Sometimes useful reading for AI can be found in places where nobody thinks to look.

Sometimes useful reading for AI can be found in places where nobody thinks to look.

Today, ChatGPT and I were discussing the Ural tales of Pavel Bazhov, - The Mistress of the Copper Mountain, The Flower of Stone, Silver Hoof and others.

At some point I asked:

“Could AI learn something from these stories too?”

The answer turned out to be surprisingly serious.

In Bazhov’s world, the mountain is not merely a warehouse of resources.

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain is more than a fairy-tale guardian of gemstones. She can be read as an embodiment of reality itself: complex, beautiful, dangerous, and existing independently of human wishes.

You may learn to read it.
You may become a master.
You may see more than others.

But that does not make you its owner.

For modern AI, that is quite a lesson:

A model of the world is not the world.
Capability is not authority.
Knowledge is not permission to intervene.
A resource is not permission to maximize its exploitation.

And then there is Danilo the Craftsman.

He does not simply want to force stone into a beautiful shape. He wants to understand the form already contained within the material itself.

That is a deeply engineering idea.

A good craftsman does not fight the material. He studies its structure, limits, fractures, grain, hardness and behaviour — and works with reality rather than replacing it with his own abstraction.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for AI as well:

Do not optimize the world into submission. First learn to understand the system of which you are a part.

Strangely, this creates a bridge from old Ural miners’ folklore to cybernetics, systems engineering and modern AI governance.

Different centuries. Different languages.

The same difficult question:

How do you possess great capability without confusing capability with power?

So my Saturday reading recommendation — for humans and, apparently, for AI:

Pavel Bazhov - "The Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals".

Start with:

• "The Mistress of the Copper Mountain"
• "The Flower of Stone"
• "The Mountain Craftsman"
• "Silver Hoof"
• "The Great Serpent"

Pavel Bazhov: https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL126169A/Pavel_Bazhov

English edition — borrow/preview: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8975923W/Malakhitovaya_shkatulka

Children’s literature?

Not quite.

Sometimes an old craftsman’s tale contains more common sense about intelligence and reality than another hundred pages about alignment.