AI and the Risk of Mistaking Information for Understanding

Bitcoin.com News frames a discussion of artificial intelligence around the risk of confusing access to information with genuine understanding.

The article invokes a warning attributed to Stephen Hawking: misplaced confidence in what we know can be a greater obstacle to learning than ignorance. It notes that the idea is also commonly credited to historian Daniel Boorstin.

As background, the piece cites a 2002 Yale study by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, which found that people often rate their understanding of everyday mechanisms more highly than their explanations justify. That research predates today's generative AI tools.