I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context.
I thought this was amazing!
But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant.
In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me.
And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast.
If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!
I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:
- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.
- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.
- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.
And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.
I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle bar bets. Once free long distance became a thing, you could justify calling west coast libraries during east coast happy hour, and I had a hand-written list of phone numbers on a piece of folded up yellow legal pad. The LA Central Library seemed to be the most patient with drunk midwestern college students shouting questions about medieval art at them. Now bets are settled before they even really get going, so it doesn't even feel fun to bet on, so people don't.
I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the most recent one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.
As I learned just yesterday, this is exactly how the Guinness World Records books came about. :)
There isn't. This blog post is a great example. There isn't a hint of what you are asserting. You are assuming it out of thin air.
LLMs enable a lot and harm a lot. We should be able to talk about the harm without people assuming we are unaware of the enablement, and vice versa. LLMs are a gigantic topic.
The poem didn’t talk about asking around for info about fly fishing, not finding anyone, but then deciding that was okay and/or finding new interests based on the interests of the people he talked to.
This would have been very in-bounds thematically.
Google Translate provided OCR + translation from smartphones before LLMs became a thing so that doesn't manage to bolster your argument.
There were many benefits of the original web as well. But it rapidly turned into social media and caused us more harm than good.
So many people are very skeptical and guarded about the promises of AI now.
>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are
lol.
To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.
If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.
In another comment[0], I gave a personal example. In a sense you are correct, because I could have taken a year or two to go to the library and find books on reading Cyrillic and speaking Serbian, or maybe found something Duolingo-like (I have to hedge here because neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone offer Serbian, which perhaps challenges your point), or even hired a private tutor.
All of these options sit on some kind of spectrum of ease and cost. If you have enough money, you can get the best help in the least amount of time. If you don't, you have to maximize the time you can put in instead, and both will be constrained by your intellectual capabilities.
One of the primary purposes of technology is to unbundle what consumers actually want from the craft that was previously necessary to deliver it, and in so doing allows us to do more, experience more, be more. That doesn't mean that there are no possible drawbacks, but let's not lose the forest for the trees.
The point was "talk to another human about shared experiences, whatever that may be".