Influential Ideas in an AI Era

A philosopher often praised for the accessibility of his writing, when asked about it (he often took part in advice sessions for younger academics), would say that he is not writing for today, but for the future. What he meant was that rather than clogging his writing with technicalities, keeping it focused on narrow disputes, hiding its ideas behind jargon, burying it with caveats, and bending it around every far-fetched-but-logically-possible objection—things which are normal, and not always objectionable, in the typical academic article or monograph, that is, when one is communicating to one’s contemporary colleagues—he was trying to write about matters that people outside of our particular professional moment would find important, and in a way that they could understand. The desire or hope that one’s ideas outlast one’s era is not uncommon among academics. Though he was pilloried for putting it in such extreme terms, when another philosopher said on social media, I would regard myself as an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years. I have zero intention of being just another Ivy League professor whose work lasts as long as they are alive, he was expressing that common attitude. So how can one make one’s ideas last? Carve them into stone, obviously. Stone carvings will survive time and its disasters much better than paper, magnetic tape, plastic discs, hard drives, etc. If we ask the question in a less cataclysmic register, the answer might be different. It might be something like what Tyler Cowen (George Mason University), writing at Bloomberg (reproduced at Marginal Revolution) says: If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea. After all, the AIs will have digested much of your corpus and built a model of how you think. Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas... The post Influential Ideas in an AI Era first appeared on Daily Nous.