Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Not sure why LLMs feel the opposite. Maybe it's because of the terrible marketing and pushing it down everyone's throats. Maybe it's because of the personality of people like sama, or how it's being used to produce the so-called AI slop globally. Maybe something completely different. But there's something bleak and off-putting in it.
"I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki
On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…
But it has been so frustrating to listen to the hype and then contend with the actual results.
How bizarre is this tool, that I have been forced to conduct interviews across all domains, to see where people are having actual productivity gains?
I never had to do this with the iPhone, or with word, excel or any number of cool technological inventions.
The early internet empowered people, and we created some of our most amazing collaborative intellectual achievements like wikipedia.
Today, aside from being built by harvesting the IP of people, LLMs are shuttering our entire information economy. Sites I go to for info are either going behind paywalls or shutting down because they are being rapaciously harvested by bots.
Yes, history rhymes and repeats; however there are other tunes that have been played that sound similar but end differently.
To my mind, saying the AI will cause me to forget how to learn is equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn.
I see plenty of “classically trained” people (as opposed to self-taught) that have no idea how to learn things on their own and at their pace.
I mean, in the era of youtube and the internet, any subreddit is filled with posts like ‘where do I start with X?’ or a endless rehashing of the same beginner questions from people that are not even able to use Google.
I am biased as a self-taught person that dropped out of high school, and it is baffling to see people have forgot how to learn things by themselves past 10 years old. There wouldn’t be so many people with student debts if that were the case.