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Comment by sim04ful | Hacker News Reader

Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ?

Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ?

Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

What say the 1% ?

Just a thought.

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There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube, even if there was no doubt that humanity would in this way survive until the sun expands and makes the earth uninhabitable.

> There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube

Even in a hypothetical world where AGI can do everything that humans do better, this would still be a choice to make, not an inevitable consequence for everyone.

And life doesn't require suffering to have meaning.

Huh? Why bring up suffering? I was responding to the question of “Why is it a problem if people don’t understand things?” .

I was saying that human pursuit of understanding of things provides value beyond survival and resources.

Joint pursuit of a common goal is a way for people to better be-in-relation-with one-another.

You can still pursue understanding of things, full automation doesn't preclude that.

What it does is make it a choice rather than a survival necessity. The latter is where the "suffering" comes from.

> Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

I'd argue that this extremely extreme scenario is the only one in which it kind of makes sense to not have understanding. But let's be honest: no one knows if we'll be there (and it seems unlikely since everything reaches a plateau eventually). So, what happens if we allow ourselves to forget everything and then we don't reach the ideal scenario?

Whole civilizations fell when people forgot how to do important things

I grew up in a cult. Based on my experience, I believe that the most dangerous thing a human can do is to allow someone else to do their thinking for them.

It’s not going to be ubiquitous? There hasn’t been a single frontier model where generation n costs less than generation n-1 to run. So the reasonable thing is to assume that GPT-7 will cost even more than GPT-6, and more and more of the frontier of knowledge will be locked behind a giant paywall. Participating in any field will mean ponying up to the oligarchs that own the infrastructure that runs the model.

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