Everything at Once

 

View from the terrace of the ASU student union, 8:15 AM. The front of the Hayden Library is visible in the background through the space created by the PowerParasol shade structures, the solar panels of which are visible at the top of the image. In the foreground, my half-eaten bagel and my coffee sit on the table next to my backpack.

If there is a theme to my life at the moment, I would say it is expressed in the title of this post. "Everything at Once." My thoughts pivot swiftly from one thing to another, contemplating one deep question after another. It occurs to me that this is a product of using AI, which makes such accelerations of thought seemingly possible and renders our poor human minds unable to keep up, overwhelmed by the pace we can set for ourselves.

Yet it is foolish to ignore this tool, and what it will do for human thought. This morning walking in from the car my thoughts turned to a quote from Steven Weinberg, my teacher and (unwittingly and unknowingly) my mentor from the University of Texas, who before his death in 2021 was widely regarded as the greatest living physicist. 

I had been reading a post on X citing him as saying how the more we look into the fundamental laws of the universe, the more meaningless it appears to become.[1] I know why he said this. I could explain it to anyone who knows a little physics. Do I agree with it? Only if I accept the premises of contemporary particle physics.

One of the surprising twists of the AI revolution has been the use of it to challenge these very assumptions. One can do this, I have learned, because AI tools are the greatest research assistants ever invented. One can accomplish months of research in a matter of hours. 

My mind yearns to delve into such questions, but I am not being paid for that at the moment. It has to be a free time. At the moment I am being paid to build tools to allow other people to use AI. But will they ask such questions, as I have mentioned? I know of a man whom I respect who is doing just that, on his own. I have been following his work. 

I have a year until the next IARD conference next June, which I had heard may be in Florence. Could I scrape together a good talk by then, using AI to overcome the barriers and limitations that I hit before working on my own? Can I say something meaningful more than filling space with my words for forty-five minutes after which my colleagues politely applaud, ask a few obligatory questions for the sake of form, and then move on?

For my personal welllbeing I must try to do this. What keeps the planets in the night sky moving as they do? This is s more profound question that one might realize. Can I do my own little part to contribute to our understanding it, using my powerful research assistant, who produces all the references I would ever need?

References:

[1] Actual quote is "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” "Learning to Live with Weinberg's Pointless Universe", Dan Falk, Scientific American, July 2021