The age of the second brain is finally here
Stephen Addison
FOR YEARS, THE goal of a lot of people, whether they’ve thought about this explicitly or not, has been to have something like a robot or a clone to share their work. In some circles this search—this goal—is called the Second Brain Movement. What that’s meant to date has been to find some way of organizing all that you know and storing it so that it’s readily accessible whenever you need it.
But while having a way of organizing your knowledge is useful, it’s not nearly as useful as it would be if that second brain could also do some of the work for you. And that’s what these large language models like ChatGPT and others offer, because they can take the drudgery out of much of the work that we do and allow us to focus on higher-level concepts. Think of it as a “brain amplifier” if you like.
Recently I was working with some people writing a proposal, and one of the people that I was working with was going to be the external evaluator for the proposal. But while this person had all of the necessary skills, he had never worked as an external evaluator. He didn’t know what to write about what he would do, nor did he have any idea how long the process would take or how much to charge for his services. So I asked ChatGPT and several other programs to develop a budget and a scope of work for an external evaluator on a project, which I described. Then I combined those reports into one document.
It took me no more than 30 minutes to do that. If I had done it in the traditional way, I might’ve spent an afternoon—or a whole day—putting that together with someone. And when I gave the report to the proposal team, I told them which questions I’d asked to generate that report, so they could follow up with other questions if need be.
When I told this story to a friend, he asked if I was pleased with ChatGPT’s answer. “Oh yes,” I said. “I didn’t see anything that I could have added to it.”
I subscribe to 10 A.I. programs in all, but for convenience’s sake I’m going to lump them under the ChatGPT moniker for short. What I can tell you is that ChatGPT is getting better and better. When it first came out with “beyond text” capabilities, they were rather limited. It was horrible at arithmetic; it is at root probabilistic, so it would often give the wrong answers to arithmetic problems. But now it has come a long way, and not only can it do arithmetic, it can also do graphs, graphics, and movies, and it can show you how to arrive at results. Now again, it’s being trained on data, so it’s seen these results and, if you ask the right questions, it will tell you what equation you need to use. But if you need to know where that equation comes from, it now does a pretty good job at that. It isn’t reasoning, but in terms of organizing information, it’s really great. So if you’re trying to learn something new, you can ask, “What’s a good starting point to learn this topic?”
I’ve found it to be particularly useful for language learning. I’ve seen people put together a scheme whereby they basically describe what their current level in a language is and ask ChatGPT to develop a set of instructions to help them improve, and it will do that. It will give sources, it will give readings, and those sorts of things. So you can now use it as a second brain, but it’s a second brain that has access to information that you don’t—or at least information that you can’t readily recall.
People talk about how blandly it writes, but you can say, “Here’s a sample of my writing, I want you to write in that style.” You can tell it what words you do or don’t like to use. In other words, you can actually train your second brain, and you can continue training it for your own benefit. So whether you’re a young person just starting your career or a seasoned manager or executive, ChatGPT may be your ultimate personal and business tool.
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ALMOST ANYTHING THAT you would want to do, you can ask it to do. I actually find the things that it can do to help you learn things to be far more important than anything it can actually write for you. Say you’re a new graduate or an aspiring apprentice and you’re applying for your first job. You’ve never applied for a job before. And by the way, that’s increasingly common. People in my era held after-school or weekend jobs when they were growing up, but today, it’s actually quite common for students to have very little experience outside of school. When I was a child, most people serviced their own vehicles, changed the oil, those sorts of things. I was probably 6 or 7 years old the first time I helped my father change the oil in his vehicles. Before we became this throwaway society, people got lots of little hands-on experiences and often had to ask questions and work with people to figure those things out. Sometimes good things came out of that.
I remember as a teenager—I was 15 or 16—I went into a store and asked for various electronics parts. “Oh, that’s an interesting array of things,” said the man who was waiting on me. “What are you doing with them?”
“My dad’s friend has this record player that he wants to get working for his daughter’s birthday,” I said, “so I took it apart and figured out that we need to replace those parts to get it working again.”
“Are you still in school?” he said, and I said I was. “Well, how would you like to work for us on Saturdays?”
People aren’t doing those kinds of things these days, because most products today require a specialist to fix, if they can be fixed at all. So the young people don’t get opportunities like kids of my generation did. Add to that the fact that we tend to shelter our kids more today. Parents expect to be in contact with their children 24/7, so the kids don’t have as much independence as they used to. As a result, when they have to prepare for those first job interviews, they don’t have a clue about what to expect. Many of them go in cold and perform abysmally.
But with your trusty second brain standing by, now there’s an option. You could say to ChatGPT, “I’m about to interview for a job at a company that does such-and-such. What sorts of questions should I expect in that interview?” And ChatGPT will give you some questions…and you’ll quickly realize that you have no idea how to answer them. So you ask ChatGPT, “What would be a good, solid answer for each of these questions?”
What all of this means is that somebody who has never gone to an interview before could—if they simply have the presence of mind to think about it ahead of time—go in well-prepared for an interview. You could ask ChatGPT, “What should I ask in an interview? And what should I not ask?” If you just think about it a bit, you can imagine a whole series of things that you can learn from ChatGPT—things that you would not otherwise be able to learn except the hard way.
In many ways, ChatGPT and its fellow A.I. programs may be the ultimate educational tool because they have infinite patience. And they’re not reasoning logically. At best, they’re doing pattern-recognition at this point. But if there’s something you’re having difficulty understanding, you can ask it to break the explanation down into smaller and smaller pieces until you get a piece that you do understand. That actually reflects the way that I tell students to problem-solve: If there’s a problem in an area that you can’t solve, there’s certainly an easier problem that you can solve. So find the easiest problem in this class that you can solve, and then work your way up to the problem that you want to solve. Large Language Models can help you do that.
And this applies to anybody and everybody, whether you’re a first-time job seeker or a CEO. I think that A.I. and the things that grow from it are going to be revolutionary. It has unlimited possibilities. So my advice to people is, don’t fear it, embrace it. The things that you thought you could never get done, you can get done—you with a little help from your second brain.
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Dr. Stephen Addison is Professor of Physics and Dean, College of Science and Engineering, University of Central Arkansas. He is also a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Arkansas Academy of Computing, and Secretary of the Arkansas Academy of Science.
