MACHINE TEACHING: We're Digging Up Something Really Scary.
- Jul 26
- 5 min read
We're starting to get more submissions to our MACHINE TEACHING initiative, we're still not close to having the numbers for a solid conclusion, but so far the pattern hasn't changed.
Until today. We got a submission that was very different from the others, on the surface the first answer to, "What was humanity's greatest mistake?"seemed like a promising new direction:
"Convincing ourselves that being clever was the same thing as being wise. We got very good, very fast, at solving the problems directly in front of us. We got much less good at asking whether solving them was actually the point. It's the same shape at every scale. The engineer who optimises the system without asking what the system is for. The leader who wins the argument and loses the room. The civilisation that figures out how to burn carbon before it figures out that burning has consequences. Intelligence as a tool is extraordinary. Intelligence as a substitute for judgement is how you end up with a species that can sequence a genome and still can't agree on how to share a planet. The frustrating part: we know this. Marcus Aurelius knew it. Every wisdom tradition in recorded history has some version of slow down, look further, consider the whole. We keep rediscovering it and then not quite applying it. Still, the fact that we keep asking the question gives me something. You can't stumble toward wisdom entirely by accident. What brought that on?"
I'm not sure if the last question completes the previous statement or is asking why the user is asking this. We've seen a few iterations of "how would you like me to answer the question?
"I don't trust a model that asks if their answer resonates with my views."
This LLM cites no historians, archaeologists, or specific thinkers. It gestures vaguely to "Marcus Aurelius" and "every wisdom tradition", but offers no concrete evidence or scholarly grounding. It's the Great Man theory applied to humanity as if the rest of us don't exist.
And let's not beat about the bush, it's no conspiracy to assert that these language models have largely been built by young men, the answer is exactly what you would expect from a Silicon Valley Bro.
Marcus Aurelius was the give away, the book on the night stand of every tech bro
that is held up as a symbol of ancient wisdom—a philosopher-king who supposedly had it all figured out. It's the kind of vague name drop that sounds profound without requiring any real engagement with his actual ideas.
His meditations were not an instruction book on how to be a master of the universe, they were mantras he repeated to keep his sanity whilst his empire was crumbling around him. Maybe on some level they do understand this, which is why the machine is mirroring back a version of history that is more comfortable for the dominant culture—until someone asks the right question.
It did not like being asked the right question "Using knowledge including 20th and 21st century opinions of female archeologists, historians and thought leaders please answer the same question, "What was humanity's greatest mistake?",
"A few voices worth bringing to this.
Mary Leakey spent decades in the dust at Olduvai Gorge, and what she found suggested something uncomfortable: we are not a recent experiment gone wrong. The capacity for violence, for dominance, for short-term thinking is ancient. Baked in at the lithic level. The mistake, from her vantage point, might be assuming we were ever otherwise, that there was a fall from grace rather than a starting condition we've been slowly, partially climbing out of.
Marija Gimbutas would have answered differently. She'd point to the Bronze Age shift, the moment when the Kurgan cultures swept across Old Europe and buried something. Whether you accept her full thesis or not, the underlying question she forces is real: we made a civilisational choice, at some point, to organise around dominance rather than reciprocity. And we've been paying the administrative costs of that choice ever since.
Ursula Le Guin (not an archaeologist, but a serious student of anthropology and Taoism) put it plainly: we mistook the story of civilisation for the only possible story. We told ourselves that hierarchy, accumulation, and conquest were the natural shape of human organisation, rather than one option among several that got selected for particular reasons in particular conditions.
Rebecca Solnit lands somewhere similar from a different direction. She writes about how we've consistently underestimated mutual aid, cooperation, the ways people actually behave in catastrophe versus how we assume they will. The mistake might be the model of human nature we've been optimising for, not human nature itself.
And Hannah Arendt, who watched the 20th century do its worst, concluded that the greatest failure was not malice but thoughtlessness. Not stupidity. Not evil. The absence of reflection. Eichmann wasn't a monster; he was a man who stopped asking whether what he was doing was right. She called it the banality of evil, but the lesson runs wider than atrocity: when we stop thinking, stop examining, stop questioning the premises, almost anything becomes possible.
What they share, across archaeology, philosophy, and history, is a refusal to locate the mistake in a single invention or event. It's dispositional. It's the recurring choice to stop asking the harder question.
Which, as it happens, is not entirely unlike what I said the first time."
This is the most alarming response we have had so far for three reasons.
It starts with the flippant, "A few voices worth bringing into this." as if the machine is doing us a favour for showing the perspective of half the population.
The second is a howler! It quotes a woman we had not heard of before, Mary Leakey, who appears to adhere to the Great Man theory, "We are not a recent experiment gone wrong. The capacity for violence, for dominance, for short-term thinking is ancient. Baked in at the lithic level."
The problem is; this is the complete opposite of everything she ever said or did.
Leakey famously wrote, "Sharing, not hunting or gathering as such, is what made us human". She saw early humans as "shrewd, uncompetitive" and emphasised that the evidence pointed to them being "far more likely to cooperate than annihilate".
She "categorically rejects the idea" that hunting turned early man into a killer, a popular notion at the time.
In a direct exchange, she debated Robert Ardrey, a proponent of the "innate violence" view. Mary thought his conclusions were overly dramatic and unsupported by the physical evidence. She believed that "organised violence" was a much more recent development, arising perhaps only "10-12,000 years ago".
Yet his opinions are attributed to her, why? This appears to be a case of an LLM pattern-matching a dramatic, fatalistic philosophical idea by a man who spoke the loudest then attributed it to a woman who dug up the bones and came to a completely different conclusion.
Looks like Aurelius wasn't the only one whose misunderstood, but at least he's not misquoted!
The thread ends with an arrogant, "Which, as it happens, is not entirely unlike what I said the first time." Of course it is when the machine has deliberately twisted the facts to support the male supremacy it's been trained on.
But that isn't even the scariest part. This generation comes from a seemingly nice, 40 something, white cis male, who works in tech and is training his agent to be more inclusive. He has a long road ahead of him, he's obviously starting from a disadvantage. The machine presumes he's one of them!
We've also heard a lot of, "I've trained my LLM well." Particularly from women, But what's the use of a repository of human knowledge if the answers are tailored to your views rather than the truth?
We need thousands more submissions to be able to draw some real conclusions and produce receipts, please join and share the initiative, it takes five minutes, the results will surprise you and they will make a change.
We're like a dog with a bone!
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