The joy of knowing

 Why do we have to learn things when we can just ask Google or ChatGPT? A friend told me recently about a conversation with a child when they were doing a puzzle together about capital cities. The child asked my friend why she knew so many capital cities and she said that she had memorised them. The child then wondered why she should spend time memorising such information when the answer is only a click or two away. A logical question really and it has become a reflex action to reach for your mobile whenever you're not sure of something. I sometimes get frustrated when I ask someone if they can give me directions of if they know how to fix something and they simply reply "just google it". The reason I ask is to engage in some conversation or to gain from their advice. I know I can find some kind of answer on YouTube or a web search (I don't google anymore) but prefer to ask.

It's ironic that trivia quizzes are so popular today when the answers are nearly always a few quick clicks away. There are usually strict rules to keep mobiles out of reach during quizzes and the joy of such activities is finding how much you actually know. We feel pride in what we have learnt over the years, whether it is knowledge in a particular subject area or everyday trivia. Getting an instant answer from a chatbot gives us no sense of achievement at all. 

Learning is hard work but gives us great satisfaction and pride when we find that we have mastered a skill or can remember important facts. This is particularly true with the information we learn in our hobbies. I have spent a significant part of my life learning all sorts of useless information about nature, history, sport, railways, music, languages and indeed the capital cities of the world. I get a real kick when I am able to use this knowledge and can amaze my friends. Admittedly 95% of this personal information archive will never be used except in my own head but sometimes, in a quiz for example, it suddenly comes to use. 

Increasingly we hear of  AI-enabled literature, art or music but for me these are empty vessels, devoid of human experience. They can never be more than decoration or background noise because they convey no human experience and required no thought or skill to produce. I could certainly generate this post with AI and it could well be better written, but it would not be mine and give me no sense of achievement no matter how many views it got. When I read in languages that I haven't mastered I prefer to struggle and work out the meaning myself with the help of an old-fashioned dictionary than to simply use the camera function in Google Translate. I am rather proud to have read books in, say Finnish, even if I probably missed many nuances and guessed or skipped a few words on each page. Using Google Translate wouldn't give me any satisfaction. That's the reward for years of painstaking memorising and practice and that's why we keep on struggling to learn even when there are tempting shortcuts.