Dunning-Kruger Effect & Artificial Intelligence
Jesus Velasquez-Bermudez
![Jesus Velasquez-Bermudez]()
Jesus Velasquez-Bermudez
Decision-Making Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneur & Researcher - Chief Scientific Officer
Generative Artificial Intelligence, GPT, has revolutionized the dynamic between the general public, professionals, and scientists, exacerbating the Dunning-Kruger effect: those who know the least overestimate their competence.
1. As Stephen Hawking warned: "the illusion of knowledge becomes its greatest enemy"; or in the words of Bill Murray: "Arguing with someone intelligent is difficult; with someone ignorant, impossible."
2. The accessibility of GPT has created a wave of pseudo-experts who, with basic notions, proclaim competent and challenge scientists, imposing their ideas by their power, not by their authority.
3. The commercial (non-scientific) approach to AI has convinced many that they have mastered technology, celebrating trivial applications as great achievements, that they don't understand why they happen.
4. The simplicity of GPT is eroding advanced mathematical methodologies (optimization, equilibrium models, finite elements, etc.), under the fallacy that "what the pseudo-expert does not understand does not exist", and therefore true knowledge must be discredited as complex.
5. According to John Sterman, the performance of many professionals is therefore far from optimal, often far from reasonable, in a wide variety of tasks, from managing an ecosystem, governing a city, controlling a factory, etc.
6. I think that the advance of the Dunning-Kruger effect is alarming: it polarizes the actors into ignorant and experts, irremediably widening the gap between the two, who little by little belong to two worlds.
Jesús Velásquez-Bermúdez