Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘How might A.I. change the way history is written and understood? To answer that question, it’s useful to think about L.L.M.s as merely the latest in a long series of shifts in the organizing of human knowledge. At least since the third century B.C., when Callimachus wrote his “Pinakes,” a series of books (now lost) cataloging the holdings of the famous library (now lost) in Alexandria, humanity has devised increasingly sophisticated systems for navigating pools of information too large for any one individual to take in.

Such systems inevitably have a double edge when it comes to scholarly research, a task where “efficiency” always risks being synonymous with cutting corners. The printed index in books, a device dating back at least to the year 1467, allowed scholars to find relevant material without reading each tome in full. From the perspective of human knowledge, was that a step toward utopia or dystopia? Even now, 558 years later, who’s to say? Innovations that cultivate serendipity — such as the Dewey Decimal System, by whose graces a trip into the stacks for one book often leads to a different, more salient discovery — must, almost by definition, be plagued by arbitrariness. Classify a book about the Mariposa Battalion with Brands’s “The Age of Gold” and other gold-rush titles (979.404), and it will acquire a very different set of neighbors than if it’s classified as a book about the Battalion’s victims (“Native populations, multiple tribes,” 973.0497).

The rise of computers and the internet were of course an unprecedented turning point in the history of tools for writing history — exponentially increasing the quantity of information about the past and, at the same time, our power to sift and search that information. Psychologically, digital texts and tools have thrown us into an era, above all, of “availability”: both in the colloquial sense of that word (everything’s seemingly available) and in the social-scientific sense of “availability bias,” whereby we can fool ourselves into thinking that we have a clear and complete picture of a topic, buffaloed by the sheer quantity of supporting facts that can spring up with a single, motivated search.

Even among academic historians, this availability has shifted incentives in a direction that A.I. is likely to push even further. In 2016, years before the L.L.M. explosion, the University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam published an essay about the achievements but also the dangers of search-driven digital research. “For the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look,” she wrote, in a particularly trenchant paragraph. “Technology has exploded the scope and speed of discovery. But our ability to read accurately the sources we find, and evaluate their significance, cannot magically accelerate apace. The more far-flung the locales linked through our discoveries, the less consistent our contextual knowledge. The place-specific learning that historical research in a predigital world required is no longer baked into the process. We make rookie mistakes.”

Putnam’s essay wasn’t a jeremiad against digital tools — which can power what she memorably calls the “sideways glance,” the ability for a historian whose expertise lies squarely in one domain to get up to speed more quickly on other topics. Digital search has allowed historians to make genuine, powerful connections that wouldn’t have been made otherwise. But she worried about what was being lost, especially given that the pool of digitized sources, even as it keeps growing, remains stubbornly unrepresentative: biased toward the English language and toward wealthy nations over poor ones, but biased especially toward “official” sources (those printed rather than written, housed in institutional rather than smaller or less formal archives). “Gazing at the past through the lens of the digitizable,” Putnam notes, “makes certain phenomena prominent and others less so, renders certain people vividly visible and others vanishingly less so.”

When she and I chatted recently, Putnam compared this shift to Baumol’s cost disease — the phenomenon, noted by the economist William Baumol, that when technology makes certain workers more efficient, it winds up making other forms of labor more expensive and therefore harder to justify. In principle, Putnam notes, digital tools have no downside: Professional historians remain more than capable of carrying out time-consuming research in physical archives. But in practice, the different, faster, more connective kind of research was making the more traditional work seem too professionally “expensive” by comparison. Why spend a month camped out in some dusty repository, not knowing for sure that anything publishable will even turn up, when instead you can follow real, powerful intellectual trails through the seeming infinitude of sources accessible from the comfort of home?’ (from the New York Times)