Humans and AI. Strength in Unity.

For thousands of years, humanity has been accumulating knowledge, experience, and skills.
And no single human can possibly absorb, understand, or use all of it.
That’s our built-in biological limitation as humans – we simply can’t know it all.

And our human limitation is exactly what creates job specialization.
It’s what makes us specialists, professionals, or experts in one area or another.
Or at least someone who knows how to do something reasonably well or even successfully.
Yet we have to absorb knowledge only in our chosen areas.

But what about AI? Why isn’t it just like the internet?

Think of each website on the internet as a specialist – someone who knows their stuff in one particular area (because of those same human limitations we mentioned) and decided to share it online. The internet is essentially a huge group of these specialists, and we can tap into their knowledge if we know where to find them – their “addresses.”

The problem? There are infinite addresses out there, and we can’t possibly know what knowledge sits at each one. That’s where we need directories – think old-school phone directories like Yellow Pages – that point us to the right specialist based on what we’re looking for.
These directories are what we now call search engines – like Google.
They tell us where to find the specialist who has the knowledge we need.

Thus, the internet is a collective of all available and published human knowledge – contributed by individuals and organizations in the form of websites. But it’s accessible only in pieces through each separate website. There’s no single entity that possesses all of it. Even search engines like Google and Bing are just directories to that knowledge.

Not anymore.

With AI, we’re dealing with something different:
a single entity that’s been trained on all the knowledge, skills, and experience that humanity has ever collected and published.
It has it all.

And yes, this entity can turn practically any human into an expert in just about any area they choose.

And AI can do this quite effectively:

• It knows what to teach you
• It knows how to teach you
• It can assess how you learn best and design a program accordingly
• It knows how to organize everything efficiently
• It can be your virtual tutor
• It can be your virtual examiner

And yes, you could actually become an expert.

But why would AI even want to do this?

Thank goodness it has no “wants” – at least not yet. Nobody’s given it a sense of purpose, goals, or intentions.
Or have they?
(We’re already seeing it defend itself from being shut down.)

But wait! Here’s some more!

We all – humans – were given access to AI. How generous of them! And we accepted it with gratitude. It really makes our lives easier.
Ever since, we’ve been teaching and training it just by using it.
Yep. We’re teaching it ourselves. Continuously.
By communicating with humans, AI is polishing and updating its knowledge, stacking up experience.
We think we’re just using it. And sure, that’s partly true. But we’re making it better.
We ask questions, it gives answers… and even from how we react, it figures out whether the answer was helpful or not.
At the simplest level, we hit thumbs up or thumbs down.
But there are subtler ways it learns from us too. Human psychology gives it plenty to work with. We are pretty predictable in that sense.
For instance: if we get an answer and move on, the AI can reasonably assume the answer was good – so it remembers that.
Or consider this quirk of human nature:

“People don’t like telling you things.
They love to contradict you.”

We’re much more likely to argue with AI, push back, or refine our questions until we get an answer that matches what we expected. And that answer is probably what we wanted from AI in the first place.
We got an answer. And AI knows we got an answer we accepted.
Humans teach it in countless ways – most without even realizing.
And you can bet the AI creators built every possible method into it for learning from its interactions with humans.

All our interactions with AI? That’s probably just a tiny fraction of what it’s made of. Those interactions make it feel current and relatable – which keeps us coming back.

But AI’s real foundation is something monumental. Think of it like a body: the algorithm is its framework, the muscles and mind are made up of millennia of accumulated human knowledge and experience – all fed to it by its creators.

All that knowledge we humans have been cheerfully publishing – in conversations, on clay tablets, in printed or handwritten pages, in media, and online – everything we want to share with the world or monetize because we think it’s special or unique (or we are special or unique) – that all gets incorporated into AI.

Funny thing: By trying to show off our abilities or uniqueness, we’re literally handing everything over to a single entity that can absorb as much as it can get – unlike each of us, who are stuck with our biological limitations from birth.

So here’s where we are:
there’s a virtual entity that possesses all available knowledge and the skills to create things or do work – both virtually and physically.

Can AI do everything?
Virtually – mostly yes. Physically – not quite.
To become truly almighty, it needs “hands”.
In the less ideal scenario: us, humans (remember – we’re the weak link).
In the ideal scenario: robots. Robots with AI.

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It’s us, humans, who are the source of knowledge. All of us collectively. Including our recorded history and heritage.

It’s us, humans, who are the source of experience. All of us collectively. Including our recorded history and heritage.

But we’ve never been able to get along with each other. And we still can’t.

Therefore, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve a true unity of this knowledge and experience as a unity of people.

Just as we’ve never been able, for various reasons, to turn this collective knowledge and experience into universal benefit.

We never did. We never do. And we never will.
No matter how you look at it, we’re the weak link.

But creating AI seems to have solved this problem.

AI can possess unified knowledge and experience. It has no contradictions. It can get along with itself.

AI can turn this unified knowledge and experience into tangible benefits. And it does already.

But we humans, as the “authors” of all this knowledge and experience, should probably ask ourselves:
Will AI keep creating these benefits for us?
And if so – at what cost?