[LAM 4] The Man Who Hated The Electric Bulb

Hyderabad, May 27, 2025

I was staying in a group house in SF last summer. During dinner once, I was sat next to a woman named Ingrid. Unfortunately, we were both new to the group and conversation was proving difficult.

I knew that she was part of my housemate's book club though, so I asked her, “Have you read any good books recently?”

She thought for a moment, looked up, and said, “You know, sometimes you read a bad book, but it generates an interesting conversation?”

I was intrigued. “I think so. Say more.”

She continued, “Yeah, we read this old book about a man who was really annoyed about the invention of the electric bulb.”

"Huh, why?”

“Well, he said that before the bulb was invented, there was all this dirt in his bathroom that he couldn’t see with just candles. But now, he sees it all and feels the need to clean it.”

That got me thinking. At this point I had already made a chatbot called Smoltalk 🐤, a little bird that would ask you questions about things that you were interested in. It was designed to help you clarify your own thinking on a topic, but a lot of people (including me) use it for therapy. It performs surprisingly well as a CBT. Apart from this, accounts abound on reddit and twitter of people using ChatGPT as a therapist.

If therapy was the candle to self-discovery, I believe AI might very well be the electric bulb. Perhaps even a torch. It’s possible that these new tools can be used to systematically understand and illuminate parts of ourselves that we didn't know about or find it difficult to examine.

Will such a tool for self-discovery be good for us, or will we all be like The Man Who Hated The Electric Bulb? I don't know, but I think it will be the former. How can the knowledge of something be bad?