The Importance of Self Education in a World of AI

Full podcast episodes available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ⁠⁠⁠

Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠⁠Tim Ferriss⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Sam Harris⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jonathan Haight⁠⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠⁠Niall Ferguson⁠⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠⁠Bill Gurely⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jason Calacanis⁠⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Howard Marks⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ray Dalio⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Naval Ravikant⁠⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠⁠Todd McFarlane⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Bill Burr⁠⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠⁠Hugh Jackman⁠⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠⁠James Clear⁠⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠⁠Seth Godin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Susan Cain⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Morgan Housel⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jocko Willink⁠⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠⁠Tamara Levitt⁠⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠⁠, ⁠David Deutsch⁠, ⁠Richard Dawkins⁠, ⁠John Vervaeke⁠,

Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

Discussion

• The need for autodidacticism in the face of AI

• Comparison of AI to previous technologies

• Discussion of Thomas Malthus and the Malthusian Moment

• Recommendation of Resources that Discuss AI

• Chat GPT, GPT 4 and AI Agents

• Where Humans Still Fit In

• Conversation Between Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch on Tim Ferriss Show

• Meditation, Gratitude and Media Diet

• The Roots of the US Educational System and How its Ineffectual Today

• Discovering Learning Styles

• Part X and the Need to Cultivate Curiosity

• Shenpa's and the Danger of Becoming a Hacked Human

• Final Advice and Closing Thoughts

Transcript:

Hello beautiful people. This is episode nine of the Matt’s Mindset Podcast, the show that helps you to stand on the shoulders of giants so you can achieve your dreams.

Today we’re discussing the need to cultivate lifelong learning or autodidacticism in the face of artificial intelligence.

AI is going to shape the world in amazing ways, but it also is going to be a massive disruptor on the scale that we haven’t seen since the introduction of the internet.

In the years to come, people will discuss the introduction of the printing press, the disruption of the steam engine, the explosion of the internet and the changes that came about due to AI, in the same breath.

This is the real deal, this is the next big thing. AI is going to change the landscape of how we work and who we work with. Jobs will be phased out and jobs will be created. Programmers with only college education will be able to code on par with coders who have 30 years experience.

Lawyers will be able to find and cite case law with much greater ease given AI’s capacity to ingest large corpus of text and respond to queries as easily as texting your friend.

This is a Malthusian moment. Thomas Malthus was a British economist living in the late 1700s who predicted that the natural population growth in the British empire would inevitably outpace agricultural output, ultimately resulting in famine and other catastrophes until the population was reduced below a sustainable level.

He forecasted this using models and statistics, based on the information he had, and was actually correct based on the information available. But what he could never have predicted or accounted for in his models, was the industrial revolution. All of his models were based on the then available output of agricultural input.

And as the population in the British Empire, and indeed the world was exploding, he didn’t see any sustainable way for this to continue. With more demand and a stable supply, he predicted massive inflation would ensue.

But technologies like the spinning jenny and waterwheel, the steam engine, electricity, the telegraph and telephone, and eventually the internal combustion engine, all increased productivity on a scale hitherto unseen before in history.

And when you have an increase in production, when one worker can suddenly be 5x more productive than previously before, this is massively deflationary and the supply can catch up or even exceed the previous demand Malthus had modeled.

We are living through another Malthusian moment. AI has the ability to make any one individual involved in knowledge work at least 5x more productive than they would have been without it.

I won’t go into too much detail about the capabilities of AI here as there are experts who can do it much better than me, but I would direct you to Episodes 118, 122, and 124 of the All in Podcast, as well as Episode 367 of the Lex Friedman Podcast with Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI.

But suffice to say, AI is iterating on a track almost unseen before in technological advancement. To give you a frame of reference, it took about a year for each iteration of the iPhone to come out.

Its taking about a month for each iteration of AI to come out. At first it was just Chat GPT which was like a question and answer machine. Then it could write blogs or short articles for you and proofread your work.

Then it could incorporate plug ins, like for open table and kayak, so you could tell GPT4, please find a restaurant in this price range and this cuisine and find a table for four on this date. The find a hotel that is walking distance away that is in this price range and sleeps this many people. And then it would find those things for you and you could approve or ask it to revise.

And now we have arrived, at the date of this recording, with AI Agents, which are basically fully actualized virtual assistants. You can ask an AI agent to just do a task. Instead of prompting it one at a time, you can give it parameters and ask it to execute a task which may involve several steps and places it needs to go on the web.

So with AI becoming infinitely better at computational analysis and set to take over a lot of administrative and knowledge work over the coming years, where do humans fit in?

Humans still have an edge over AI in the form of the emergent phenomenon we refer to as consciousness, which we discussed in depth in my nature of God episode.

It is going to be a long time before AI is able to think and perform creative tasks and engage in true critical thinking. Yes AI can generate a painting from a word or write a Haiku in the style of Kurt Vonnegut if you ask it to. But that’s just it. All it can do is imitate.

As Rick Rubin would say, “While some of these works have been impressive, I have yet to have an emotional experience while looking at them.” Which I entirely agree with. While some of these works are impressive and cool, they lack the emotional depth that a great story, or a great painting can evoke.

If you’ve ever seen a Van Gogh painting, you know what I’m talking about. I remember standing in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and there was a sign that said “this room contains a Van Gogh.” And I remember thinking, “I wonder which one it is. And as soon as I stepped into the room, I was like “Oh its that one.” It was so evocative, so different from anything I had ever seen.

Creativity and critical thinking, as well as the creation of new knowledge, will still be a realm solely occupied by humans for quite a while. And the reason for this is because there is a big difference between Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial General Intelligence or AGI.

In his conversation with Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant, David Deutsch, the professor of physics from Oxford university, discusses this at length and I’ll let him explain it in a much better way than I ever could:

So that was David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant speaking about AGI

And so, as they discussed, creativity, problem solving and critical thinking, as well as the ability to think new and different ideas, will still solely rest with humanity for the foreseeable future.

Which is why it's so incredibly important, now more than ever, to be a lifelong learner and invested in your own education.

I was going to do a whole episode on why we need to reform the educational system. But to be honest, it would be way to complex and I’m not well connected enough to understand all the nuance.

But I can provide a quick history lesson as to why the system is set up the way it is, and why it has become ineffectual to our society at this moment in time.

The roots of the US educational system can be traced back to the early 17th century, when the first public schools were established in Massachusetts. These schools were designed to provide basic literacy and numeracy skills to the general population, with a particular focus on religious instruction.

Over time, the US educational system evolved to become more formalized and centralized, with an increasing emphasis on standardization and efficiency. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US educational system was heavily influenced by the industrial revolution, as we discussed, and the growing need for skilled workers in factories and other industries.

As a result, the educational system was designed to prepare students for the demands of the industrial workforce, with an emphasis on standardized testing, teacher-centered instruction, and rote learning.

Factory work involved working on one task and getting really good at it in a production line. It’s designed for conformity. You have one job and one job only. Do it and do it well and you’ll be rewarded.

Today, the US educational system is still heavily influenced by these historical roots, with an emphasis on standardized testing, accountability, and efficiency. However, there is growing recognition among educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders that the current educational system may not be well-suited to meet the needs of today's learners.

This is not a new issue. We’ve known about the issues in our educational system for a long time, dating all the way back to the days of Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Seymour Papert. In fact, one of the main platforms George W. Bush ran on was education reform. He was going to be the education reform president. He was sitting in a second grade classroom reading them a story when the planes hit. And of course, we got side tracked with the war on terror. Classic guns and butter conundrum.

But its only now we will feel the fallout of our inaction. Based on research conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017, we are 24th in the world in science, 40th in the world at math, 24th in the world at reading comprehension.

The public education system is set up to prepare you for a nine to five corporate job. It tests your ability to conform and regurgitate information an authority figure deems important regardless of whether you retain such information for the long term. It does not take into account your unique learning style, nor does it allow you to focus on what your intrinsically interested in, while allowing you only to have a basic understanding of the subjects you struggle with.

It does not promote critical thinking or cultivate creativity all of which will be necessary for every generation that comes after the age of AI.

So what can you do? First things first, figure out your learning style. The main four are Auditory learners, kinesthetic learners, and reading and writing learners.

Auditory learners learn best when information is presented to them via strategies that involve talking, such as lectures and group discussions. They can benefit from repeating back the lessons, having recordings of the lectures, group activities that require classmates explaining ideas, etc.

I’m an auditory learner. I enjoyed lectures in school and college and would take notes on the specifics of what I found important or interesting. I’d ask questions or engage in dialogue to think through my own conclusions. Today I learn best by listening to podcasts or audiobooks, while engaging in a secondary activity.

I’ll listen to a podcast while doing a chore such as cleaning the house, cooking food, walking, or playing a game such as Civilization. I’m performing a task that I can put on autopilot while listening to the podcast, and when I come across something interested, I can say to my Airpods, "hey Siri, make a note", and then repeat back what I just heard to be organized later.

Kinesthetic learners are individuals who prefer to learn by doing. They enjoy a hands-on experience. They are usually more in touch with reality and more connected to it, which is why they require using tactile experience to understand something better.

These could be engineers, mechanics, someone in the trades, builders, GC’s. Anyone who wants to build and touch and get hands on to learn how things fit together.

Reading and writers learn best by writing ideas down or reading ideas. They learn best by reading ideas or arguments and then rewriting the arguments to make sure they understand them.

There’s also four categories of sub-learning for each individual, such as whether they learn better in groups or as individuals. I’ll put the link in the show notes.

So everyone learns in an extremely unique way. So that’s your first order of business, is to figure out what your learning style is.

Next, you have to cultivate your own personal curiosity. What are you intrinsically motivated to learn? Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it's personally rewarding to you. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something because you want to earn a reward or avoid punishment. Intrinsic motivation is based around the wealth game. What is rewarding to you personally, in your life. Extrinsic motivation is based around the status game. What looks prestigious to others and society.

But with the advent of AI, many of the careers that we see as extremely prestigious will start to be massively disrupted.

It doesn’t seem very far off that an AI will be able to diagnose diseases better than any physician, or perform surgery with a zero error rate or compile case law and create an argument that is tailored to a specific case using every legal argument and case ever codified in text.

Doctors and lawyers won’t be phased out, but their part in the process will be spot checking AI to make sure there has been no error. Humans will always play a part, but the prestigious professions where we as society allowed for a certain error rate, will soon be massively disrupted by an AI that has no error rate.

So forget about what society deems as prestigious. What are you intrinsically motivated to want? What are you intrinsically motivated to study?

Naval Ravikant, the entrepreneur, who I mention frequently on this channel, has a bit of advice about there’s about how you should read what you’re interested in until you become interested in reading.

That could even mean reading comic books or fan fiction. Read whatever your into until you enjoy reading. Or in my case, listen to what you want to listen to until you cultivate an insatiable desire for knowledge.

In a similar way, Brené Brown, who we discussed at length last week, has a saying that that curiosity is the scale of midlife. Meaning, once your brain has fully developed around the age of 26, you are no longer an adolescent. Curiosity will become your greatest asset.

From getting curious as to why you behave a certain way when confronted with certain triggers, to why you’re curious about a certain topic.

And this mindset can help you in every facet of your life. Phil Stutz the psychologist, talks about your inner critic. Your part X. The part of you who tries to stamp on your dreams, really in a perverse way, to keep you safe. The brain isn’t concerned with your happiness. Its concerned with keeping you alive.

Part X is the part of you that when you think, “I want to start that business, it tells you why you can’t. It’s the part of you that when you say “God she’s pretty. I want to talk to her,” it tells you why its not a good idea. Its the part of you that when you have something to say, when you have come to what you think is a new idea of new way of seeing the world, tells you why it would be dangerous to share your opinions.

Cultivating a mindset of curiosity is the opposite and the cure to part X. When you’re operating from your curiosity, you’re not operating from that place of fear. Instead your internal monologue might sound like “I wonder what a conversation with her would be like? Let’s find out. “I wonder what type of accent that is. I’m gonna ask him. I wonder if I could achieve financial freedom if I just worked hard, put the time in and created a business plan. Only one way to find out.”

Curiosity allows for you to be you, whoever that is.

And in an age of AI, it is going to be twice as important as ever to be who you truly are, and tp be truly self aware of your habits, and, as Pema Chodren would call it, your shenpa.

The Tibetan word for this is shenpa. It is usually translated “attachment,” but a more descriptive translation might be “hooked.” When shenpa hooks us, we’re likely to get stuck. We could call shenpa “that sticky feeling.” It’s an everyday experience.

Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there. At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are. That’s the hooked quality. That tight feeling has the power to hook us into self-denigration, blame, anger, jealousy and other emotions which lead to words and actions that end up poisoning us.

Shenpa thrives on the underlying insecurity of living in a world that is always changing. We experience this insecurity as a background of slight unease or restlessness. We all want some kind of relief from that unease, so we turn to what we enjoy—food, alcohol, drugs, sex, work or shopping. In moderation what we enjoy might be very delightful. We can appreciate its taste and its presence in our life. But when we empower it with the idea that it will bring us comfort, that it will remove our unease, we get hooked.

So we could also call shenpa “the urge”—the urge to smoke that cigarette, to overeat, to have another drink, to indulge our addiction whatever it is. Sometimes shenpa is so strong that we’re willing to die getting this short-term symptomatic relief. The momentum behind the urge is so strong that we never pull out of the habitual pattern of turning to poison for comfort.

It doesn’t necessarily have to involve a substance; it can be saying mean things, or approaching everything with a critical mind. That’s a major hook. Something triggers an old pattern we’d rather not feel, and we tighten up and hook into criticizing or complaining. It gives us a puffed-up satisfaction and a feeling of control that provides short-term relief from uneasiness.

Those of us with strong addictions know that working with habitual patterns begins with the willingness to fully acknowledge our urge, and then the willingness not to act on it. Without meditation practice, this is almost impossible to do. Generally speaking, we don’t catch the tightening until we’ve indulged the urge to scratch our itch in some habitual way.

AI doesn’t have shenpa’s as it doesn't feel unease or anxiety, does not have a need for self preservation and does not have subjective experience.

And this is why, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his book Homo Deus, it is going to be twice as important to know and be curious about ourselves, because otherwise, we run the risk of becoming hacked humans, meaning, an algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves.

For example, in the name of productivity and being able to better serve you, a virtual assistant will begin to compile a dossier on you. This is already happening, you can find your dossier on Facebook. It shows you how the algorithm has deduced what you political leanings are, how well educated you are, what your relationship status is, and what your personality is like based on the types of content you consume.

But beyond that, an algorithm will compile a profile of every song you listen to, happy or sad. What you search and query on the internet or to a chat bot. How and what you learn. What you fear and what you desire.

And for people wearing Apple watches and the like, these algorithms will have access to your own internal biorhythms. Algorithms will literally be able to tell when you’re in a heightened state of a fight or flight, or a relaxed state of peace and will be able to deduce from the context what your triggers are.

And if you’re not aware of your own and unconscious patterns, triggers and shenpas, then you could be at risk of being what Yuval Noah Harari calls a hacked human meaning, an algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself and has the capacity, if it so desired, to manipulate you.

And if you think that’s far fetched, consider this. Next time you open Facebook, or Tiktok, I want you to notice something. There will be a split second delay as the app loads. And then, after a moment or two, a red notification will appear. On facebook its even a bell that rings.

Facebook is notorious for giving you notifications that have nothing to do with anything like “So and so posted.” Like okay.

They do this because it simulates the same effect as when you win something at a slot machine. It lights up. A bell rings. It lets you know you are a big winner. Someone cares about your content and you get dopamine from the red notification bubble letting you know someone cares about you and what you have to say.

This is all to get you to keep coming back to the app to get that little hit of dopamine.

So if social media companies are already manipulating us to keep us on their apps, what do you think the likelihood is that AI companies will not do the same?

So to wrap up with some practical advice, how can you prepare for the age of AI?

As we talked about, follow your bliss. Follow your interests. Follow what your intrinsically interested in. Who knows what the status game will look like in a few years.

All we know for certain right now is it will take a long time for AI to get good at the creative, abstract and critical thinking skills we have as humans, as well as the kinetic work we can do as engineers, builders, or tradesmen. It will take a long time to replace work that is based on socialization, nurturing, and human to human contact such as sales, nursing, or psychiatry. All these areas still require the human touch.

Read what you’re interested in, and they become interested in reading.

Learn about history, philosophy, religion, and literature, as the major ways of recording tradition and epistemological knowledge so you’re aware when AI has made a mistake and returned an incorrect output.

Learn about physics in the nature of reality

Cultivate a meditation practice, and attempt to get in touch with the sublime so you can learn more about yourself, your shenpa’s and avoid becoming a hacked human.

AI here to stay, it is going to be as disruptive as the internet was, and more disruptive than mobile was. But by setting yourself up for success by cultivating your own creativity, curiosity and critical thinking, you can not only survive in this new world, but thrive. As Charles Darwin said, it is not the strongest among us who survive, not the strongest, but the ones most adaptable to change.

Light and love my friends, go in peace to love and serve.

Outro: Cornfield Chase, Hans Zimmer