Intellectus intellectus gratia: The value of education has always been in the knowing, not the known

 We organized a wonderful event yesterday and were exposed to incredibly rich, deep and diverse perspectives. 

I am in love with the intellectual atmosphere at U-M, and I'll have to do several posts on the talks and the panel discussion, but this one is reserved for an outstanding talk from a first year PhD student from Aerospace Engineering, Timothy Welch. 

This blog is about amplifying signal. Tim compressed a bunch of signals in 4 minutes. Read a transcript here even if you don't read the rest of this post.

Tim's core argument is that education has been a commodity for a while. You acquire knowledge, you sell it.  AI is dismantling that transaction. He refers to "a striking tension between the democratization of knowledge, the democratization of the capacity to produce, and the restriction of one’s drive to develop crystallized intelligence."

Why invest years building crystallized intelligence if the output can be generated on demand? The student of the future, he argues, will need to be a "mystic": someone who seeks knowledge not for the value society assigns to it, but for its intrinsic merit. He invokes ars artis gratia (art for art's sake) and argues that this principle will have to migrate to education. 

I've been talking about the friction question: how we train students to cover the final few feet when AI removes the struggle that builds intuition. Tim is pointing at something upstream of that: the motivation question. If the economic rationale for deep learning (the human kind) erodes, what replaces it? His answer is that the drive has to become intrinsic. The joy of understanding. The "intellectual and natural appetites" that AI does not possess.

As soon as my spouse heard his reference to ars artis gratia, she said 'That's you'.  But knowledge is not what drives me. If I try to write my motivations,  intellectus intellectus gratia (the act of grasping/understanding for its own sake.. a phrase that doesn't exist in Latin, but is legit according to Claude.) This is the singular thing that has driven me (for at least 30 years).

The point is the same. When AI commoditizes the output of knowing, what remains valuable is the act of understanding. This is why Tim's words really struck a cord within me. 

Tim wraps up by saying "It has the potential to remove the economic facet from intellectualism and make learners and thinkers into mystics once more."

Now, I have to say.. it is both beautiful and unsettling about a student articulating this. Unsettling because even if students become mystics, how do we ensure they have a livable place in society? Pursuing knowledge for its own sake is a luxury that historically required either wealth or institutional patronage.

Pursuit of understanding is perhaps less so.  Let's hope our educational systems at least motivate and prioritize this. No matter where AI leads us, this won't be a bad bet.