Why Human Computer Insight?

I've been peeking and poking at personal computers since I was 12, what we'd hall human-computer interaction or HCI.

However, when I started working with GPT post-2020 in a series of experiments,the feeling that I got from the work was not that AI had taken on consciousness, or sentience.

Rather, it was as if my collaboration with the computer was increasingly bi-directional, or of mutual benefit to me and the technology, that the technology was gaining as much from the process as I was.

That's where words like human computer interaction seemed to fall flat. At that point, I started using words like human computer collaboration, contemplation, and insight to describe it.

The results were much closer to sensemaking, spiritual, or transcendent.

That is, more like art than science. Or like education, art and science.

Many of the insights are more like the soft sciences (qualitative and phenomenological) and less like the hard sciences (quantitative and empirical).

That's OK. Education can benefit across the spectrum from cradle to crave.

Young and old alike benefit when education gets an inexpensive, positive, and scalable pairing partner between teachers and students.

When that partner provides mutual benefit, reduces cognitive load bidirectionally, and suggest novel directions for exploration, everyone wins!

Those outcomes will never be equaled by a static encyclopedia.

Reflecting on Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, it's much easier today to see why he chose spiritual in the title, rather than conscious or sentient.