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The idea of the intellectual immortality of generations
is knocking at the door of the next stage
of the AI revolution.
To give a first impression of what we are talking about,
let me recall a counter-intuitive statistic
on road safety by age groups:
the safest drivers, by far, are seventy-year-olds.
In other words, it takes people roughly half a century
to truly learn how to drive safely.
And then, all too soon, they pass away —
with no opportunity to share
that hard-won skill …
not even with their own grandchildren, who must begin learning from scratch and often pay the ultimate price for their mistakes.
This is not a unique situation. In fact, it is emblematic of a deeper human condition.
All verbalized knowledge amounts to only a thin, transparent surface layer floating on the vast ocean
of human knowledge & skills.
That ocean is formed by a lifetime of accumulated experience, most of which remains inaccessible to others …
felt only by the individual, stored in tactile, muscular, motor, and emotional memory rather than in any kind of sharable words.
As for knowledge formalized in computers and other automated systems — that is merely a thin film on the surface of this immense ocean.
Keeping all of the above in mind, I coined the term AUTOFORMALIZATION and described its meaning in an article:
“Autoformalisation - Knowledge & skill acquisition”
netvalley.com/cgi-bin/librar…
From my more recent experience, I see that today’s most popular AI products — LLM services such as GPT — hold the potential to become effective tools for helping people extract their intuitive knowledge:
first by verbalizing it, and then by autoformalizing it.
Some people have asked me why I coined the term AUTOFORMALIZATION at a time when there were no tools capable of scaling the process it describes.
My usual answer is a quotation from
Heinrich Neuhaus book: “The Art of Piano playing”
‘To give a thing a name is the beginning of understanding it’
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