 shatter 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 rapidly changing societies.
The previous centuries 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 are hardly aware of the “software” that runs in the brain - psychology. 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 the formation of emotions, and 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. Because when we look into the deep understanding of our mind, then only we can create systems that can behave as if they are 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, the 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 Generalistic Artificial Intelligence. The problem that comes there is that we cannot discount the psychological 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 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 result in another wave 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 “why” being the pursuit of knowledge.