We just subjected the world’s most advanced AI to the world’s most sophisticated test for human maturity.
We call it the Maturing Test.
Could the results transform our world?
Developmental psychologists have demonstrated that a human being grows through a successive progression of increasingly complex stages of meaning-making. These stages of ego/self-identity development can be thought of as coherent structures or patterns of how the “self” of each stage organizes and navigates itself in relation to the world (e.g., think of how the 3 year old self organizes itself and its world versus the 12 year old self versus the 30 year old self, and you’ll begin to appreciate the progression of qualitatively more advanced maturity that occurs). Maturity of a given adult’s ego/self-identity is assessed through language, specifically how they reply to a set of specific sentence prompts, prompts like “A true friend…“, “My mother and I…“, “Rules are…” and a few dozen others.
Using this same method, we just assessed GPT-3, the world’s most advanced sentence-generating Artificial Intelligence, having it complete sentence prompts for the Maturity Assessment Profile developed by Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter. This test and its resulting data has been collected on hundreds of thousands of sentence replies over the course of four decades, and shows that more mature “selves” evidence a growing sophistication, self-awareness, sensitivity and perspectival fluidity as they progress to later, more complex stages of self-development.
So what is the maturity level demonstrated by the world’s most advanced AI?
It is impressive, promising, and thought-provoking — and in this very special discussion we reveal the results and discuss what they mean, where it may go from here, and how this might impact our world.
I’ll be curious to know what you guys think of this piece. I thought it was such a tremendously cool conversation, and just the opening salvo for an ongoing series of discussions. The AI age has already begun, and I think it will be even more disruptive — and have even more evolutionary possibilities — than any other major technological age we’ve experienced. And it increasingly feels like a truly integral theory of mind is our only shot to navigate and make sense of all this.
I think it was a great conversation, I am very glad for it!
What I see in GPT-3 and ChatGPT, is a great tool and I will be exploring how to use it. It has great potential to upgrade many professions, and replace some. People who don’t want to become obsolete, should monitor this very closely and update their stack. I would compare this to using a calculator few decades back. Or a smartphone nowadays it’s quite difficult to live effectively without it - people just expect you to have it and access to the internet and email. I am guessing that by not using AI, you will become obsolete. Like people who studied language and used to translate everything, are now only correcting the AI translations and are expected to be paid less.
So I challenge everyone, keep an eye on this one, and keep your toolkit updated!
I would like to see the ‘Maturing Test’ done by the leaders of the WEF, Bill Gates, etc., and the leaders of the world governments and the UN, including the WHO, that they seem to be so heavily influencing.
How mature do you think these people are?
Are they the red and amber people who seem to be winning on the world stage?
Everyone seems to be going nuts over GPT3 right now but this is the first and only in-depth analysis I’ve seen of its broader implications. Amazing conversation, and perspective! Thank you, Corey, Robb and Susanne.