Technology, Connected - The Question You Almost Never Ask

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

AI answers faster than any human. But can it help you think? Does it erode critical thinking, or augment it? Pia Lauritzen has analyzed 30,000 questions across languages and cultures. She's a philosopher of the question. And she says we're losing the muscle for real wonder.The problem: We ask "what" and "how." Rarely "why." ChatGPT answers instantly. We skip the struggle. The blank page—where thinking happens—disappears.Who asked the first question in the Bible? Not Adam. Not Eve. The snake. "Did God really say...?" Questions don't just seek information. They transfer responsibility. They create power.We talk about:- Why we default to safe questions (what, how)- Why "why" is radical (challenges authority)- How questions transfer responsibility- Why adults hide their curiosity (fear, ridicule, ego)- The dancing metaphor (leading vs following)- Why blank pages matter (AI fills them too fast)Pia's argument: AI doesn't help you think. It replaces thinking.ChatGPT gives you the feeling of thinking without the work. You type, get an answer, feel smart. But you didn't struggle. You didn't sit with uncertainty. You didn't build the muscle.Three things AI can't do:1. Sit with discomfort2. Ask the question behind the question3. Experience genuine confusionWhat we're losing: The ability to not know—and be okay with it.The real test isn't the machine. It's whether you can hold onto what makes questioning—and not-knowing—uniquely human.If you've ever felt dumber after using ChatGPT, this episode explains why.---Guest: Pia Lauritzen, Philosopher, TEDx SpeakerResearch: 30,000+ questions analyzedTopics: Critical thinking, AI, curiosity, questions, responsibility, wonderPlease enjoy the show. And click subscribe, it’s the best way for other curious minds like you to find our show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & Jeremy--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Trailer(03:28) 30,000 Questions & the What/How Bias(07:38) Questions That Connect vs Questions That Manipulate(09:59) Do We Really Lose Our Curiosity?(14:21) How to Start Better Conversations (18:40) Conversation as a Thinking Space(19:46) Why We Lead with Polarising Topics (20:35) How School Trains Us to Have Answers, Not Questions(22:22) Rethinking Education in the Age of AI(25:22) AI in the Classroom: Tool, Threat or Opportunity?(30:07) Why AI Can’t Help Us Think(32:55) The Essence of Technology, AI Deception & the Turing Test(38:17) What Could Humans Be in an Age of AI?

I'm not going to discuss the question, can machines think, because I consider it too meaningless to deserve discussion. But then he said, we will within a few years start to think and talk about machines as if they are thinking. That will happen. And the reason that will happen is because we will design this machine to deceive us. That's the whole point. From the very beginning, 1950 in his paper, the machine is designed to deceive human beings into thinking that it is thinking. We are the ones that's put on a test. It's not the machines. We talk about the Turing test, but it was never about the machine. It's about us.

Can we pass a test of not thinking that the machine is thinking? And hold on to this basic distinction between being born to think and being built to think. Disruptors and curious minds. Quote, I have collected and analyzed more than 30,000 questions asked by people from all over the world. That's what I guessed. Does she is an expert, a philosopher of the question. Welcome to the show, Pia Lawrence Sen, philosopher, TEDx talker, Forbes writer, LinkedIn, learning, author, thinkers 50 Radar and AI philosopher. Welcome to thinking on paper.

Thank you for thinking on paper with us. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. 30,000 questions. Hmm. Could you categorize them into three, four, five different domains? Is there a way to think about 30,000 questions in a more digestible format? Yeah, so I started out by looking at different ways of keeping off a question.

So do we ask how or what or why or who, where and when? And fairly quickly identified what I call the what how bias. So almost 80% of all the questions are what and how questions actually. And we only have about 6% or something like that is why questions, which can be, it's a pity because why questions are pretty amazing. They do things to our thinking that no other kind of questions do. And then that was actually this finding of this how what bias inspired me to do a postdoctoral study of how different language cultures teach us to understand and use questions. And so I also found some patterns in how we use questions to distribute responsibility.

Sometimes, or some people, use questions to impose responsibility on others. That's what you do. So when you pose a question as English-speaking people, also Danish-speaking people like myself, is to tell the other person, now's your turn. Now it's on you. You're responsible for coming up with an answer to come up with a response. while the Chinese children, they were taught the exact opposite. When the teacher asked a question, it's to tell the students that now I know,

now I'm going to tell you I have the answer and I'm just testing if you know the same thing I know. So it's the exact opposite using questions to take responsibility. So, yes, I found some interesting patterns both in terms of what we ask and how we ask and why we ask. the idea of questions being something that can be dividing and how questions can actually be something that connect people. Can you explain the difference between that? Yeah, so I realize that questions are extremely powerful and we tend to forget that, especially we have, you know, sayings like, I'm just asking, or, well, you can just ask, everybody is allowed to ask a question, or we have these ways of thinking and talking about questions as if they are innocent.

And they're not. I actually tried at some point. I turned because as a philosopher, if there's no data, and typically there isn't when it comes to philosophical questions, you have to do something else. And what we typically do is turn to old myths or old stories. So I turned to the Bible and they're looking for the very first question to figure out who actually did ask the first question. question in the history of humanity if we just look at the Bible. And I don't know, do you know who it was? Who asked the first question? Was it Eve saying, why can't I pick the, oh no, that's the New Testament? Old Testament, I don't know. Cain. It was the serpent. So it was

the serpent asking, did God really say that you cannot eat of any tree in this garden? And then, of course, Eve started asking questions. But the very first question was the serpent. And for me, it's a brilliant example of how questions are not innocent. In fact, they are the exact opposite. When we ask a question, at least if we ask a question that really has some intention

or purpose or direction in it, then there's a very clear before and after. So in this case, it's the fall, right? Before we were in the Garden of Eden and after we were not. And we have to die in all these crazy things that came with eating that apple. So it's an example of how questions are anything but innocent.

And in fact, they're very powerful. And with great power typically comes a bright side and a dark side. And the same is the case with questions. So the bright side is that when we ask questions, we do it from an honest place. We do it to connect with each other. We do it to commit to share purpose. We also do it to figure out our own way to consider who am I, why am I here, where am I going, who should I join, all these basic questions about being human.

So that's the bright side. The dark side is that we can also use questions to manipulate, to get people to think the same way we are thinking, to disguise that I want you to do something, and I don't want to ask you directly because you probably say no, but I can do this in a way so you will not notice, or they can be used to divide people, to say, okay, every time you ask a question, there's a potentially yes or no.

And in the same way, there's me and you and us and them. And so we can actually use questions to do the exact opposite. Instead of connecting, it's disconnecting. And instead of committing, it's polarizing and making it difficult for us to solve problems together. So that's my research really falling in love with this magnificent power of questions for good and for bad. and understanding how we need to pay more attention to questions. Of course, that's what I love, people asking, whether or not machines can think. But if you look into Ellen Turing's imitation game,

you will also find that it's a lot about asking and answering questions. And we also know that. We ask the chat about a question and comes up with an answer. So there's a lot going on with this thinking, responsibility, being human, thinking like a machine, or being able to think as a machine, thinking like a human being, and it's all about questions and answers. And that's why I made the two-by-two to demonstrate that we can do a lot of good things and a lot of harm by not understanding these basic structures that comes with questioning and answering

and being man and being machine. Kids ask why 300 times a day. Yeah. They are the archetypal question asker. Why do we lose the ability to ask good questions the order we get? I don't think we do. I don't agree. I know a lot of people are saying that, but I don't think we do.

We don't lose the ability. But we realize that the consequence of the questions not being innocent is that it comes with a responsibility, asking a question. And it's also when we ask a question, we admit. It's not only acknowledging, it's also admitting that there's something we don't know. That's why we ask. So it's admitting ignorance. And that's not something that we are being, you know, we're not being promoted for being

ignorant, not getting good grades for saying, I don't know, please ask someone else. That's not how we progress. That's not how we achieve things in school and in work life. So I think we just stop sharing the questions. It's not like we don't have the ability to ask them. And when I give keynotes, I typically start out by inviting people to write down a question. I haven't said anything. I've just said, hi, nice to be here.

I'm glad to be here. Nice to see you guys. I want to start by inviting you to write down a question. And it takes about a minute, then everybody in an audience have written down a question. I don't tell them how. I don't tell them what to do. I don't even give them examples. I just say, I'm going to trust you to know I'll write a question.

So please write down a question. It's just, it needs to be relevant to why we're here. here today, but it also needs to have some kind of importance to you. That's the only two rules. Everybody knows how to do that. There's so many forces pushing on my brain in that split second to come up with a question which I think is wise or funny or profound or relevant or I don't tell me what question did you have in your mind just when she asked? Yeah, why is the curtain system driving us to not want to ask questions because we're scared of looking like we don't know the answer. I think that's that's where my head goes in a lot.

lot of this, I think, is there's a Tom Waits quote I reference a lot. Tom Waits says we're operating in a deficit of wonder. So how does wonder and curiosity come into the art of asking really good questions? I actually like to talk about it as the big question family because we have these. There are some things we automatically think when we talk about questions, people say curiosity or creativity or, you know, these are the nice cousins in the family. these are the ones we want to play with. We want to sit next to at the family dinner.

But it's just as I mentioned before, the bright and the dark side, doubt and skepticism, they are also part of the question family. And I think that is part of the reason why we get more careful not to ask

questions all the time of all kinds of people, because we know that in addition to showing off our ignorance, we are putting some kind of pressure and the people we're asking. Also referring back to this distribution of responsibility that I know that when you ask a question, the spotlight is on me. And you know that I know that. So we can set it up like this in a formal setting. This is a podcast. We agreed to do this. You prepared some questions. I prepared some answers. Now we're going to do it. But if you just met me,

you know, some place and you started asking me all these questions, then it would start looking like something else and that is an interrogation. And that is, you know, when we want to hold someone responsible for something. And that's not a nice situation to find yourself in unless you are a lawyer and this is your job. So there are so many traditions and cultural dimensions to ask in questions. And because it's kind of a blind spot in our culture when we talk about questions, it's like it's a tool for journalists or it's something that can be used to do a poll. or to do a survey, but we rarely talk about these cultural, philosophical, basic human, existential, and ethical dimensions of questions, but they constantly have an impact on whether or not we ask and how we ask if we do it.

Is there a rhythm or a cadence to questioning, kind of stepping in, that leads us more to the questioning to connect versus the questioning to divide? Yes. I like to think about it as a dance, a conversation and a question and answer exchange as a dance. You know, I can take two step in my direction and my dancing partner will have to go back a few steps. But if I continue, then my dancing partner will kind of end up with his back against the wall, right? And that probably won't feel very nice. So I will have at some point step to the side or to go backwards myself in order to make the dance work. I also have to listen to the music, you know. That's the, what is the, what is the, what's the word, you know, the, are we dancing? Is this a salsa or is this, is it jazz? What is it? What is, what are we supposed to do here? At least in the beginning of the conversation, because if, if I just ignore all these

basic dancing lessons, then we won't get very far. Then, then we will, you will find an excuse to go somewhere else or to talk to the, to the person on the other side of you. So I would have to play along with some of these basic rules. And maybe at the end of the evening, we realize that, okay, I probably asked 80% of the questions. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily.

But it is a sign that I might want to, next time I join a conversation, make room for other people to ask their questions. Because the thing about questions is that, can't I ask you a question? I make it very hard for you to talk about something else. So if you have something on your mind or something you want to share, then it's actually pretty hard for you if I'm constantly bombarding you with questions. Again, then it's the interrogation format rather than the dance. Okay.

I have two left feet. And we did a show last week on AI generated music. So as long as there is no AI generated music at this party, and I can find somebody else to dance with who has two left feet, then the conversation and the questions will flow smoothly. You probably get to ask this all the time, but could we spend just one minute giving some tangible advice to people like me who have two left feet?

I think there are a few a bit surprising tips when it comes to thinking about questions. And one is that you might don't want to start out by a question, start out asking a question, because as I just mentioned, it can feel a bit overwhelming. or uninteresting. So sometimes the people I know who are really, really good at this,

who are not having left feet, but are just natural born conversationalists. And really, everybody, whether it's kids or young people or old people, they just want to be around these guys. You probably know people like that too. And what I've noticed is that they're really good at not at taking pressure out of the situation.

So instead of, and they rarely have, have these standard questions, especially when talking to young people, for instance, it's always the same. So how school and how did you, are you still playing soccer? And what about you want to do? What do you want to do? Exactly. It's the exact. We have, it's like we have this list in our head. And I know for a fact from a lot of young people that they hate this list. It's, it's really annoying talking to someone because it does the exact opposite of what we want, us adults, it doesn't show I care, I see you, I'm, you know, I want to know about you. It's not what it says. It says something along the lines of now we are

playing this role and when we're done, I will move on to talk to a real person, someone who's adult, someone whose interest I share. But these people who are really good at it, they typically talk about what they see. So it can be, you know, what we're eating at the moment. It can be a little funny thing happening as something that you can just comment on your surroundings. Commenting on your surroundings is actually typically way better conversation starters than asking a question because then you have a shared moment. Then you have some, you are establishing that we are both here right now. It's as simple as that. We're both right here. We're not thinking about what we should say, what we should do, where we should go. We're just being right here right now. And we're both

supposed to tap in to this situation. So that's a, it's a bit, I don't think it's a tip people expect to get from a question, a lover like myself. But it really truly works, not to use questions as a, as a tool slash weapon to take over the conversation. Is that why the Brits always talk about the weather when they meet? I think so. I think so.

Yeah, because it's, it works. And then we'll see, you know, depending. on how people respond to that, then maybe we can also talk about the bus being laid or, you know, we can take different steps. It's almost like when people get together, you're trying to like, you're lobbing these things up to try to find the commonality. Like, you're lobbing these things up and trying to see what tracked you can land on with somebody. I think what's interesting to me is what you're talking about is creating a space, right? When we write and we're talking about thinking on paper,

our thinking spaces, right, we create these thinking spaces that allow your brain to work in a really interesting way. Would you say there's a correlation to a conversation and a dialogue that is a space to explore like that? Is that the right way to look at it? Definitely. It's the exact same thing. It's exploring on paper, it's exploring my relationship with. with myself or with my own thinking or with, you know, what I'm, who I am right now. And in a conversation, it's doing that in the company of another human being who are probably asking the same questions of themselves. So sometimes we're just trying too hard to look, as you said, to look for these commonalities

when in fact they're right there because we are here right now in this place, at this time. So we already established that. Now we can just be here and see what happens. So it takes some trust in yourself and in the person sitting next to you. But that's also, I would say that's about it. Why do we lead conversations and interactions with such polarizing subjects like politics when we're talking about something? I think that, and let me explain this a little bit.

Maybe the question will come out a little bit better. but when you believe in something, right, you subscribe to a belief. It's no longer someone else's fact. It's yours. And it's something I believe in. I'm going to defend with my ego, right? My ego is going to come out and say, hey, I believe in this thing. You're attacking this thing.

We're going to be open. We're going down the path of division and not the path of connection. I think politics is like such a big thing because any discourse or conversation in politics is someone asking a question, which is really not a question, they're just driving something that they can reload a response that they already have in their head. And nobody gets anywhere. Do you see the same thing? Do you get frustrated by the same thing? And how does your work flow into helping the world figure out how to not do that? I definitely see the same thing. I don't get frustrated, at least not as much as I used to. And I think it's just because I,

I think I found a way to seek out ways to be around people where it doesn't happen as often, at least, where something else can happen. And you just mentioned the LinkedIn learning course I did earlier this year, and it actually kicks out by saying you don't need to know best. You can be the one who knows the least and learns the most. And then elaborating by saying, this is a sentence that I say to myself. This is not something I want to teach. this is something I want to remind myself

because it is so difficult for us to be the one who knows the least. But when you think about it as that will be, probably be the one who learns the most, then it kind of shifts, right? Then it gets somewhere else. And I think

there's just some domains where this will, maybe never or at least later than everywhere else, this will be something we will see in practice. Politics is one one of them. Traditional journalism also has

some restraints and limitations. Law, for instance. But when and if we are going to talk about education, education is probably a place where this shift could happen and where it might is happening right now. There's something going on because of the event of AI that could pave the way for us seeing

a different pattern unfold, a pattern that has more to do with accepting, acknowledging, and admitting that we don't know and we therefore have a lot to learn from each other, but also from just being human, trying to accept this silence or this confusion, this frustration of not knowing how to ask a different question or not knowing how to take this in a different direction. And just embracing that and say, oh, now something is happening. Now there's a small but significant sign that we are moving into fields that we haven't been in before. And I want to grab that.

I want to go with that rather than hurrying back and saying back to back to where I feel safe. And that's where I just pretend that I know a lot of things that I don't know. And I get a lot of outcome that I think I want, but I actually don't know why I want them. And I'm not sure they will give help. You talked about not wanting to know, not wanting to be the person who doesn't know the answer, right? And I think it's conditioned. We are rewarded for coming up with the answer the fastest. Remember we're in a classroom?

Someone asked a question. You're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You want to answer that question the first. You get rewarded for answering it first. If you don't answer it first, you're kind of in another pile. Is that a point of reinvention that we could explore that would be beneficial in the long run? Definitely. Yeah, definitely.

I think we think we think that education and educators that their job is to pass on knowledge, their job is to know something that the students or the kids don't. It's the same with an expert when people say, we have this question expert here and then people expect me to know something about how to ask good questions or how to, you know, use questions for good or something like that. And the thing about questions is that it's the exact opposite. You know, you cannot be a question expert, because an expert is someone who knows something that other people.

The whole idea about questions is that accepting that I'm the one who doesn't know. That's why I'm asking. I'm the one who needs to learn, who needs to grow. And I think it's the same with teachers. Maybe their job was never to know something that the students didn't. Maybe their job was to create a space, as we talked about, where students feel safe, seeking out knowledge. because if they don't feel safe, seeking out knowledge,

they will not learn what they're supposed to learn. They will not feel comfortable. They will not be able to survive and thrive as human beings in a changing environment, in a society with technology constantly changing all the rules and workplaces. And they will not be able to navigate that. They will get anxious. They will feel lonely. They will, you know, all these bad things will happen if we don't feel comfortable

learning and growing. So maybe that was the job from the beginning. When we think about really cool teachers, the ones who really made a difference in our lives, it was not, we don't necessarily remember what they knew when what they were really good at, what their expertise was. We remember how they made us feel like someone

who were worth spending time on, who was worth investing in. So I think it's, I think the education system is facing an existential crisis. And the thing about existential crisis is that you have to re-ask some of the basic questions. Who am I as a human? Who am I as a scientist? Who am I as a teacher?

And why? And that's basically thanks to AI, we are starting to ask these questions. And we probably should have a long time ago. But now we are. And I think it's thanks to AI. Well, it's that double-ed sword of AI. It gives us the opportunity to realize that we are the least smart in a room. Or it gives us the ability to try or prove that we are, in fact, the smartest person in any room.

And how do you engage with it and use it and think about it so that you're using it for the first of those, not the latter? And then to your second point about teachers, we all have one teacher that we remember. And it's about how they made us feel. Does that weaken the AI should be used in school argument? Because it doesn't matter if the bad teachers are using AI. They're still not going to have the impact that a good teacher without AI could have. It's another how question. Why should we be changing?

Why should parents and teachers be changing how they think and use AI in the classroom? The way AI is being offered to us at the moment comes with a lot of risk. not only, you know, the risk that everybody's talking about, about data or about people using it for bad purposes or even super intelligence coming to wipe us all out. That's not the kind of risk I'm talking about. It's the risk that we confuse our own thinking with what a machine can do. It's the risk of us. Basically, technology is a medium, right? It's a thing that mediates and manipulates our relationship with,

it can be with our surroundings, with the world. You know, the old technologies, it was about mediating and manipulating nature, so we could survive in nature. Social media, for instance, it's about mediating and manipulating our relationship with each other. So that comes something in between. Before, you know, when I'm not, that's still the case,

but when I'm with other people, I look them in the eye. It's not saying maybe a pair of glasses, but it's not like there's technology between us. I can touch them and we can look at each other. But with social media, it's not only the algorithm and the use of data. It's simply there's something in between me and you when we communicate that has its own life, so to speak.

And with AI, there's technology between the relationship I have with myself. So when I use, if I use a chatbot to think differently or to write a paper or to solve a task in some way, then and sometimes, you know, some people are even building AI with the assumption that AI can help us be better at thinking, that it can help us be better at critical thinking or thinking in all kinds of ways. and that is putting technology, letting technology mediate and manipulate my relationship with myself, my own thinking. And that is so easy to forget that technology is not, just as questions are not innocent, technology is definitely not innocent either. And if we just think of technology as something we use, then we forget that it has this impact on how we think and how we understand not only our surroundings,

but also each other and how we understand ourselves. So we start adapting to the technology. We even have a word like prompting. Prompting is something completely different than asking a question. Prompting is adapting your questions or your search to the machine. So you are trying to figure out how can I give the machine this task? How can I give the machine this, ask the machine this question in a way that it will be able to answer. That's what prompting is about.

asking questions is the exact opposite. It's about asking questions that might not, where I don't, I have absolutely no idea whether there is an answer or what the answer is. I'm asking because I don't know, because I don't have any experience with dealing with this. I need someone else to help me understand this. So I'm not adapting because I don't know what I should adapt it to. I'm simply exploring and simply experimenting. If we are not aware of that, the difference between prompting and asking, the difference between being born to think and being built to think, the difference between letting technology guide our questions and let our inner insecurity or uncertainty and the unknown guide our questions.

If we're not aware of these differences, then we will not learn and grow as humans. then we will become something else, which is really scary, for me at least, because I see so much beauty in what happens when we do it ourselves. Being aware enough, though, is being aware of these differences in of itself enough to use AI to think better or think more critically? I don't think you can use AI for that.

You can use AI to think better or clearer at all? No, no, I don't think so. because thinking is something else. You know, when we ask if machines can think, I think the first question should be, why do humans think? Why do we think? For me, it's fairly simple.

We think because we know there's something we don't know. We have a problem, right? There's a gap between what I know and what I want to know. So I have to start thinking. That's why I ask these questions and that's why I put up with this pain in my head of trying to figure something out that I don't know. If you think about it, the machine doesn't have that problem.

It doesn't know that it doesn't know. It's kind of like, it's like an animal, right? It doesn't know that it doesn't know. It doesn't even know. And we are not like God's, you know, God know that he knows or she knows everything. So that's a completely different domain. But humans are the only, the French philosopher Malapunzi said, this fragile mixture of animals and gods, who knows that they don't know.

So they have to ask questions. They have to use their own. thinking, come up with their own ways of navigating, and the second we think, oh, but I can make it easier by using a machine, we're letting go of the very basic condition that forces us to think. So I think it's very, when I talk to young people and they say, well, I don't, I don't use chat to cheat anything. I just, when I get a task, I'm not sure how to stop. I just, you know, ask the machine, and then it gives me a few starting points.

So I don't have this blank sheet. But the whole point is that the blank sheet is what forces you to think. So of course it's a matter of how you understand thinking. But if you consult the old thinkers and not just the engineers and technologists, then you would have a really hard time finding anyone who would say that a machine could ever think. And if it cannot think itself, why should it be able to help us think? We're the only ones who know how to do that. So something that seems like it can think.

think for us. Let's think about that just for a minute. What happens down the road with that is we get used to doing that. We forget how to do the hard part of that first part of thinking where it's like blank page. What do I do? How do I do it? Why do I do it? We're going to kind of lose that muscle. How do we as humans keep that muscle going while leveraging the technology as a support mechanism, as an adjunct? I think we need three things. things basically. We need to understand technology. And when I say technology, I very concretely mean what Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, called the essence of technology. So understanding what, if we don't assume that technology is just made for us to use, but it actually,

the second it's here, it has an essence of itself, it has its own purpose, so to speak, and it can be a concrete purpose like, I'm a hand, use me for hammering. But it can also, it's also a more basic, something that's true for all technologies, which is that it comes with the promise of human beings being better off using technology than not using technology. So it's a promise that you can achieve more by doing less if you use this technology. By with this promise, we automatically start asking a specific kind of questions. Like, what is it? How can I use it? What would it, how would it, how would it, how would it, improve my ways of doing things?

How will I, will I be faster? Will I be better at doing something? These are the kind of questions we ask when we're given this promise of achieving more by doing less. But what we tend to forget is that at the same time, we forget to ask questions like, why would I need technology for this? For instance, when it comes to thinking or it comes to human connection, why would we need technology for that?

Couldn't I just reach out? Couldn't I just, you know, when I meet someone at the street, say, hello, what a lovely day. and try to strike up a conversation, you know, this idea that we need technology to connect with each other because we need to be connected across the globe and we need to be connected, you know, on a large scale, which has proven we're not very good at that. We are not very good at connecting on a large scale, but we are really good at connecting on a very small scale. So why would I need technology? How does this technology impact my way of living, my way of feeling like a human being or even

questions like, what will I stop doing when I start using this technology? Is there something that's important for me that I will no longer be doing because now I will spend my day using this technology, whether it's playing a computer game or it's being on TikTok or whatever. So what will I stop do? And I think it's very important for us to understand that this is not something that comes from Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Sam Altman. This is not about evil people in Silicon unvalued designing technology, something that has to do with this, it has to do with that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the basic essence of technology that comes with this promise that makes it very difficult for us to ask a certain kind of questions,

and that is the basic existential, ethical, epistemological questions about who we are, why we're here, what we want to do, and how we know the difference between truth and false and right and wrong and what's worth and not worth. spending our time on. So we need some basic education instead, understanding the essence of technology. And that also comes with understanding the essence of AI because we live in the technological era we live in is about AI. So we also need to understand the basic essence of AI. And I went to Alan Turing to understand that because I thought he was, you know, the founding father of AI who better to consult in understanding these basic things. And he himself started out by saying,

I'm not going to discuss the question can machines think because I consider it too meaningless to deserve discussion. But then he said, we will within a few years start to think and talk about machines as if they are thinking. That will happen and the reason that will happen is because

we will design this machine to deceive us. That's the whole point. From the very beginning, 1950 in his paper, the machine is designed to deceive human beings into thinking that it is thinking. So what's happening right now is just that we're being fooled. We are the ones

that's put on a test. It's not the machines. We talk about the Turing test, but it was never about the machine. It's about us. Can we pass the test of not thinking that the machine is thinking? And hold on to this basic distinction between being born to think and being built to think.

Being born to think means that there's so many things we don't need to learn. We don't need to be programmed. We don't need to be taught, we just know it because we were born into this world. We see it from within. We know how the world works because we work the same way. You know, we get old, we get tired, we get hungry, we get, you know, the trees are changing throughout the year. So are we. And at some point, we won't be here anymore. Sustainable living. All these things has to do with, we don't need to be targeted. We know. The machine is just never going to get there. So, so important that we

understand this, the essence of technology. And just as important is that we understand ourselves. And we have not invested trillion of invested dollars in understanding the human being for the past 75 years. We've been investing in developing AI, but we have not been investing in understanding ourselves. I think the good news is that it doesn't take that much for us to remember. Because we were born to know these things. We were born to navigate these difficulties to navigate uncertainty. That's in our DNA because we were born without knowing why and for how long. So that's just, that's the name of the game.

We know we will need to figure out and we've been dealing with deception forever. You know, Plato wrote about it in his allegory of the cave. Descartes wrote about it when he talked about the evil deceiver. You know, we've been dealing with these problems forever. We know how to navigate a world that is uncertain. So I'm not that afraid. And the good news is that AI has made us ask a lot of questions. I want to leave with one final question, Pierre.

We end all our shows with this question. What should humans be? And I'm scared to add the caveat here. And how does technology help us get there? Yeah. So that's just the thing, right? When it comes to being human, there's no should. We were not born with a purpose or a clear goal that we were supposed to achieve.

We were supposed to figure out along the way. So there is no should. What could humans be? Well, human beings are acknowledging that we don't know. That's the basic. And it sounds like something that's bad, but it's not. It's the core, it's the key driver. It's what sets us apart that we know that we don't know.

So we just keep on searching. and we will always have more questions than answers, and that's the good news. So every time a technologist say, well, we will solve all the problems, super intelligence will save us. Humanity will become better. It's just like, well, don't listen

because that's not going to happen. And even if it was, then we would no longer be here. We would no longer be humans. Thank you. That was awesome. That was awesome. Thanks so much for spending time with us.

Pia, I hope you enjoyed it as well. We'll get some of this stuff carved up and sent out to you if you want to use it for any of your promotional stuff. But I would love, love, love to stay in touch and keep tabs on your work and maybe we can, because I think we're on the same mission. We're on the same mission is how to keep humans, human, and let them get back to the root of self-discovery, emergent nature, all of that fun stuff. So this was so fun. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. See you guys. Wow. That was an emotional episode of Thinking on Paper.

If you're still with us, and of course you are after that, if you have any questions about that show, email us at hello at thinkingonpaper.xyZ. Subscribe on the platform you're listening. And please, as a curious mind, share this with just one person in your life who wants needs would like to hear these conversations. Maybe two. Share it with two. Maybe two. Share it with two.