Peak Hacker News material
Thoughts on thinking
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Re: Thoughts on thinking
#72> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…
Let's frame it more generously: The reward is based on being able to contribute something novel to the world - not because nobody else can but because it's another contribution to the world's knowledge.
The primary motivation should be wisdom. No one can become wise for you. You don't become any wiser yourself that way. And a machine isn't even capable of being wise.
So while AI might remove the need for human beings to engage in certain practical activities, it cannot eliminate the theoretical, because by definition, theory is done for its own sake, to benefit the person theorizing by leading them to understanding something about the world. AI can perhaps find a beneficial place here in the way books or teachers do, as guides. But in all these cases, you absolutely need to engage with the subject matter yourself to profit from it.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say that the chess players became "purposeless" with Deep Blue, or Go players with Alpha Go?
It's interesting that you name those examples, because Lee Sedol, the all-time great Go player, retired shortly after losing to Alpha Go, saying: "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated... losing to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing... I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired." [1, 2] So for some, yes. It is of course also true that many people derive self…
I am in no way disputing that some people would feel that way because of AI, just as some performing classical musicians felt that way in the advent of the audio recorder.
What I am saying is that (1) I regard this as an unhealthy relationship to creativity (and I accept that this is subjective), and (2) that most people do not feel that way, as can be confirmed by the fact that chess, go, and live music performances are all still very much practiced.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, I just replied to this post recommending the exact opposite: to focus on means vs ends. The post laments how everything is useless when any conceivable "end state" a human can do will be inferior to what LLMs can do. So an honest attention toward the means of how something comes about—the process of the thinking vs the polished great thought—is what life is made of. Another comment talks about hand-made…
I saw that and thought it was an interesting dichotomy. I think a way to square the circle is to recognize that people have different goals at different times. As a person with a family who is not independently wealthy, I care a lot about being economically productive. But I also separately care about the joy of creation. If my goal in making a loaf of bread is economic productivity, I will be happy if I have a robot…
ooh I like this take. We can change the framing. In the frame of one's livelihood we need to be concerned with economic productively, philosophy be damned.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#75[dead]
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#76My thoughts are that it's key that humans know they will still get credit for their contributions.
E.g. imagine it was the case that you could write a blog post, with some insight, in some niche field – but you know that traffic isn't going to get directed to your site. Instead, an LLM will ingest it, and use the material when people ask about the topic, without giving credit. If you know that will happen, it's not a good incentive to write the post in the first place. You might think, "what's the point".
Related to this topic - computers have been superhuman at chess for 2 decades; yet good chess humans still get credit, recognition, and I would guess, satisfaction, from achieving the level they get to. Although, obviously the LLM situation is on a whole other level.
I guess the main (valid) concern is that LLMs get so good at thought that humans just don't come up with ideas as good as them... And can't execute their ideas as well as them... And then what... (Although that doesn't seem to be the case currently.)
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#77> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…
"The fun has been sucked out of the process of preparing food because nothing I make organically can compete with what restaurants/supermarkets already produces—or soon will."
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#78> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…
I don’t think it’s solely the rub in others faces that they can’t create. You hope they learn to as well.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#79My thoughts are that it's key that humans know they will still get credit for their contributions. E.g. imagine it was the case that you could write a blog post, with some insight, in some niche field – but you know that traffic isn't going to get directed to your site. Instead, an LLM will ingest it, and use the material when people ask about the topic, without giving credit. If you know that will happen, it's not a…
> I guess the main (valid) concern is that LLMs get so good at thought
I don't think that's a valid concern, because LLMs can't think. They are generating tokens one at a time. They're calculating the most likely token to appear based on the arrangements of tokens that were seen in their training data. There is no thinking, there is no reasoning. If they they seem like they're doing these things, it's because they are producing text that is based on unknown humans who actually did these things once.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#80Ok, nice article. Now prove an AI didn’t write it.
As a matter of fact I’m starting to have my doubts about the other people writing glowing, longwinded comments on this discussion.