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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#101

Post by senordevnyc »

wcfrobert wrote: post #92
curl-up wrote: post #31

> 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 think the article is getting at the fact that in a post-AGI world, human skill is a depreciating asset. This is terrifying because we exchange our physical and mental labor for money. Consider this: why would a company hire me if - with enough GPU and capital - they can copy-and-paste 1,000 of AI agents much smarter to do the work? With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless. While I'm g…

This is only terrifying because of how we’ve structured society. There’s a version of the trajectory we’re on that leads to a post-scarcity society. I’m not sure we can pull that off as a species, but even if we can, it’s going to be a bumpy road.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#102

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

spinach wrote: post #28

I've had the same experience but with drawing. What's the point when AI can generate perfect finished pieces in seconds? Why put all that effort in to learning and drawing something. It's always been hard for me but it used to feel worth it for the finished piece, but now you can bring a piece of computer art into being with a simple word prompt. I still create, I just use physical materials like clay and such, to ma…

AI won't create something perfect or even better. And to the extent we enjoy creating for its own sake that's still there. But it's true that real creators will have a harder time being seen by others when there's an ocean of slop being shoved down our throats by parties with endless budgets.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#103

Post by quantadev »

hooverd wrote: post #88
quantadev wrote: post #67

There's quite a dichotomy going on in software development. With AI, we can all create much more than we ever could before, and make it much better and even in much less time, but what we've lost is the sense of pride that comes with the act of creating/coding, because nowadays: 1) If you wrote most of it yourself then you failed to adequately utilize AI Coding agents and yet... 2) If AI wrote most of it, then there'…

Maybe, but will anyone understand what they are creating?

Right. In the near term, I'm predicting a dramatic decline in software quality, because code was never understood and tested properly. In the future we will have better processes, and better ways of letting AI do it's own checking/validation, but that's lagging right now.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#104

Post by hooverd »

quantadev wrote: post #103
hooverd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but will anyone understand what they are creating?

Right. In the near term, I'm predicting a dramatic decline in software quality, because code was never understood and tested properly. In the future we will have better processes, and better ways of letting AI do it's own checking/validation, but that's lagging right now.

It'll be interesting to see a society where there's a big negative incentive to actually sitting down and understanding how things work, in the name of efficiency.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#105

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

senordevnyc wrote: post #101
wcfrobert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article is getting at the fact that in a post-AGI world, human skill is a depreciating asset. This is terrifying because we exchange our physical and mental labor for money. Consider this: why would a company hire me if - with enough GPU and capital - they can copy-and-paste 1,000 of AI agents much smarter to do the work? With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless. While I'm g…

This is only terrifying because of how we’ve structured society. There’s a version of the trajectory we’re on that leads to a post-scarcity society. I’m not sure we can pull that off as a species, but even if we can, it’s going to be a bumpy road.

the barrier to that version of the trajectory is that "we" haven't structured society. what structure exists, exists as a result of capital extracting as much wealth from labor as labor will allow (often by dividing class interests among labor).

agreed on the bumpy road - i don't see how we'll reach a post-scarcity society unless there is an intentional restructuring (which, many people think, would require a pretty violent paradigm shift).

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#107

Post by 9dev »

wcfrobert wrote: post #92
curl-up wrote: post #31

> 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 think the article is getting at the fact that in a post-AGI world, human skill is a depreciating asset. This is terrifying because we exchange our physical and mental labor for money. Consider this: why would a company hire me if - with enough GPU and capital - they can copy-and-paste 1,000 of AI agents much smarter to do the work? With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless. While I'm g…

That seems like a very narrow perspective. For one, it is neither clear we will end up with AGI at all—we could have reached or soon reach a plateau with the possibilities of the LLM technology—or whether it’ll work like what you’re describing; the energy requirements might not be feasible, for example, or usage is so expensive it’s just not worth applying it to every mundane task under the sun, like writing CRUD apps in Python. We know how to build flying cars, technically, but it’s just not economically sustainable to use them. And finally, you never know what niches are going to be freed up or created by the ominous AGI machines appearing on the stage.

I wouldn’t worry too much yet.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#108

Post by harrison_clarke »

steamrolled wrote: post #39
jebarker wrote: post #17

> nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by default. Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of your thought…

More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same. It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the pl…

a fun thing about having a high-dimensional fitness function is that it's pretty easy to not be strictly worse than anyone

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#109

Post by iamwil »

OP said something similar about writing blog posts when he found himself doing twitter a lot, back in 2013. So whatever he did to cope with tweeting, he can do the same with LLMs, since it seems like he's been writing a lot of blog posts since.

> I’ve been thinking about this damn essay for about a year, but I haven’t written it because Twitter is so much easier than writing, and I have been enormously tempted to just tweet it, so instead of not writing anything, I’m just going to write about what I would have written if Twitter didn’t destroy my desire to write by making things so easy to share.

and

> But here’s the worst thing about Twitter, and the thing that may have permanently destroyed my mind: I find myself walking down the street, and every fucking thing I think about, I also think, “How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people would favorite or retweet?”

https://dcurt.is/what-i-would-have-written

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#110

Post by avaika »

don_neufeld wrote: post #3

Completely agree. From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive. I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer. Lest you wonder “what does this gu…

This reminds me how back in my school days I was not allowed to use the internet to prepare research on some random topics (e g. history essay). It was the late 90s when the internet started to spread. Anyway teachers forced us to use offline libraries only.

Later in the university I was studying engineering. And we were forced to prepare all the technical drawings manually in the first year of study. Like literally with pencil and ruler. Even though computer graphics were widely used and we're de facto standard.

Personally I don't believe hardcore ban will help with any sort of thing. It won't stop the progress either. It's much better to help people learn how to use things instead of forcing them to deal with "old school" stuff only.

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