Remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo is strapped into the chair and Link uploads all sorts of martial arts into his mind? When Neo wakes up, he says "I know Kung-fu," then proceeds to demonstrate his skill in a battle with Morpheus. That was a pretty amazing scene. But if you suspend your disbelief for a second, it also suggests that when you have all the information at your fingertips, knowledge is just a matter of uploading it into your mind.
The directors of the movie conveniently skip the scene where we actually see him acquiring the knowledge. All we see is Link typing on the keyboard and different karate poses appearing on the screen. Is Neo practicing kicks? Is he doing strength training? Is he running up and down a mountain, carrying buckets of water a la Kill Bill? We don't know. So we have to assume that, from his seat, the information is simply being downloaded into his mind.
What if we had this same capability in the real world? What if you had all the information you needed to learn any skill? You don't have to limit it to learning Kung-fu, but you sure can. What if I provided you with a computer, an internet connection, and a subscription to ChatGPT Pro Max Ultra Turbo? If you wanted, you could become a doctor, right? What can a university teach you that ChatGPT can't? In fact, the LLM is more patient than a teacher and can tailor the course to your exact needs and level.
By these metrics, we should all be geniuses by now. We should see people wake up in the morning and say "I know medicine" or "I know quantum computing."
Personally, I'm experiencing the opposite. The better access we have to these tools, the less we seem to know. It's as if acquiring knowledge takes more than just exposure to information. Recently I was building a little game with a 10 by 8 grid. The data was stored in a one-dimensional array, and I wanted to look through it using x, y coordinates. I struggled. I tried not to use AI to write the mapping function, but try as I might, my mind could not come up with the terms "rows and columns." It was embarrassing to watch the AI solve it for me. It's as if, my knowledge degrades over time.
From the outside, though, you can look at the application as a whole and be impressed with the results. But unless I go through the code and build a mental model of the application, I'm not confident enough to modify or debug it. My knowledge is built as I spend more time reading the code, forming the neural paths in my mind that help me understand how the different parts work together. I can do this because I'm a software engineer and I understand software.
But if I decided I wanted to learn Kung-fu, ChatGPT would oblige. It would probably be the perfect teacher. I don't know what I don't know, so any information it gives me would be more than I currently know, because I know nothing. If it were training me to become a doctor, I would feel just the same. But if it were training me to become a software developer, I would question everything it tells me. Why? Because somehow, large language models suddenly start to fall short when it comes to a subject you actually have experience in.
When we're learning something we don't know, we tend to focus on the answers and the definitions. Knowledge is the thing that appears after you let information marinate in your brain for a moment. I've done math in school since I was a child, but I remember the exact moment I figured out what pi was:
[...] In my very first electrical engineering class something unusual happened. The professor was talking about sine waves and he drew a straight line between two humps and the line was labeled, as you might have guessed, π. This is not the first time I see this graph or used it for that matter. But all of the sudden, after many years of toiling with this, it clicked. Call it:
"Deus ex machina."
I looked at π as the distance between the two humps. The circle, the small triangle in the first quadrant. I know these, I have memorized them, but today for the first time, I understood what they meant.
So I interrupted the teacher and said, "So pi is half the length of the perimeter of the circle if it was stretched into a straight line?" He didn't know where this came from. He looked at the class for a moment then said, "yes... sure." My classmates looked at me as if I was stupid. I bet most of them still didn't know what I was talking about but had camouflaged their ignorance with an exceptionally confident face. This was a defining moment for me. It was the Rosetta stone to solve the cryptic text file I had been appending to for over two decades.
This is not to say that an abundance of information is useless. I'd take it over no information any day. But it doesn't accelerate knowledge acquisition. You can try to download all the information into your mind a la Matrix, but unless you spend time understanding it and building a mental model of the subject, you might as well be relying on hypnopedia.
In the movie, while Neo is strapped to the chair, Link tells Morpheus that he's been at it for "10 hours straight. He is a machine." While 10 hours is a short time, it seems long in the movie world. It tells us that on top of information, time is a necessary ingredient to breed knowledge. We've built the technology that brings information to everyone. For now at least, all we have is our brains to ingest and slowly digest information into knowledge.