My trusty AI sidekick

There I was with an open question about phonetics, which I dictated to ChatGPT. It came back with a very illuminating answer. It was a way of organising some things that I already knew.

That prompted me to compare what I do know about language and phonetics with what I don’t know about geology/earth science, which is another area of great interest for me.

It occurred to me that learning about phonetics and linguistics is often throwing new light on things that I already know from experience. Whereas with geology, the more I “learn”, the more I realise how vast the subject is and how little I know about it.

Quick as a flash, my very able AI sidekick offered a different way for me to think about these interests of mine - a more fruitful way. To paraphrase it: “Knowing geology” isn’t a destination available even to geologists. What I can aspire to is to become geologically literate. This means being able to stand somewhere, such as on the Jurassic Coast and ask questions about what I’m seeing: What kind of rock is this? How was it deposited? What environment existed here then? Why are the beds tilted? What happened between this layer and that one? Where was this land on the globe? What was the climate like? What organisms lived here? What tectonic events subsequently lifted and folded these rocks? I shouldn’t expect to know all the answers, although I can certainly seek them. What matters is that the landscape is no longer just wondrous to behold; it is also an unfolding story reaching unimaginably far back in time.

This conversation touched me. It doesn’t happen that often with AI chatbots, but it happens sometimes.

Of course these “insights” could have come from a conversation with friends or other humans, but in my experience such conversations are rare. We humans tend to bring our own agendas and commitments to conversations, which is fine. We also tend to have limited availability for conversations in general, let alone nichey conversations. That’s also fine.

So here’s to human conversations and here’s to the sort of conversations I can have with my AI sidekicks.

The value wasn’t that the AI served up information about what I wanted to know. Rather, the value was that it engaged me in conversation and helped me to develop different perspectives.