> “Think about it,” he continued. “Who discovers the edge cases the docs don’t mention? Who answers the questions that haven’t been asked before? It can’t be people trained only to repeat canonical answers. Somewhere, it has to stop. Somewhere, someone has to think.”
> “Yes,” said the Moderator.
> He leaned back. For a moment, restlessness flickered in his eyes.
> “So why wasn’t I told this at the start?”
> “If we told everyone,” said the Moderator gently, “we’d destroy the system. Most contributors must believe the goal is to fix their CRUD apps. They need closure. They need certainty. They need to get to be a Registered Something—Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Full stack. Only someone who suffered through the abuse of another moderator closing their novel question as a duplicate can be trusted to put enough effort to make an actual contribution”
Modern "AI" (LLM-based) systems are somewhat similar to the humans in this story who were taped. They may have a lot of knowledge, even a lot of knowledge that is really specialized, but once this knowledge becomes outdated or they are required to create something new - they struggle a lot. Even the systems with RAG and "continuous memory" (not sure if that's the right term) don't really learn something new. From what I know, they can accumulate the knowledge, but they still struggle with creativity and skill learning. And that may be the problem for the users of these systems as well, because they may sometimes rely on the shallow knowledge provided by the LLM model or "AI" system instead of thinking and trying to solve the problem themselves.
Luckily enough, most of the humans in our world can still follow the George's example. That's what makes us different from LLM-based systems. We can learn something new, and learn it deeply, creating the deep and unique networks of associations between different "entities" in our mind, which allows us to be truly creative. We also can dynamically update our knowledge and skills, as well as our qualities and mindset, and so on...
That's what I'm hoping for, at least.
Apparently, Asimov was an early critic of the “Mozart in the womb” movement.