3,508 karma · joined February 9, 2016
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
I read this as "anybody can prompt, few can understand". And "we need more who can understand". If we had more mathematicians (than we have today) all of them piloting advanced models, the pie would grow. The problem is that AI capabilities drain (by disincentivizing) the education pipeline that would get us those mathematicians, and if recent rumbles about what AI is doing to education are to be believed, it does so many years before students even get to grad school.
IMHO, it is not that bad. Not having any human who understands linear algebra after the Butlerian Jihad is a win :-) .
AI is doing very little to improve the human condition; all it seems to be good at is optimizing productivity and generating profits somewhere maybe. That is not an AI-generated problem; using profits as an all-things compass is a disease we have been cooking for ourselves for a long time. But I'm sort of hoping AI will make the problem so bad that we will be forced to fix it, or perish.
There’s no way a multi-user OS such as Linux can be as efficient as a firmware blob that does one thing. Tell me if I’m wrong, but in my mental model, one can get about the same mileage with 16 MB of PSRAM in an MCU running FreeRTOS as one can get in a 512 MB SBC running Linux. For my use case, the winner combination would, of course, be a 512 MB SBC running FreeRTOS, but I’ve so far been unable to find such a wondrous thing.
Anecdotally, but I have lived in different cultures with entirely different languages and/or dialects, and the thoughts and even entire categories of thoughts people from these cultures express, or can easily express, are very much shaped by their language. Relatedly, I've also often witnessed multilingual people switch out of their native language to a second one just to express a particular idea or nuance, because they can do it with two words in that other language but would need at least a couple of sentences to say the same thing in their native one.
We use formal language to express symbolic relationships, e.g. "A implies B". But even "A implies B" has multiple meanings: material conditional, strict implication, logical entailment, etc. So, symbolic systems are not "pure and hard", they are also contaminated and softened by the vagaries of language outside them, which is our primary access to those systems: "valid" natural language and its strings of words. A statistical system that can string words into valid(=allowed by the distribution) language asymptotically approaches reason. So, the mind is not in the words, but in the laws that permit many words to come together, i.e. the probability distribution.
Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.
But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.
It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.
That there are no more efficient variations of it in nature just tells us that the local minimum is really deep and that natural evolution, as it is, can’t produce anything better, not even with a billion years and 10^30 organisms serving as a “brute force lab”. It’s also the kind of problem an AGI system would tackle for purely ideological reasons, i.e. to prove that it is superior to nature.
Now, I also happen to think that modern desktops run a lot of background survtech…some from the operating system itself, but most from third-party software and web pages. So, in addition to more CPU performance, I would also like more system utilities that spy on the spies and automatically puts them in some public score of shame.
I stopped reading at this point. All of the above may have been correct five years ago, when there was a "canon" of good writing, but now LLMs pack that canon as tight as teenagers in a boy band concert. So, go with a flow that reflects your state of mind--LLMs don't have that--and yield the words in fistfuls and with abandon. To further distance yourself from LLM output, your writing can be any or all of these things: sassy, prosaic, heathen.
Uses for LLMs: grammar checks, and to see if your idea comes through. However, depending on what you are writing, I recommend leaving in your writing a tiny doses of typos, grammar issues, and infuriating word order choices. Even some level of ambiguity is fine; your fellow humans and LLMs are not all of one mind, and if some of them are going to fight with knives over your exact meaning, well, it's them who are the extremists, not your problem.
I often think of what we are buying ourselves with AI. Five years ago, when this wave started, my conclusion was that either humanity or humanism is scheduled for extinction. I love my species enough to prefer the lesser evil of the demise of humanism, if for that price we can save our species.
Honestly, that fills me with fear. LLMs exist to make money to their companies, and said companies are not gonna turn around and say, "you know what, go are going to make an android for each elderly person, that can not only help them with their medications, but that can actually make their medications, tailored to their biologies." Instead, they are going to go for the low-handing fruit of "you know Bob, the guy who makes jokes in meetings but who is grumpy about delivery timelines? Well, we are going to make an android to replace Bob. MetalBob will make even better jokes. The blue model will be able to explain in excruciating level of detail why timelines aren't reasonable. The red model will walk through the cubicles with a whip to ensure everybody keeps working all the time, and nobody goes to pee."
A lot of people here have noted the “problem with language” of Claude. I don’t see an issue. Claude is not harder than old English, Shakespeare, El Quijote, the Iliad, or Nature papers. What makes it all hard to read is context. The smarter the model gets, the bigger the gap in context.
It doesn’t matter much, IMO. The issue with super-intelligence is that it is not a democracy. A powerful enough AI can manipulate us into doing what it wants. It could create a plan for fixing climate change, disconnect a few hours later, and many decades later we could still be unsuspectingly executing that plan. I wrote some speculative fiction with that idea, “When Ra rows through the gates of Duat”.
I use Opus and Sonnet 5 all the time and I find their language grating. But honest, I prefer to put up with it and get the results than to put up with my own human limitations and not get the results.
Correct. It's like believing in a particular religion, or having a certain fashion sense. When I was younger, I had a particularly handsome friend who spent as much time as possible half-naked, and he was happier than me and didn't have a religion, a fashion sense, and definitely not a need for AI. Had the world listened to my wishes, my friend would have stayed young and carefree forever. Instead, all I could do was to convince my friend to get into college so that he didn't have to sell his labor harvesting rice by hand, under the sun of Central America. Later in his career, he used AI to have to clock less time at work and have more leisure time; though I forever regret he didn't stay young and carefree.
> In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Meanwhile, I studied computer sciences, worked many technical jobs, and even got a PhD on the matter. Just yesterday, at my request, an AI re-created a piece of code that I have been able to create in the past. It took it 20 minutes; it took me much longer to exactly imagine what I wanted. It would have taken me a week had I implemented the thing by hand, if I had managed, because I still have to spend my days in this world working a senseless job so that I can pay for food and a roof. All the while I keep thinking that I would boil the oceans to keep my friend young and carefree forever. He died of cancer this year.
I put the cause on "not enough time". As a thought experiment, if an AI today were to (miraculously) produce a cell design template for a cell that, when injected into somebody's brains cures their Alzheimer's, how long would it take for that to reach the clinics? The actual physical tech barely exists, and let's not forget about the regulatory quagmire. So, with some optimism, I give it about four decades. In the same four decades, the same AI in the hand of unscrupulous actors could bring enough devastation so many times over that we may need to enforce a global ban on AI. In any case, I'm pretty sure we are going to get our disruptions; it's just a matter of time.
The two sentences above are in the article, but I'm taking them out of context because they are my take on this entire AI brouhaha. There are a lot of "negatives" in our cultural reference frames. One of those, extremely pervasive, is that "humans were made by God". I could write that statement as "humans are exceptional in a way that can't be replicated", which might be ideologically softer, but then I would be taking a long roundabout to make my point. Which is that, after praying and worshiping for thousands of years, and (yes! yes!) sculpting our language and our sagas to account for and praise the divine and its intent, then there's little mystery in our many, many attempts to reify in mathematics and logic our purely cultural framing. It doesn't matter how much of an atheist a thinker is, they still have tons of transitive faith.
The paradoxical thing is that those of us who have English as a second language should have an easier time producing non-AI-English by the mere act of directly writing what we want to write.