Recently, I attended an informal event at work where colleagues performed musical pieces. And there was also occasion for a ‘lec-dem’ (lecture & demonstration), where seasoned musicians who have soaked long in the joy of music shared some of it with others.
And since then, I have been thinking about the nature of joy. What brings joy? Where from does it come? Philosophically, I am inclined to believe in the Vedantic maxim that our very nature is joy. Indeed, joy is all there is. And living this truth may be the highest fulfilment of life.
But what is it in more prosaic terms? Perhaps joy is simply a sense of harmony and order, when disparate elements align, defying the natural tendency to chaos. In the musical event, it was the harmony between my desire to appreciate music and the the seasoned practitioner’s cultivated passion. Maybe there was more in common beyond the music - a pride in the cultural richness of the country, the satisfying symmetries across music and logic, and the empathy in thinking about colleagues.
Why is such joy not as frequent? Why are we not prone to joy? My current sense is that joy is derived from harmonies of a certain narrow range. If things are too commonplace, even if there is deep alignment, we don’t suffer joy. For instance, though there is much harmony in my fingers wandering over a keyboard and characters popping on a screen, there is not much joy that I feel. On the other end, if things are too rarefied, even when there is deep alignment, we may not have the skill to be joyful. For instance, the mysteries of the body, the mind, the universe - both real and imagined, are intensely harmonious as evidenced by work of mystics, poets, philosophers, and mathematicians. But many of us have not the mastery to derive such joy.
(I realize that the above is a more heartful rephrase of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said in his book “Flow” which he characterizes as the complete absorption in a task that is neither too easy nor too hard. But I am at a stage, where writing it down from first principles was joyful. 😊)
Alright, joy is a channel of harmony that we are tuning in and out of. What does it have to do with GPT? Before I get to that, let me survey the space of emotional reactions to ChatGPT over the last couple of months.
The reactions to ChatGPT have been several: existential fear, scientific snobbery, techno-utopianism, and many others. Each of these seem to arise from different corners of our collective psyche. Fear is most acute amongst those who believed that talking like a median human being knowledgably about a certain body of work was their differentiator. Scientific snobbery seems to arise from those who have not yet accepted that the rhythmic humming of tens of thousands of GPUs can revolutionize entire fields of research, overturning decades of established knowledge and challenging long-held assumptions. And techno-utopia is only expected given that in an otherwise gloomy political and economic climate, AI is one of the few things to throw bets at to get to a 10x better world!
While the above reactions vary widely, one common thread across them may be the underlying expectation of human exceptionalism. A ‘regression to mean’ antidote for many of these reactions could be to see the emergent performance of large language models as an invitation to explore ourselves and our created world orders more carefully. My sense is that this deeper introspection will naturally follow.
And in one such introspection, I recognized that we don’t talk much about GPT and joy in the same breath. This is despite many people labelling their first ChatGPT experiences as “mind-blowing”. And despite ChatGPT amassing larger user bases than ‘addictive’ social media apps.
Why does ChatGPT have such engagement? It could well be because it is useful - people are writing essays, emails, code, and generally getting things done. But I suspect a stronger reason could be that it is joyful in doing various things: help remember that phrase one forgot, enthusiastically debate about a topic one hold’s views on, mix and match Shakespearean language and Indian mythology, invite people to find what it gets wrong (which may not be a bug at all!).
And in doing all these joyful little things, ChatGPT is highly malleable - people can get it to focus on topics and engage at a level of discourse that they like. And they can do this by just speaking in natural language. Essentially, ChatGPT is an API call to an accessible single software system that can potentially create harmonious channels of experience for millions of its users.
And this is the real opportunity - to convert this potentiality of joyful experiences to reality for all people. An early experience in this direction for me was using GitHub Co-Pilot to write code. Seeing the GPT model come up with multi-line code completions that matched my thinking in my code was delightful! Yes, it was a co-pilot in that it helped me do my job of writing the code, but it was also a co-pilot in that it created a channel of alignment where harmony could be seen and joy experienced. And such joyful channels will emerge for writers, and lawyers, and teachers, and mothers, and everyone else. And perhaps we will take it even one step further and create channels of alignment synced across multiple people - a jazz of harmony!