The human experience of learning
Contribution to the AI debate from a new perspective
Although the ancient Egyptians knew about the 3, 4, 5 length ratio of right angle triangles more than one thousand of years before Pythagoras, this mathematician did an extraordinary advance to knowledge. He outlined a Theorem about the relationship of lengths for any possible size right angle triangle in the world.
And this is a radical difference.
As anyone else, I have recently participated in many conversations about the advent of the Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such topic is becoming object of discussion in familiar, professional, media debate because it has the power to defy the ideas we have about many things.
In most conversations, I have had the feeling of something that is missing in the debate and today, after having a meal conversation at work about new technologies for classrooms, this missing idea clarified.
What’s my experience of learning?
I have asked myself about the process of learning a complex matter. Please, observe I want to talk about my own experience, not about abstract ideas.
Imagine that I am an student or a professional and I need to learn from scratch or to go deeper in the field of dynamics and stability of feedback systems.
I could start from a selected book chapter, assist to a traditional (face to face) professor lecture using chalk over a blackboard, attend a recorded lecture, a video tutorial with more or less interactive material… Today, we have many options, while good material still remains scarce.
Pay attention
The first thing I need to do is to pay attention. Even, more, to pay a lot of attention, because the matter requires it and my intelligence is average. It is not quantum physics but it is a complex thing. Distractions out.
Fix in memory: write down
I myself will need to take notes with pencil an paper. I have observed that the process of hand writing helps me much to keep things. I do not know if it is the process of writing, the process of reading what I write, the synthesis process of getting the essential ideas from others that are subordinate or the combination of all, help me much. Even more, I myself don’t conceive other way of learning complex things. Just hearing works well for simple things but I need to write down for more complex ones.
Knowledge: making it mine
The process described so far is not enough. It requires an essential new step: the one that makes it mine. What I have learned needs to be transformed into part of my guts to know it.
The most typical way of doing this is in the form of a problem. Maybe the professor or myself, need to settle down the learned things by translating them from an ideal world of the theory into a practical scenario. This new theory, this new tool, has to be used by me to solve, to explain something of the reality, be it a real problem or an imagined one.
I may require to exercise with a single problem or with many of them.
I still remember epic moments in which I was able to understand the operation of heterodyne radio receivers, operational amplifiers stability or how decoupling capacitors work in reducing the impedance of the power distribution network.
It’s knowledge if it can explain all known aspects
I can say I know something if this knowledge is able to shed light on all the known aspects of the problem.
Long time ago I had problem with an analog satellite digital demodulator. I set up a simulator in the lab and it worked but in a real application there was something that was not right. There were very frequent phase slips that created very large error bursts. I worked on the problem for a couple of months. Almost every day I was able to conceive a test to understand better how the demodulator operated, to measure the gains or transfer functions of the elements of the receiver. I discovered some flaws on the design, but they did not explained the problem of the phase instability. I had a reference design form a competitor: they did things in different way but theirs worked while mine not. The project was canceled.
Some months later, I was reading an article in Electronics Design magazine. It was about phase noise in frequency synthesizers. There was a sentence, a single sentence, that illuminated my understanding of the problem. With it, I could connect all the dots of the problem. All things that didn’t match, suddenly were understandable under this new approach.
I remember I wrote the author of the article to thank for it.
This day, I had an income of knowledge. I increased my capability to understand how things work, and what makes them not working.
Making things work vs understanding how things work
Making things work is one thing. Knowing how they work is another.
All over my life, in the profession and outside it, I have been able to make things work I do not know how they work. I can glue something but I do not know how glue operates. The history of mankind is full of that. It may takes months (like in my example), years or even centuries for knowledge of how things work evolves into knowledge about why things work.
Does it matter?
Making things work or understanding how things work, does it matter? I can say it does, for two reasons:
You can discover something randomly, but pure innovation (creation of new things) is possible only when you understand how things work. Pasteur discovered the effect of vaccines by accident but he changed the world when he was able to explain what was happening in his culture.
Human nature is curious. We have been created to know, to understand. While it is absolutely impossible to understand every aspect of reality, we have inside us such impulse. Don’t you feel envy when you met some that has passion to learn, that has the capacity of ashaming and wonder?
Return back to the AI problem
Artificial Intelligence can be a very good tool to make things work, but knowledge is something of other nature. Most of times, when I study something, I pursuit knowledge, not just a way to solve a problem.
Imagine a world that refuses to learn, that rejects knowledge, and instead of that, consider enough to solve problems. I would not like to live in such world.
The search for knowledge is something extremely human. Once Albert Einstein expressed how ashamed he was by the fact that reality could be understood. A human being is a part of nature that, folding over itself, is able to reach consciousness of nature.
And this is something that has the power to lay us speechless.
Brilliant!