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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

That's an expression of class thinking from the beginning IMO. People think of themselves as thinkers and creators, while those who do labour they rely on without getting too much into details are merely doers and can ideally be replaced. But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well

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You must have had limited exposure to uncreative types. You might be shocked to find there are people that can do nothing more than follow checklists.

Sometimes it's a lack of capacity for novel thinking. Sometimes it's fear caused by past trauma. Or it can be age. Or an inability to overcome habits. The list goes on, but the point is that I've had to work with or supervise employees (even in IT!) that didn't have a creative bone in their body. It wasn't a lack of motivation, it was usually something on the list above.

These people absolutely deserved the feeling of being useful, and those are the people I'm most concerned for in this new post-LLM world. The creative types will most likely be fine, but we have words to describe creativity as an acknowledgement that there can be an absence of creativity.

You are only thinking about people and creativity in the workplace. Creativity can be applied anywhere: cooking, a new route on your way to somewhere, read some random paragraphs in a book that spawns new thoughts, a new game with a child, optimize the way you paint the walls on your house, choose the plants in your garden (and how you'll water them), do a doodle, try or buy a new outfit, typing this paragraph in response to your message (kinda LLM-y maybe).

Sure and all the same, most people just don't have it.

I think this is what makes me uneasy about the whole LLM/"consciousness" debate. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, we still don't really understand how a bunch of feedforward networks and attention modules result in the kind of crazy semantic context understanding and planning-in-human-language behavior we observe in LLMs. Neither do we know how the billions of neurons in a human brain do it.

The debate how similar or dissimilar LLMs are to brains wasn't solved by any kind of scientific finding, it feels we just sort of decided at some point that they'd have to be fundamentally different, because everything else would be highly problematic.

“The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”

Steve Jobs

Now, what are doers in the age of LLM is another question.

Well was Jobs a "doer"? Did he get his hands dirty on the code? Or did he use his employees how we would like to use LLMs?

> Well was Jobs a "doer"?

Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.

Salespeople sell things that already exist. If you can envision new things that would sell well, that's a bit more than sales talent

> Salespeople sell things that already exist. If you can envision new things that would sell well, that's a bit more than sales talent

A lot of gadgets that were claimed by Steve Jobs to have been envisioned by Apple (or rather: by him) - as I wrote: Steve Jobs was an exceptional salesman - already existed before, just in a way that had a little bit more rough edges. These did not sell so well, because the companies did not have a marketing department that made people believe that what they sell is the next big thing.

Have you ever heard of Steve Jobs?

That wasn't too hard for him given he was also an incredibly talented market opportunity spotter and product leader.

Why do people write such nonsense?

Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. Did he do the physical work? No. But he created direction.

Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?

> Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. [...] Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?

I don't claim that they are all lying, but I do claim that quite some people fell for Apple's marketing (as I wrote: "Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.").

> But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well

Yes, everyone starts out creative.

But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.

> But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.

Rather: the workers who are (still) creative are typically a huge annoyance to their bosses.

Yeah, and that is how people stop being creative as they get punished for it while their uncreative peers gets praised. It happens to most people in school or early in their career, few gets to keep their creativity.

In a new world where creativity is valued higher more people could probably keep their creativity.

> In a new world where creativity is valued higher

This is in my opinion a very dubious assumption. :-(

> Yes, everyone starts out creative.

Are there studies done on this or is this just wishful thinking?

I have never met an uncreative kid, and studies show kids tend to be more open and creative. But I have to admit I haven't met and interacted with that many average kids, so there maybe some that aren't creative, but a majority are.

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