The New Dark Ages
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The New Dark Ages
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: The New Dark Ages
#2> Getting access to a book will be really complicated because there won't be many of them, and they will be reserved for the wealthy.
Do people genuinely believe this?
I don't know how to express my opinion about this without applying ad hominem or violating HN rules.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#3Books will be expensive? Seems unlikely, the expensive part of books is the time and attention needed to read them.
Where is the citation for high government debts causing collapse of society? Sounds as much of a pet theory as anything else without proper citations and evidence.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#4Yep, a next token predictor is comparable to the fall of the roman empire. That makes total sense.
In all seriousness, who upvoted this kind of content? I am not saying that it's impossible for us to be headed anywhere negative in the future (literally who knows where we're going to be in 50-100y) but taking LLMs as the culprit for our society to finally crumble and not even mention the climate crisis shows how little thought has gone into this submission.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#5Books will be expensive? Seems unlikely, the expensive part of books is the time and attention needed to read them. Where is the citation for high government debts causing collapse of society? Sounds as much of a pet theory as anything else without proper citations and evidence.
That's pretty much my impression of the post, too.
It has a spark of profound thought "Generative AI will obscure the path to truth" combined with a lot of conspiracy-theory-grade, flimsy analysis.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#6> Right now, LLMs are a source of truth for many people. We are becoming more and more dependent on them and rewiring ourselves to make use of them instead of reading books or original sources
This is the core thesis of the essay. I have two problems with this statement. I think only a small minority of people reads books or original sources in the first place. The general audience relies on simplified and often wrong generalizations aimed at, well, the general audience. I also don't think researchers are at risk of "rewiring themselves" to rely entirely on LLMs. Science is suffering from an influx of AI slop papers, but it's not that different from all the weak or dishonest research that was being published before. Ultimately, our core academic institutions are designed around minimizing this and incentivizing high-quality intellectual output.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#7Reading a book is an investment, and progressively larger and larger amount of books are not worth it, and, looking back, were never worth it.
For example, Look how the sentiment has changed about Malcolm Gladwell books. They were very popular among people who consider themselves smart, and now are debunked. Personally, I find it hard to read many recent non-fiction books because you clearly see - this is padding, this is filler, that chapter could’ve been edited out and no message would be lost, this is just self advertisement…
Re: The New Dark Ages
#8> Right now, LLMs are a source of truth for many people. We are becoming more and more dependent on them and rewiring ourselves to make use of them instead of reading books or original sources This is the core thesis of the essay. I have two problems with this statement. I think only a small minority of people reads books or original sources in the first place. The general audience relies on simplified and often wron…
Yeah. For 20+ years, for many, the source of truth was like first google result (especially if it supported their opinion).
And let’s face it, with reproducibility crisis, the books aren’t sacred too. Their authors are also people, who also might cherry pick their facts at best and plain lie/invent them at worst.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#9For a serious take on the actual new Dark Age we are currently living in, I'd recommend "The Twilight of American Culture" by Morris Berman. It's no longer about limited access to information. It's about the erosion of cultural values.
Re: The New Dark Ages
#10What if someone distributed contraband rechargeable tablet devices running an offline open source LLM into a knowledge desert where the government limits education, censors information, and blocks the internet to control?