every human generation built upon the slop of the previous one
but we appreciated that, we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"
but we appreciated that, we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"
We do not see nearly so far though.
Because these days we are standing on the shoulders of giants that have been put into a blender and ground down into a slippery pink paste and levelled out to a statistically typical 7.3mm high layer of goo.
I think all we can expect from internet information is a good description of the distribution of materials out there, not truth. This is totally within the capabilities of LLMs. For additional confidence run 3 reports on different models.
Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.
- Sir, this is an elevator.
The industrial age was built on dinosaur slop, and they were giant.
Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
[24] “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. [25] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. [26] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. [27] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Capitalism, freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, democracy: at their best these things are ways to bend the wisdom of the crowds (such as it is) to the benefit of all; and their failures are when crowds are not wise.
The "slop" of capitalism is polluted skies, soil and water, are wage slaves and fast fashion that barely lasts one use, and are the reason why workplace health and safety rules are written in blood. The "slop" of freedom of expression includes dishonest marketing, libel, slander, and propaganda. The "slop" of democracy is populists promising everything to everyone with no way to deliver it all. The "slop" of the marketplace of ideas is every idiot demanding their own un-informed rambling be given the same weight as the considered opinions of experts.
None of these things contributed our social, technological, or economic advancement, they are simply things which happened at the same time.
AI has stuff to contribute, but using it to make an endless feed of mediocrity is not it. The flood of low-effort GenAI stuff filling feeds and drowning signal with noise, as others have said: just give us your prompt.
Why is anybody still surprised that the AI bubble made it that big?
If Einstein came up with relativity by standing on "the religious non-sense and superstitions of the medieval ages," you'd have a point.
They have so many ways of saying "God" without saying God.
You might be missing the point of science.
It's ultimately an endeavor of finding testable descriptions of the world in the face of being fallible. It's not about the "why". It's about "how" the world is. No faith required. "Why" the world is is a philosophical question and perhaps a religious one. But that has nothing to do with testable theories.
Any scientific theory gains credibility by providing ways to test it. Each such experiment that fails to disprove the theory increases confidence in the theory's validity. There is no faith required for any of that and no god either. If you can predict that conditions A and B lead to C happening, and I can try it and see that indeed C is happening, then you have science going on, without any faith.
Scientists only do safe experiments that will 100% verify the findings they are paid to attain.
Nobody will do peers review of whatever study unless its controversial- in which case they will come out of the woodwork to "discover" how correct/not THAT wrong their peers were/are still.
It is nonsense that we consider what comes from such a system to be "knowledge" - Modern science is many things, faithless science validating experimental theory -> that is not a real thing.
- (1) A lot of developing can be just chores around managing scaffolds and repeatable work, and due to this macros, autogenerated code and other tools have been a thing at many layers for a long time; and
- (2) I remember copy-pasting from Google/StackOverflow (i.e. mostly search + pattern matching with some minimal reasoning) being criticized as a low-effort mode of development during the 2010s, before ChatGPT and AI assisted coding tools took over that part.
So yes, I'd argue a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever actually reasoning from first principles, AI tools just made that more visible.