Tatyana Chernigovskaya: “Socium and the human psyche are incompatible with human chipping”

We offer the readers of Novye Izvestia several excerpts from the lectures of the famous scientist in the fields of neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and theory of consciousness.

“I want to warn you of something. I will not consciously name names. Performances on the topic of artificial intelligence and the brain appear on wide venues; these recordings have millions of views.

Do not trust everything that you hear. Even if it's told by people of the high status. These may be people who accidentally fell into this sphere, they are by no means fools, they are well educated, but in other areas.

Since life is interdisciplinary, I do not insist that those who study economics always deal only with economics, and those who study languages always do linguistics.

But I say this to the fact that you still need to hold onto the tail somehow. When you climb into other areas, you need to know about these areas.

There is a lot of misinformation these days. From these statements it follows that people who are engaged in unmanned combines have already studied the brain, as they say.

If they knew how it works, they would already have 100 pieces of Nobel Prizes! Because they would be the only ones in the world who found out. But all this is not so.

They claim that they learned how the brain learns, stores information, how you can influence it. And they are confident that they are already creating new artificial brains that will safely exist on this earth.

So, I inform you: all that I have listed is not so. This is just not there.

Today in the world a huge amount of information. We must learn to understand it, handle it, filter it. Fakes in this world can be better than originals; they are masterly in many areas, if not all. One must always remember this.

It is necessary to build verification skills. It is really very important, it needs to be taught.

Everything around us is filled with gadgets: “Ok, google, tell me ....” But do not go there! Do not watch Wikipedia and so on.

If I forgot how to make fish sauce, I will see it, of course.

But if I need serious information, then I will go to serious professional sites, links to which I will specifically recognize.

In the future, we may become completely dumb. Because social networks, more precisely, a virtual environment, take away all our time. Absolutely wasted.

The memory of people living in the digital age is worse than the memory of our grandparents. Because today - there is no need to remember.

No wonder the owners of social networks, all sorts of Google and other things allow their children to surf the Internet only two hours a day.

Of course, we will turn into cyborgs more and more. But if you have a chip in your head, an artificial heart, kidneys, arms, legs, liver - will you still be considered a person?

All this is from the field of very serious philosophical questions, eschatological. About the place of man in the universe, about who such a man is.

I personally have apocalyptic visions of the future. Are we still human or not already?

Whether we agree to such a world - no one can ask us about this. Such a world, as it were, could happen.

This entails serious consequences - psychological, social. All sorts.

If you put a chip in your head, we are talking about nanoscale quantities, just imagine its influence, all this horror.

Your decision will no longer be your decision. You can download anything you want.

The society and the psyche will not stand all these things. Because it is a completely different world. The creator did not create us like that. We are not ready for this. Maybe the events of evolution will go so well that we will come to terms with this in the end, but it's too early to talk about it

Now there is an active redistribution of activities between us and robotics. We no longer do a lot of things, but devices do them for us.

There are predictions that within five years a wild number of millions - if not billions - of people will be freed. They will have nowhere to work, since robots will serve enterprises.

That is, you see, a huge army of people will be freed up to whom the state will pay money so that they do not die of hunger. But what will they, interestingly, do?

Talking that they will all become poets and artists makes me laugh.

Great efforts must be made so that people orient themselves and understand what to do with their free time, of which there will be a huge amount.

With regard to education, I believe that in general it is impossible to replace online education with online.

This is not replaceable. I'll tell you even more, such a cynical phrase walks around the world: online education is education for the poor.

Yes, no one denies that such an education exists. There are a million courses on the Internet. Yale, Stanford University makes them, our Higher School of Economics how much it got.

All this is so. But this should not be instead of traditional education.

Tell me, do you want to be treated by a doctor who learned something from biochemistry and physiology while lying on a sofa and scratching his cat’s stomach? You do not want.

Medicine is the highest science. But in the end, it’s also art. And this means that you need to learn from the master.

You cannot learn to paint and draw like Leonardo without being a student of Leonardo. You have to walk around it for many years, first rub the paint, then wash the brushes, you know? And then, maybe that's what will come of it.

Therefore, this is a difficult question. I do not deny this topic. Moreover, I am pushing my colleagues to do such online courses, but with all the caveats that I have indicated.

It is very clear that education of understanding is needed, not memorization . This was also mentioned by Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, with whom, in due time, I had the good fortune to communicate a lot.

I do not need a student who has fives in all subjects and who remembers everything by heart. Because such a "subject" lies in my bag - this is my computer. And I don’t need such a person at all.

Anyone who remembers what year and on what day of the week Napoleon married Josephine is not interested in me. Because I can easily find all this myself.

I need a person who understands what is happening. The computer does not understand anything. Till.

It is very important for us to educate people who are not afraid of constant change.

See how they bring up children. They are terribly afraid of bad grades, failures. Why?

Have you ever met a person on this planet who never made mistakes, moreover, big ones? She married the wrong woman, chose the wrong profession and so on, settled in the wrong city ...

This is complete for everyone. So why are children brought up in this horror from any three?

By the way, this is a very suspicious assessment, especially if the young man is smart. And you always see from him that he is smart, but at the same time, he can always get three. Why is that? He doesn’t need to get fives. Analyze.

But he is simply the future Einstein. And it is to him that you need to direct all your attention, and not to the one who learned everything.

If a child receives a deuce for correctly solving a mathematical problem, but wrote it in a sloppy handwriting and blotted it, then such a teacher should be fired without further teaching to children. This is completely unprofessional. If she taught calligraphy, there’s no conversation, and here is mathematics. These are serious things.

Learning and coping with stress is very important. In St. Petersburg there is a very powerful gymnasium, No. 610, famous. There are practically no professional teachers. Literature is taught by people from the Pushkin House, art by people from the Hermitage. Here is such an audience.

They managed to make sure that among their children it is considered prestigious to know a lot, read a lot and solve difficult problems. For them, the buzz is to solve a problem that no one can solve.

In this gymnasium, they were able to turn the situation around. Your five do not care about anyone. I was there once at an event and accidentally heard a conversation between two teenage boys who passed by. “You want to say that you read Cicero in Russian ?!”, asked one another.

His contempt was guessed throughout his body! “Well, no, how could you think such a thing!” Answered the second. Wow! Of course, they are snobs there, but they have a reason for this.

What am I saying? For us there is no outside knowledge. Another thing is that there are so many around that you need to choose something that will not make you sick.

You need to know about art not because decent people need to know who Vivaldi is, this is not the case, although this component is also present, but this is not important. And the fact that this incredibly expands your associative field!

You do not know where you will find a solution. Solutions are not sought at the table with a slide rule - metaphorical rule.

You walk in a clearing and stumble over a stump: priests, but here it is, a decision! And this stump has nothing to do with it, and the meadow. But at the same time you released your brain, you released the neural network.

And the longer you sit in one place and hollow one hollow - the less sense will be, I assure you.

It is very difficult to resist stress in the modern world. We are in it all the time. So what? We have no options. It will not be easier, that's for sure.

Look what is happening in the world. "One must have great strength in order not to think about it before going to bed."