"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
cant agree more with this para
A STUDENT often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure.He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus.
Against the tide of doom and gloom I do hold out hope that the infamous star of LLMs will fade once private capital realises that the work of modern society cannot be foisted upon these fumbling, empty-headed verbal firehoses, and that there is ultimately no gold rush, only shovels.
They'll eventually retreat, and though many of us will have willingly relinquished our skills, our sanity, and some of us even our lives already, we will rebuild and (at least for a time) carry on with a renewed appreciation for the work of human thought, and the stories that caution us against powers we did not create, and do not fully comprehend.
I hear you. There’s a good amount of diversity in humanity, I think, and a good amount of dynamics in the ensuing interactions. My fear is that there’s a lot of “good enough is good enough” and consumerism and materialism in humanity. Maybe not everyone, but enough. And that makes for a hungry species. Add large social structures on top, and you amplify the social trends that may be governed by only a small amount of choices or people.
I hope too, but I think I’ve concluded that humanity is just a bit of a headless chicken of a species.
I think on some level there's this crack we're collectively falling into where we're smart enough to articulate the ideas that should shape how the world works - but we're foolish enough, or un-self aware enough to not actually run society correctly. It's the whole "smart but doesn't take their own advice" cliché writ large.
We are slightly a headless chicken, but we're so close to not being that. It's almost an evolutionary liminal space, a paradoxical state of foolish and wise. I have no suggestions for what's to be done if I'm right, though. Just enjoy the ride?
Enjoying the ride is perhaps all we have!
And yea, the liminal space point is very good point, part of the human condition you could say I think. Like I was saying, the potential is there, it seems, but we’re just a bit too reward seeking and lazy, as our evolutionary baggage likely dictates.
The only thing I see changing the balance is categorically longer life. If the average age of all humans at any given time was like 100yrs, that could be a massive addition of calm centerdness.
Robert Anton Wilson's recipe for the betterment of mankind was SMI²LE; space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension. That was back when Trek was new, they'd just gone to the moon, and technology was such a hopeful thing.
Nowadays people seriously bandy theories about higher intelligence being an evolutionary dead end, America now has Space Force and a mainly corporate space industry, and the economics of impoverishing the younger generations for the benefit of boomers has paired with increasing lifespans to create a demographic timebomb in basically every post-industrial society.
All that to say, I don't know if that recipe will suffice anymore. It was rooted in a bygone optimism. The amount of life extension we've already achieved should have convinced the rich to look after the planet better, but they're only interested in rebuilding feudalism. Would it change if they lived 300 years? I doubt it.
End of the day I think it's going to be a pretty big fight to make anything good happen in the 21st century. Or the next.
Totally fair.
Where I was coming from was trying to balance our consumeristic imagination with enough time to get bored by it and value something more.
Even if that’s possible, that longer life would also just feed wealth accumulation and feudalism, as you say, is a point well made.
A bigger question then seems to be whether human nature can handle technological progress. As you imply - tenuous at best!
Something I've come around to in recent weeks is the idea that with every single technology, there is a cost beyond materials and work that comes in the form of de-skilling. We invented writing and lost oral traditions. In this case I'm ruling that as a "good choice", but part of the problem is that it's almost never a conscious choice. Setting aside the high material costs of LLMs, e.g., the de-skill cost is clearer than ever. I hope that the sentiment goes against them because if we do willingly de-skill by accepting this so-called AI into our work, when it inevitably all comes crashing down will enough of us still know how to do without them? That's what I worry about, these days.
We invented writing and lost oral traditions.
Then we reinvented oral traditions through illiteracy and social multimedia. I read an Atlantic article that talked about how we've been living in an oral age for some time now, and it has stuck in my mind ever since.
Even though it's technically written communication, texting, slack, teams chats, and platforms like Twitter have much more in common with oral societies than ones based upon written text
and this leaves out oral platforms such as YouTube, podcasts, and TikTok. Having a debate about something on Twitter is more akin to getting into a verbal spat or an oral debate than it is to long-form letters sent back and forth between two disagreeing parties, or people publishing pieces making arguments in newspapers.
I think it also aligns with the American environment of increasing illiteracy. Some teams messages I receive daily are obviously orally dictated speech to text. My company may be an exception but there is a large emphasis on long meetings where people are forced to regurgitate written communications and parts of documents live.
I apologize a bit because this takes this thread in a completely different direction, but once you realize we live in an oral age it's basically impossible to unsee.
Okay, so I can take onboard the idea that the written word has become an amalgam of speech-to-text bullshit and internet newspeak has eroded the quality and lucidity of our discourse, but the only thing I'd take away from you is that when I speak of an oral tradition, I'm referring to a cultural body of knowledge that is transmitted orally which often involves long group sessions of oratory importantly based on rote memorization. What we do orally in our culture does not compare to the depth and richness and (this is key) the mental faculties that accompany such a cultural tradition.
I agree that it hasn't been going on long enough to be considered a tradition yet, but I think over time it may develop into one
almost out of necessity
because there is no alternative with a functionally illiterate populace. (Besides the seemingly obvious one of educating people back into literacy.)
In the same article, they speculated that LLMs may be the revenge of the written word and may lead to a change. But having to work with LLMs
practically by force
I see it differently.
LLMs allow people routes around reading and writing. They aid illiteracy. They summarize and elaborate almost like a lossy compression or decompression algorithm for the written word. They allow you to take a single sentence and pretend that there was more thought behind it than there truly was, and they digest written language and produce things that allow you to be more comfortably illiterate. Functionally, they're a hack to allow orally oriented people to pretend that they're more literate than they are.
Yeah I like the take that LLMs are a fascist artifact. They reduce language, our most valuable way of connecting with others, solving problems, sharing knowledge, etc. into a thing you pay not to think about and for output that is frequently wrong and cannot know when it's wrong.
Yea.
The writing/reading vs oral one is interesting to me. Obviously we’re both on one side of that transition, and so biased by that experience. And I certainly would like to have been exposed to more of a traditional oral approach to knowledge. But like you I think it’s a reasonable choice on balance because it can naturally complement what came before. Writing can extend the reach of what one can gain access to and memorise and then share and engage with orally. While engaging with a text orally, by speaking it out loud or to an audience while you’re completing the writing process can likely aid the reader quality of the written text. If used correctly I suppose.
The point being that maybe there are technologies which necessarily involve more or more categorical de-skilling than others. And maybe that’s a property of technologies that can be assessed and tracked.
I think the main problem with the technology of writing (combined with the loss of oral traditions) is that now all the knowledge is an object which can be destroyed, rather than a living memory. Arguably this has stopped being so much of a danger with the massively redundant nature of print and digital media, but we've been burned before - library of Alexandia, e.g.
One thing I like about an oral tradition is the inherent communitarian aspect of that medium, the idea that in order to gain knowledge you had to go talk to people and they'd speak it to you, mind-to-mind. Building not just strength in a community upon transmission, but the kind of understanding that comes from having it explained to you by someone who knows you. Learning from strangers and books often falls short of a true mind-meld. And the verbal skills you get from living in an oral tradition are something we can only guess at.
I'm content with written words though. They're some of my favourite things about life, actually.
For sure!
My only addition to the communal dimension you highlight, in line with my previous comment, is that a communitarian dimension can certainly develop around written text. You can get to know someone by their books and writings, and if you’re game to write your thoughts too, they may know you too. Not to mention letters and other more casual written formats.
Mass media, including the internet generally, even before social media, undercuts this dynamic, I think, through a saturation of both our social and content (a word I chose over “information”) bandwidths. A giant pipe of algorithmically curated content doesn’t leave much room for even noticing the author let alone forming a communal bond. Consumerism over conversation, one could say.
Additionally, moving the causal conversational exchanges online likely disincentivises real life communal engagements around written texts, such as book clubs, fan gatherings etc.
Which is all a hand wavy way of speculating that writing before the internet may have been something different than afterward with respect to how eroded the social dimensions of oral traditions have been. Of course there are trade offs again, especially with reach and connectedness. But once doomscrolling became the norm, I feel like a real categorical shift occurred.
Anyhoo, don’t let me chew your ear off! Very much appreciate the chat!
Cheers, yeah. Maybe we just need pen pals. :)