Questions

In science, the most important thing is asking the right questions. Our physics professors at the university taught us this well. In the natural sciences, questions are posed to nature itself. Those who know how to ask properly are the ones most likely to understand the answers. For others, the answers may hold no meaning.

The same is true for artificial intelligence (AI). Those who can ask meaningful questions will receive meaningful answers. Some argue that AI has already surpassed human intelligence — economist Tyler Cowen among them. Professor Cowen is a deeply educated individual, a true polymath not only in economics but also across many fields of science and the arts. I listen to his show Conversations with Tyler with great interest. He claims that ChatGPT can answer economic questions better than he can, despite his expertise as a professor of economics. From this, he concludes that AI is already more intelligent than humans.

However, by that logic, one could also claim that the Library of Congress — which houses all of humanity’s most important printed works — is more intelligent than a person. No human could ever memorize so much information. Yet it is absurd to compare repositories of knowledge with generators of knowledge. We humans are both creators and users of knowledge. AI, on the other hand, is merely a storehouse.

Only those who ask the right questions are able to draw knowledge from it. It’s true that retrieving information from AI is incomparably faster than searching through library catalogs and reading original texts. Still, the key to understanding remains the same: asking the right question — just as it is in the natural sciences.