105: Sugata Mitra | How Learning Emerges Naturally Through Self-Organizing Systems

Well, we happen to be in our home country, denmark, and there is no sunshine, and we have not seen sunshine for a long time.

Oh, I'm very happy to hear that.

I think this country is slightly worse than England, but we have less mud because it's cold.

So I don't know if there's you know weather-wise any place that's worse than England.

We spend almost four months in England this summer when we take the tunnel. We call it the weather tunnel.

Yeah, okay, we go from sunny, sunny, wonderfully plants to rain and then you come out and there's this curtain of water falling yeah, but you know there is a scottish saying which I'm very fond of.

The scots say there is nothing called bad weather.

It's all got to do with bad clothing yeah, I've heard that before the day say that, but I will say I disagree so do I.

I mean, what do you do, for example, with the tip of your nose? But let's start the podcast officially give me a very quick brief please, which is a wonderfully form of education if you choose school.

But our second child said to us it wasn't right for him, which have sent us down a path of now 13 plus years of exploring education in different forms. And we are not the biggest fans of the world on schooling because it is negatively defined like not school. So we try to use the word self-directed learning more, but unschooling is the term that John Holt coined all those years back. So that is what it's easier for many people to understand.

So that's, we are unschoolers. Yeah, we do what unschoolers do. We just don't like the word.

We don't like the word that much. So what we do is we talk with different people like yourself, experts in fields of what learning is, what education is, and who have a curiosity about learning. Course. We have ended up in normalization of that. The only way you can learn is going to a school and sitting down, and you need to change subject every 45 minutes because that is apparently good for learning.

So the idea of the podcast is we're very chatty, just like our conversation about the weather, and we laugh a lot and just flow. We like to meet real people and we're doing this because we want to open people's minds about different ways of looking at education.

That's what we usually talk about, but it could go anywhere. That makes sense for your podcast is that the words self-directed and the words self-organized mean two different things. Okay, I wanted to talk a little bit about that, but even that was not the real theme of what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was that self-directed is different from self-organized and both of them are very different from a self-organizing system. You take all the three words together a self-organizing system. I wanted to make that distinction because what I had bumped into in those experiments, you know, 25 years ago, was, I believe, a self-organizing system, and people saw the results and they thought the results were interesting, but they would invariably describe it as self-directed or self-organized and I would say, well, no, we are looking at something different.

So let's do it.

I kind of want to press record right now Press record earlier and we can discuss what should be in and not in, because I think this dialogue is very, very interesting.

Yes, I hope you're recording because we must all know what Scotland means by bad weather.

It's important stuff it's bad clothing. That's what it means you know the Scottish people and the Danes. They go back to the Vikings.

It's more or less the same but, if okay with you, I will keep some of the start of this talk we have had, because absolutely, absolutely.

I have such fond memories of denmark.

I love that place but let's make an official start.

Today we're together with sugata mitra and, yeah, as you have heard in the brief intro where we just chatted, then we should maybe change the name of our podcast, because we might have understood the words wrong and I would love to go into that.

But first I would like to thank you because, as a parent who come from choosing a path of home educating your children, and as us, using the word unschooling even though, as we talked briefly about, we like self-educated or self-directed more and or self-organizing system is probably even better for it I have a point. I have a point Then. I would very much like to thank you for the TED talk you did all those years ago, because in the start, when I as a parent felt I needed to defend our choice and people was like how will your children ever learn? I could take your TED talk up and say please look at this one first, and here we're talking about the hole in the wall. So, if we can turn back time a little and I would like to how did it happen? How did you get this idea to test this out, and can you say just a little about it, because I think the other dialogue we had should continue also.

Yes, well, it's not a very long story. It really was the 1990s when those experiments happened. The location was New Delhi, india, because that's where I was working. Where I was working, personal computers, as most people of a certain age will remember, had just about come in. They were expensive and you know, usually about a month, two months salary or something like that to get a PC which you then bring home to do your work with. You know, word processing and whatever. That PC, that expensive piece of equipment, was certainly not meant for children. So some of my friends who could afford such equipment, they bought PCs and they brought it home, and those of them who had little children would then install the PC in their living room or in their study. They would notice a little fellow staring at them, the son or the daughter, and they would turn and they would say never, don't touch it.

Okay, this was really the reality of 1990s, because it was so expensive, you know. And children, what would children do with a computer? The operating system was DOS, disk operating system. You had to. You know, type in commands, this. That. So there we were.

Then I noticed something else. I noticed first one friend, then another, then another, all with little children, seven, eight years old, saying Sugata, you're interested in education, you know, I have a feeling my child is gifted. So I said well, why is that? Well, you know, the other day I was working on my new PC. I was looking for a file and the files would scroll up very quickly. Working on my new PC, I was looking for a file and the files would scroll up very quickly on the screen. So I couldn't actually read to see if the file I wanted was on the screen or not, it would just go up. I was trying again and so on, when I heard a little voice and it was my little girl there. She said you know, try D-I-R, slash W, slash E, and when you do that you get them in pages. And so I turned to the little girl. This is my friend saying it. I turned to the little girl and said how did you know that? And she says something very simple, like well, you did that yesterday, you've forgotten. So this was happening across one friend, then another, then another something similar. And I thought to myself now, could it be possible that all the rich people's children are becoming gifted? Because only the rich people have PC. All of their children seem to be very gifted. Or could it be that children, just by looking at the computer, looking at someone doing something on the computer, have this photographic memory of what's going on and can reproduce it? So if that's the case, then any child should be able to do that. So I decided well, why don't I just take it and give it to some children who cannot possibly have access to a personal computer?

There was a slum right next to my office, so I built a structure in the wall that separates the slum from my office, a structure which looks like today's ATM machines kind of a hole. And from my side of the wall I pushed the monitor In those days we had these big monitors Pushed the monitor through that hole and I also pushed in a touchpad Didn't push into a keyboard because you know it wouldn't pass and then I covered the other side with a sheet of glass so that you can't actually push it back. And it was three feet off the ground and I just turned it on and it was running. In those days I remember whatever version of Windows was available, probably, you know, 1.0 or something like that. So just the Windows screen sticking out of that dirty stretch of wall, and because it was three feet off the ground, people who find three feet off the ground a convenient height approached it, which were obviously children, and they didn't touch it, they just stood there staring at it. I was there. So I said well, and they said can we touch it? And I said, sure, it's on your side of the wall. And they said, okay, they still didn't touch it. So I thought this isn't working.

In my friend's home one of the parents was actually using the computer and the children were watching. The child was watching. Here, nobody's using the computer, it's just standing there and the children are not touching it. Is that why? And now this is a good example of how researchers like myself make big mistakes. So I said, oh, so it needs an operator.

So I turned around and walked back to my office, thinking that I would send someone across and say do something on the computer. But as I turned around and walked I heard a lot of excited voices from behind. So I turned a little bit and I saw the computers covered with children. So I didn't go back to my office and I sent a colleague of mine. I said go and do something on that computer. Those children, what can they do with it? And that fellow went and he came running back. I still remember his name is. He came back and he said those children, they're surfing and they're teaching each other how to surf. So I said oh you, you showed them. He said no, I didn't even get close to the computer, they're already on it. So I said well, that's very strange.

They've never, seen a computer before. They don't know what the internet is, they don't know what a mouse or a touchpad is, they don't know what browsing means and they don't know English. So what's going on? And that's the question the press started to ask, because the press had landed up by then and they were saying that these children know how to, you know, go from one website to another. I mean, browsing is a big word. They weren't really browsing. They knew how to go from one website to another. I mean, browsing is a big word. They weren't really browsing. They knew how to go from one website to another and they found that really funny. They would go there, close the website, open another one, close the other, that kind of thing, and laugh.

So they asked me this question who taught them? And I said I don't know, no-transcript. And the children were playing it. It was actually a Mickey Mouse game from the Walt Disney site Disneycom in those days, and I asked the children what is this? And they said it's a game. I said yes, I know it's a game, but how did you get the game? And they said it's a game, can't you see? I said yes, I know it's a game, but how did you get the game and they said it's in the computer.

So I said yeah, I knew there's no such thing in the computer.

They would have downloaded it. So I said oh, it was in the computer. And what is it? And they said it's a funny game. It's about a rat. I said a rat. And they pointed to Mickey Mouse and said yeah, see that it's a rat game. So I said okay.

And a month passed, and these were the days of the first of the taliban wars in afghanistan, and I found the screen full of war pictures and news and I said gosh, what's this? I went to my, to the children, and I said what's this? I said yeah, it's about war. See those planes, they're dropping bombs. I who is fighting with whom? And they said the Americans are fighting with the Taliban.

And I said so, who's winning, who's good, who's bad? And they gave me an answer which I guess I'll remember for the rest of my life. They said they're both very bad people. I said why are they both very bad people? And they said as're both very bad people. So I said why are they both very bad people? And they said as though it's very obvious. They said well, bad people fight you. I said yeah, I guess so, but anyway, could you be looking at that? And they said well, I mean, this computer is standing there and it's got everything inside it. So this was the beginning of the war. And by then people started to say, well, what is this? And they said I didn't say. They said this is self-directed learning. So who's the teacher? Nobody, obvious.

So so who's the teacher? Nobody, obvious, no. So self-directed means that there is a self who is doing the direction, but I couldn't find any such self in there. There was no teacher. So where was the direction coming from? Then I thought, no, no, hang on, I've got it. This is not self-directed, this is self-organized. So what's the difference? Well, let's imagine for a moment that while you're listening to this, you're doing your dishes.

Let's imagine for a moment that while you're listening to this, you're doing your dishes, but you're self-directed, right? I mean, you could be not doing your dishes, you didn't want to, but you decided to do them, so that's self-directed. Suppose your sink was full of, you know, dirty dishes and you had not decided to feed them. But some friends landed up and you said, oh, my sick's full of dirty dishes. And your friends said, oh, hang on, let's just take care of it. And two or three of them got together and self-organized and in a few minutes your dishes are clean. So two things self-directed, self-organized. So I decided what was happening in the hole in the wall. That's what the press called it the hole in the wall experiment.

What was?

happening in the hole in the wall was self-organized. It wasn't being directed by anyone, it was being organized by children. Like I told you about these searches, I had again got it wrong. Okay, and the answer? And?

how do I?

know that I got it wrong Because in another experiment.

All of this is published and all of this is available on the internet from years and years ago. In another experiment, a group of children. I asked them you know, there's something very interesting called DNA. They said what, what? I said D-N-A and I left them there. That whole thing is documented in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.

A month later I went back and said guys, remember, I asked you about the DNA? And one of them said yeah, we couldn't understand anything. It's all full of chemistry and all that. So I said really nothing, so you just switched it off. He said no, no, of course we didn't switch it off, we didn't look at it. So you look at what I mean. You didn't understand. I said well, you know. I mean, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. So well, that can't be self-organized either. It certainly isn't directed because there's no teacher. It couldn't have been self-organized, because how would eight and ten-year-olds organize themselves to understand, you know, dna structures and DNA replication, so on and so forth.

Where is this learning coming from? I got the answer. I think I got the answer. I got the answer almost four years later, around 2004. Almost four years later, around 2004.

You know, by education. My own education is not in the social sciences, in education itself. My educational background is in theoretical physics. So I had no means in my head other than theoretical physics to try and explain what was going on over there in the world. And there is, in those days, a fringe side of theoretical physics it's no longer fringe, but it was fringe at that time called self-organizing systems. This was an attempt to understand creation. Where does it all come from? Who made DNA? Who wrote the programs? And the answer that physics gave us was nobody did it happened by itself, happened by itself. I mean, that sounds like a bad sci-fi movie. What happened? How do you mean that happened by itself? But then when you go into it, which I did you suddenly find that nature is full of that example.

Imagine some bees building a beehive. The beehive is made up of perfect hexagons. Do the bees know what a hexagon is? I don't think so. I don't think they've ever studied Euclid or anything like that, so they don't know what an hexagon is. Do they know what they're doing? Do they know that they're building a BI? Well, we don't know, but I would guess that the individual B who's building that little accident, and the next one, and the next one. He doesn't know what it's doing really, it's just following some basic instinct, something like that. But then how do we get that perfect beehive with its chambers and everything inside it? Physics said it's a self-organizing system. When things are connected to each other, like each bee can see what the other bee is doing and therefore change its actions accordingly, the system itself organizes, okay.

Another example Ants. You know little ants. You can see them sometimes, particularly in the tropics during the monsoon rains. You can see the ants marching in a perfect straight line Left, right, left, right, left, right. Okay, in a straight line there. So what happened? Did the ants have a military academy? Who taught them to do that? Well, we know the answer to that from insect specialists. They do something very simple. Each bee follows excuse me the backside of the ant in front of it. That's all it does. It just looks, finds the back of the ant in front of it and follows that. When a thousand ants do that, what you end up getting is a lie. The ants didn't make the lie. The ants did not self-direct. The ants did not even self-organize. The system itself was a self-organizing system. I know it's not the easiest thing to grapple with, but that line of ants wasn't created by the ants. It was a property of that systemic rule to follow the one in front.

And then I read a little bit more and I found oh gosh flocks of birds. They do the same thing. Does an individual bird know what it's doing? No, it has no idea. It just knows it has to maintain a certain distance from its neighbors Schools of fish. Do they know what they're doing? No, they just know that they have to maintain a certain distance from their neighbors and followers. The result is marvelous patterns that people look at and say how on earth did they do that? But they didn't. Something else did, and I couldn't get that out of my mind. I guess physicists have jased this for ages. If it wasn't done by people, then who was it done by? But the answer is not. Is that? The question is not right. It's not who was it done by, it is what was it done by? So one man had, I think, gotten this idea right. A Russian physicist who, I think, migrated to one of the Scandinavian countries, won the Nobel Prize. His name was Ilya Prigozhin, and Prigozhin wrote a book called Order Out of Chaos. He wrote this book somewhere. Order Out of Chaos he wrote this book somewhere in the late 1970s.

In the late 1970s I was doing my PhD. I had no interest in children's education, I was doing quantum physics and had gone for a conference in New Delhi, and I must tell you this story, even though it's a very stupid story. I I went to the conference. I went to the men's room and you know, we had this line of men. I was one of them and next to me, slightly shorter than me, was a white man, and I turned and he looked very serious. I said good morning, sir. While we were both standing there and he said good morning, we finished. And as we were washing our hands, I said, sir, I'm a PhD student. Sir, my name is Sugata, and he said well, I've had to work with physics too. My name is Ilya Prigozhin. So that's how I met Prigozhin. I'm very proud of this.

It's a perfect place to meet.

So Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for showing that chaotic systems which appear to have no order in them, if you connect the pieces to each other and let it go on doing its disorder, then order appears from somewhere, and this is called a self-organizing system. Why am I telling you this long story? It's because somewhere in 2005, I looked at those children. I used to look at those hole in the wall experiments. By then we had many, many sites all over India, africa, cambodia. So look at those crowds of children.

I used to think of ants, I used to think of bees, I used to think of birds. But one day I thought of Ilya Prykushin and I said I got it. This is a self-organizing system. One day I thought of Ilya Prykushin and I said I got it. This is a self-organizing system. No one is teaching them, not even themselves. It's order appearing out of nowhere. I actually said that in my TED speech. There's one sentence that says learning is an emergent phenomenon in a self-organizing education system. Nobody paid the slightest attention. What kind of sentence is that? But I thought I'd got it. I brought the results to England and in 2006. And tried it out at the schools of Gateshead. You know, gateshead is across the River Tyne, newcastle and northeastern England. If you remember the map of England, it's about 2 thirds of the way from London to Edinburgh in Scotland, but 2 thirds of the way up north, across the river from Newcastle, is the town of Gateshead.

It's a poor area of the country and I went into the schools of Gateshead and I set up the hole in the wall. You can't set up the hole in the wall in. England. Why? Because the weather will not permit it no one's outside no, nothing happens outside, okay.

So I said, oh, this is a problem. But how do you do it? It's very simple. Okay, for those of you who are teachers, okay, here's how it goes, very, very simple. Take a class full of 24 children, let's say 24. Take six computers, just six, not 24, no matter how rich your school is, no matter how rich your country is. One computer for every four or five children. Give them those six computers and ask them a question Move back and sit down. That's all.

When you do it the first day, it won't work. The children are going to think that there's a trick. Sooner or later she's going to get up and yell at us and say what are you doing Something like that? The second or third time you do it, they begin to realize that you're serious. You're actually allowing them to do whatever they want. What would they do? Well, they'll form groups.

Obviously, six computers and 24 children. They have to form groups. They form groups, they start talking to each other, they start looking at each other's computers those six of them and then, in about 30 to 40 minutes, self-organization happens. They learn. They learn something. It depends on what question you asked. If you got the right question you get whatever you wanted them to learn. Otherwise they learn something in any case. Remember those children with the Taliban in the war? I didn't want them to learn anything. I didn't even want them to look at those pictures. But what did they learn? Bad people fight. Would I like my children to know this? I think I would. Bad people fight Just three words. Think about it. So self-organizing systems are different from self-directed and self-organized. Self-organized is two separate words.

It's different from self-organized as two separate words in different self-organizing system it's really, I'm about to say, mind-blowing, but maybe not exactly, it's just the one thing some things in my mind and I mean you were with us on the beginning of our journey, as when we moved away from schooling our children to not schooling our children and the whole. I mean it's been such a long time now that now it's just we don't get up in the morning and not send our children to school. It's not a thing. We just get up in the morning and not send our children to school. It's not a thing. We just get up in the morning and live our lives. But it was a big deal when it happened and your TED Talks and your work in general was a big part of okay. This can be done in many different ways. It's just now.

I realize I don't like the idea of the curriculum like a state or school defined journey of learning for 10 years of children's lives. I don't like that. That's not where the responsibility should be. That doesn't make sense. I don't like homeschooling because that's like doing the same thing. It's just the parents doing it. So I as a mom have to decide what my children are doing. I don't like that. But I actually also equally don't like the idea of the children having to plan it out and being responsible.

We've said many times it's one of our kind of mantras that learning is a byproduct of living, it's something that happens. And now I realize that sentence learning is emergent has kind of been lurking in there in the depth of my mind. I just didn't really give it like it should have had more of a center stage, because that's the same thing, right, that learning is something that happens because you're doing something that makes sense or something that ignites your interest, or something that we are social beings. So maybe you want to be with your friend and your friend is talking about this thing and you might have never been interested, but now you are because there's this social situation. So that's where the learning comes from, Is that? Oh, we might have to change the name of the podcast.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Because I don't like the idea of the self. Then you have like a three-year-old with responsibility for the rest of his or her own life, and you have to be so self-centered, in a way, and on your own path, and that's not what it's.

It's not where the responsibility should lie should there be responsibility?

do we trust the process? Do we trust the systems to self-organize? Yes, we do. I just never put it that way and we.

This talk for us comes shortly after we talk with Peter Gray. I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but he is. Yeah, he's very centered around what he called free play, and what he's actually talking about is the self-organizing system inside the free play that the children among themselves are creating. The rules are creating the game and are creating that system, or, as you maybe would say, it emerges.

We were together very recently, just last month, peter Gray and I, at an event in Ohio in the United States, and I heard him and I remember one line from him. He said school may not get it exactly right, but he said we send our children to school to be disciplined and stopped. He just put a full stop there and you know, I thought he didn't say anything bad about school. He didn't say anything bad about education. He just said we send our children to school to be disciplined. You sit where you have to sit, you stand where you have to stand, you say good morning. When somebody says good morning or you meet someone, you say sorry and you say thank you. When I say read your book, you read your book. It's not what you're doing, it's whether you are following the instruction.

And Peter Gray likes my work. He told me this himself and both of us decided that there are a couple of things we don't know. Okay, this is going to be another bit of a problem. You know you send your child to school so that they would know things or you homeschool them so that they would know things. In any case, you want your children to know stuff. But you know, the trouble is if I were to ask you, what does knowing mean? We don't have a definition, so what do you want?

Now somebody just called me called this a sophist argument. They said this is the kind of thing that they used to do in ancient Greece just tie you up by asking you stupid questions. Everybody knows what knowing is, do we? I think so. And then came along Generative AI. Just a year ago, two years ago, 22. And people started asking me about Generative AI. I had no idea. I didn't know what it was, how it worked, I mean.

I knew what it did, but I didn't know how it worked. So I decided to stay absolutely silent until I knew how it works. It took only a few days to figure it out, actually because of the internet, but how it works is an engineering I believe we have never seen before. You know in engineering, you know what your machine does, we know what it does. We don't know how it does it and, worse than that, as of today, as of this moment, we cannot know how it works. It will take too long to go over that in a podcast like this. But I know the insights of it. I know how to build one. I actually tried building one on my stupid laptop. It obviously is a very stupid gen AI that I built. But in building it I realized one thing I can build it, but I have no way to figure out why.

Of a saying from stephen hawking again one of those sayings that sticks in your mind forever. Remember? Stephen hawking said, talking about god, he said a creator that watches helplessly as his creation unfolds Watches helplessly. Well, I wish I could put it in a more funny way, but it's not funny. It's not funny at all. So Gen AI works like that. So Gen AI came along. When I understood how it works, sort of I began to speak about it. How do you build Gen AI? Well, you feed it lots of stuff into it and where does that stuff go?

You know people say. You know the AI reads everything there is, does it? No, it doesn't do anything other than song. It converts everything it reads into numbers, everything you feed it into numbers, and it uses those numbers to change other numbers and those changed numbers change other numbers and other numbers and other numbers into an enormous, gigantic matrix of numbers. And then you ask a question. The question enters the matrix, the numbers do their magic and what comes up, if you've done everything right, is a sensible, meaningful answer. What do you as a programmer? How much control do you have? You know people ask. They say you know Google should be careful about what their AI is doing. You know Meta should be careful about what their AI is doing, and we should. You know Meta should be careful about what their AI is doing. They must take responsibility, and I think to myself. The creator that watches helplessly is creation and product. Well, gentlemen, does that make any sense?

It makes sense. It just also makes me think. That's why I'm so silent. That takes time. I'm not a computer.

No, it makes me think two things. One is I'm, for my work and curiosity, using ChatGPT every day more or less, and have for one and a half year or more in my line of work. And just yesterday we talked about was it cardamom? Because we were making some food and we actually have had difficulties finding it in some countries. As we are full-time travelers, we see a lot of different countries and I was like why do the scandinavian countries have this tradition of using cardamom in some of our food, in our baking and stuff like that? And I asked chat gbt and got the story about the vikings all the way from back then they traded, they traded in spices and it showed well to use it and that they used it in their line of work. So there's so much where it reminds me of the knowledge bank that the hole in the wall was for these young people, that I'm curious about your thoughts about what will it do for learning. And then there's the other part, as are we as a society ready, which is a different dialogue about it.

And I know I'm jumping a little, but among the things you said about the self-organizing system, I am baffled and still thinking about what kind of world have we created? How self-organizing are the systems? The school doesn't seem like a self-organizing system when I look at it. The way we live in the so-called nuclear families doesn't look as a self-organized thing. Least doesn't look as a self-organized things that the individuality have become the goal, where everyone have their own trampoline, their own chainsaw, everything, so you don't need to interact with your neighbors even more. So I'm like the the self-organizing gets so small that it's on a family basis and I'm just thinking that cannot be healthy. And those are some of the thoughts that what you're saying is bringing into my mind and I'm like is there a question in this?

yes, but I don't know. Go in 19 different directions from here very interesting yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I, I guess, we should bring this to some kind of a conclusion Of focus Of focus.

Can I ask an even harder question to conclude on what about the question of truth? That's my problem with the AI thing. So we have this computer inside the computer kind of program and we use some of us, my husband, uses it every day and and he's begun the past, I don't know six months to send me long whatsapp messages that are clearly not written by him but by chat GBT. And I usually say I'm not talking to robots, not that the information is bad, it's just. I get this. I'm an old fashioned studied at the University of Copenhagen in the 90s and we were reading actual books and you know this is not before the internet, but it was with the modem kind of system. Um, I like books, I like a table of content, I like references, I like knowing where my information comes from. You know, and I think you put way more thought into this than I have. So the question is what about the truth in ai?

well, what about the truth in in anything? I mean, this is not a, this is not a new question. This the question that we you know, who have the old sophists have asked for many thousand years uh, is there anything called truth, or whatever. But I think what you're asking really is that what should I believe? I mean, after all, an easy definition of truth is what you believe. So you know I mean, it's a long discussion Is there something called absolute? We don't know. We have to ask Socrates. But the thing is, what should you do with your children? Where is that generation going to head towards? Okay, in a world where knowing is obsolete, think about that. We're so proud of knowing stuff. I studied in the university. I know this, I know this, I know this. Is that relevant today, when you have this generative machines which let you know?

anything you want at the point in time when you need to know it, provided you grasp it quickly enough. So suppose for a minute you take this argument further. So knowing is not necessary anymore, and I know that a lot of adolescents would kind of nod their heads because they ask themselves the same question.

Why am I doing?

this? Why am I sitting in this class and listening to this? Why am I listening to a 50-minute lecture and paying for it, when I could have Googled it in five minutes or I could have chat GPT'd it in two minutes? Why am I doing this?

why are they doing this to?

me. Well, one day they will have children. Will they also tell their children you have to know things. I don't know the answer, but I have two suggestions that possibly could be the conclusion of where we are headed. The first suggestion If we have a question to which there is an answer, then AI knows that answer always. So should I ask questions to you to which an answer is already known? It's a waste of time, but I could do something else. I could ask you a question to which no one knows the answer. If no one knows the answer, the Internet doesn't know the answer either. If the Internet doesn't know the answer, generative AI doesn't know the answer.

If I ask a question to which no one knows the answer, I have to figure it out for myself or I have to give up. So what if I focused on the questions to which no answer is known yet? That's point number one. Number two what else can generative AI not do, apart from answering questions to which no answer is known? It cannot do another thing. It cannot deal with nonsense.

You can try feeding in lines from Lewis Carroll. You know, I don't know whatever. The cat became a butterfly. It will tell you immediately oh, this was written by Lewis Carroll, the famous author of that, so on and so forth. But it will tell you immediately oh, this was written by Lewis Carroll, the famous author. But it will steer away from the cat becoming the book of life, because you know that's nonsense.

I think children love nonsense. Everybody knows that. So point number one the questions to which no answers are known yet. Point number two the value of nonsense. Imagine that a two-year-old, he appears in front of you and you say morning good. And the two-year-old kind of looks at you and you say good morning. And the two-year-old says morning good. And you say good morning. And he said that's upside down. And I say no, it's sideways and he said what are you talking about? And so on and so forth Doesn't take much, it's just a little switch you have to put off in your mind, a switch they put off for you in school. Don't talk nonsense. Put it back on. Watch the two-year-old light up. That's a good plan. I don't have much of a plan, apart from at this point in time. I wish I could be more useful, but I can't be. I an apartment at this point in time. I wish I could be more useful but I can't be.

I think it's very insightful, it's very much talking about and we have to wrap up. It's just hard because this is very interesting Knowing what AI can do and knowing what AI cannot do will be a discussion about what makes us human. And what makes us human is partly to be able to think about questions to which maybe there is no answer, but we need to think about it anyway, and also to be ridiculous, which is, you know. Your example about the two-year-old morning good thing made me think about all the many, many times we've had fun with small children saying, you know, pointing at grandma and saying, is that uncle? And they laugh. You know, that's uncle. Ah, it's funny and it's just ridiculous. But it's ridiculous small scale, but we're still having fun. It makes you laugh.

yeah, ai doesn't laugh not yet no yeah yeah, do we have time for uh? An extra question. I don't know your time frame um yeah, yeah, a couple of minutes, yeah perfect, so Perfect.

So, talking about self-organizing systems and learning when all knowledge is right in our pocket, professor, the chat, gpt or the Gemini or which one ever we use is, then what are we supposed to? Yeah, my, my question is how do you think we will organize uh onwards? And, as I said before earlier, I, to me it looks like that some of the self-organizing systems in our society, in our culture, have been broken down. There's not a lot of self-organizing systems in our society, in our culture, have been broken down. There's not a lot of self-organizing, there's a lot of chopped down life. How do we reclaim living in self-organizing systems? Have you made thoughts about that?

Yes, I do. I have thought about why we made ourselves the way we are right now. Thought about why we made ourselves the way we are right now and in a very simplistic kind of way.

You know, I'm not an anthropologist, but my simplistic understanding is that agriculture had a lot to do with it. When agriculture came in, we formed cities, we formed societies and we decided we need order. In order to get order, you need a social hierarchy, you need, eventually, kings and queens and ministers and bureaucrats and the whole system to keep the machine going. We thought we were machines, we thought we could live like machines and I don't know why we thought that living like machines would make us happy. But it didn't work. It didn't work. It didn't work. It didn't work because, as you can see from the world today, every now and then the system kind of revolts you know revolts disintegrates into chaos and then another emergent order appears, and I remember the face of Ilya Prigogine. So if that's the way it is, I mean we see in nature that that's the way everything works, that's the way we appeared over here.

That's how we evolved into what we are right now. That's how we evolved into what we are right now. If that's the way it is, then why would we want to oppose it with a mechanistic culture? If talking to each other is our way of self-organizing, why do we want to be alone our way of self-organizing? Why do we want to be alone? Why do we want to segregate? Why do we want our own lawn mowers and our own this and our own that, so that we don't need to deal with anybody else? Well, I don't know who has that answer. I don't think physics has that answer. I don't think physics has that answer.

I think maybe we need to ask the ghost of Sigmund Freud. I know this is not going to be very popular, but Sigmund Freud, nobody cares about him. He's a pervert, he's blah, blah, blah. I love that man, I think he was a genius. I love that man, I think he was a genius. Read him and you'll see why we want to be the way we are and why it's not going to work.

So what should we do then? Is there a way to go back to hunter-gatherers? I don't know if society can ever do it, but we have done it with information. We don't need to go to the structured library anymore to pull out the books and read them. We hunter-gather, we go after information like a hunter going after prey, and we have the means to do it in every pocket.

If we could have done that with information, can we do that with society? What would the society look like if it were to decentralize into that format, the format for which I don't even have a name? What if nothing belongs to anybody, just as the beehive belongs to nothing, to nobody, just as the flock doesn't belong to the bird, just as the line doesn't belong to the line of hand? Is there a way to do that? Well, there are philosophers who have said that. There are philosophers who have attempted answers. Mostly failures as far as we can tell, mostly failures as far as we can tell. But one thing we cannot undo as far as information and knowing goes, we have gone from structured to hunter-gatherer and our children have headed in that direction. Where will that take us? Not for people of my age to answer that question you have to ask the 16-year-olds or maybe even the 5-year-olds.

They'll tell us. Maybe it's one of those questions, you know, where there is no answer maybe it will emerge with time it will emerge with time. Yeah oh, this has been so interesting yes, I almost don't want to stop.

Time is up, it is time.

Yes, I almost don't want to stop but I heard, time is up, time is up, it is time. Roll that back.

To Gertrud thank you for all the work you have done earlier which have helped us as a family to grow, to ask ourselves questions about how we learn as a species, how our children learn, how we learn. It has changed so much in my life and this dialogue we have today. I know it will linger on me for years to come and it has been very, very inspiring.

Thank you for your time and the laughs inspiring and, um, yeah, thank you for your time and the laughs. Yes, my pleasure. I I hope, uh, I hope all this leads to somewhere. I have a lot of things I don't know.

I'll go looking for them well, when you said before that sigmund fre Freud was a genius, I've read him, obviously, as I'm studied, old-fashioned and long, many years ago. Um, I agree, I don't necessarily like all of his conclusions, but the way he was asking questions was asked by a genius, I agree. And that's the interesting thing about this conversation as well is the questions I sit back with.

Yeah, well, that kind of caps, it all you know. And the thing is what you just said, the last words, it's the question. Well, you haven't said it the first time and I haven't said it the first time. The last words, it's the question. Well, you haven't said it the first time and I haven't said it the first time. It was said, I don't know, two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha said it, socrates said it, confucius said it, they all said it's the question that matters yes, what a wonderful place to stop, said it's the question that matters.

Yes, what a wonderful place to stop.

Thanks a lot for your time today. Thank you, thank you.