Questions have a hot new role in the age of AI: Stirring human minds

livemint.com:

AI-powered ‘answer engines’ have arrived. A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported how new companies like ArcSearch and Consensus are changing the rules of web search as we knew it. As compared to search engines that at best threw up a few links to relevant articles, these new AI-run search engines not only provide the most relevant information on a topic, but also intelligent summaries of various articles.

So the collation of knowledge is no longer a difficult task. Until now, individuals were judged by the knowledge they acquired. Our educational system gauged how much of it a student has gathered and how much a test-taker can regurgitate during exam time.

Whether it was the spelling of a word or the date when a particular war started, what mattered most was whether the student had an exact memory of it to summon at a particular moment. Even at higher levels of education, what mattered most was how much one could remember of what was taught. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLM), storing a vast amount of information is very easy.

The storage capacity of the human brain is not even a smidgen compared to that of cloud storage. For that matter, forgetting much of what one learns is an essential part of the human brain’s functioning. Today’s AI-powered answer providers have developed the intelligence to make sense of the information they have been fed or given access to.

With this, data storage in human brains is becoming redundant and perhaps also the exercise of our faculties to interpret it. So, what should humans do? Allow machines to do all the thinking and let the human brain atrophy under the dulling effects of intellectual inactivity? No doubt, AI tools can provide answers to any question. But