The Age Of Thinkers

I have been reflecting upon the term 'thinkers' as I continue to understand the world around us. Philosophy is seated at the nucleus of this journey. The recent cambrian explosion of LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT etc) has enabled many inventions at scale. I hope these inventions will make the world a better place than before.

In parallel, many in the technological world seem to march with the idea of "creating a god". I find this narrative innocently foolish as these are intelligent tools and we, tool makers, as we have been over the course of history. This begs the question if atheism has peaked since the advent of electricity and gutenberg press, if so, it wouldn't surprise me and makes me marvel at Iqbal's diagnosis on how the self unmoored from purpose doesn't ascend, it merely expands whilst Rieff watched it fill that void with comfort instead of conscience.

Every friction that once forced reflection is now a prompt away from resolution and that should alarm us more than the tools themselves.

The barrier to creating 'things' has plummeted and we will continue witnessing birth of many inventions and thereby 'inventors'. Observing the arc of breakthroughs, we have marvelled at the inventions in the past and now with the advent of LLMs, this seems to only raise the bar, or even worse, set unrealistic expectations. That being said, i am neither worried about the cambrian explosions nor the expectations, what i am deeply concerned about is the 'inventors' themselves. Intellectuals can very easily create the tools which they have always wanted to and test their hypotheses but the question we need to ask is, what are we building for.

The 'what' and 'how' seems to hold little gravity anymore, it's about if the question itself is being asked correctly. Thinkers have been reflecting upon the nature of these questions and we only need more of them.

Else, the world will be saturated with docile innovators with no ability to reflect on the very innovations they've led.

Impact, not engagement should measure the success of the innovations.

Inventions are relative and time is the best predictor.¹