IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
Are humans capable of profound creativity? Of course. Are they actually doing it? No, not very often.
If you find yourself consuming more than 5 minutes of content you don't find thoughtful per day, I would ask why. "Touch grass" seems to be the common advice to combat this.
It's kind of like you hang out in a Buddhist monastery saying, "I don't know what you guys are talking about - people are so peace-loving!"
I didn't know how wide the humanity variance is before I had to go to a government office to exchange identity card (as the old one expires after some years). In the queue, when I looked to my left and right I saw some of the most bizarre people I ever saw. Because they were picked fully randomly just by having their identity documents sort of "off by one" in relation to mine. Humans and their output, when taken representatively are at most tolerable.
Isn’t that just an incorrect interpretation of the descriptive experience sampling tests? The frequency of having inner monologue varies, but I don’t think it was shown that many people have anendophasia.
Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.
The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).
I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.
Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to.
The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity.
This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue.
I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.
What I wanted to say in this post was essentially that I only do deep 'thinking' in a very narrow set of domains. For the rest, I outsource my thinking to the identity of the community I belong to.
Thank you for your kind comment, Redwood. However, commenting on that post would require deep engagement with others, and I'm a bit hesitant to do that.
But I'm in a position that nobody wants as a programmer. Porting code from failed companies to run on different equipment, or building datasets for professors' papers. These things are necessary, but nobody wants to do them.
So even if it means putting myself out there in negative spaces, for me, the exposure itself is beneficial.
That's why this is always a difficult issue. It's a problem where the boundary keeps shifting depending on the situation. You, being a rational person, would understand that problems are always fluid and dynamic.
We tend to simplify problems to conserve cognitive resources, and that's what we call bias. The reason I assume you're a successful man is because of the ease and gentleness in your tone. That's a kind of bias. But in reality, you probably have your own struggles, and there are certainly points where your perspective differs from mine. In some situations, what's right in one context may not be in another. What was correct in the past may no longer be, and vice versa. Yet we always anchor ourselves to a fixed point when we 'think.' That's what makes it so difficult.
I've read your previous comments too, and I find our conversations quite enjoyable. Have a good day.
It’s bad enough for rational reasoned discourse that we anthropomorphise LLMs, let’s please not then feed those words back into human discourse, further diluting their meaning. No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.
> AI is simply an extension of
It may be an extension, but not “simply” as it also creates the problem where it didn’t exist. I’ve seen several reports (both on and offline) of people who used to engage in deep thinking (I’m talking scientists, postgrads, PhDs working at the edge of what we know) now worrying they are losing their ability to properly think due to their LLM use.
> It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
I hope we can agree that’s bad and that we should try to stop and even reverse it, not simply shrug our shoulders and go “ah well, we were already going to shit anyway, might as well fuck everything up faster”.
I don’t know how to put it well, but… Have you ever had a moment where you realized your perception of something was off and things weren’t as you thought they were?
Have you seen people dead sure of something you were positive as nonsense?
I have, ranging from simple small isolated situations to whole worldviews. I have personally held mental models that were broken, but felt consistent and true. I still sure do, just don’t know (hopefully, yet) how they’re mismatching the reality this time.
Call it “delusion” or “hallucination” or “misunderstanding” or something else - it’s still a thing and it happens in language-capable humans and machines alike.
I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation.
You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis
Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
Unknowable. And a callous notion.
everyone is just thinking about how to recall, remix and repeat.