A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of AI as intellectual partner and tool for thought . Neither the prompts, nor the model, nor the current interfaces – generic or tailored – enable it well. This is rapidly becoming my central research obsession, particularly the interface design piece. It’s a problem I need to work on in some form.

When I read Candide in my freshman humanities course, Voltaire might have been challenging me to question naïve optimism, but he wasn’t able to respond to me in real time, prodding me to go deeper into why it’s problematic, rethink my assumptions, or spawn dozens of research agents to read, synthesise, and contextualise everything written on Panglossian philosophy and Enlightenment ethics.

In fact, at eighteen, I didn’t get Candide at all. It wasn’t contextualised well by my professor or the curriculum, and the whole thing went right over my head. I lacked a tiny thinking partner in my pocket who could help me appreciate the text; a patient character to discuss, debate, and develop my own opinions with.

I can’t agree more. I would love to help as well in this area of research. It sounds extremely rewarding.