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If computers are bicycles for the mind and AI are cars, I wonder what the analogue for the obesity epidemic is.
If computers are bicycles for the mind and AI are cars, I wonder what the analogue for the obesity epidemic is.
That is a sharp and slightly chilling analogy. If Steve Jobs saw the computer as a tool that amplified human effort (the bicycle), and AI represents a tool that automates that effort entirely (the car), then the "obesity epidemic" of the mind is likely Cognitive Atrophy. - Gemini
LLM tell right there.
> - Gemini
Yes, we already know. I suppose you think posting AI slop in this context is funny. It isn't.
Also, no, the observation is not sharp. You're being gaslighted and having your cock fluffed by a machine.
It is a quirky article but the author, instead of engaging with information sources to understand what important thoughts people have had about these topics, feels the best thing to do is introduce new terms that other terms already exist for. This is basically just inductive bias plus the AI homogenization idea producing a distribution shift. This is what happens in thought-isolation. It isn’t better than educating…
When I read pieces like this all I think is, resistance to change is a helluva drug. I've been working on a project and using LLMs heavily to inform my design decisions. There's already a long list of cases where it has taught me things I wasn't familiar with, alerted me to possibilities I didn't consider, shown me how to do things that I was struggling with. In those cases I ask for references, and it delivers. This…
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1. You can't understand the nuances, but there is a general pattern: new inventions may make us slightly less proficient at specifics, yet more powerful overall 2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute par…
Alternatively he sees that you live in your house alone and feel lonely all the time. Maybe you have a small family and a few friends but it's nothing compared to the tribal life he knows. He sees you spend your day working but rarely get to go outside or do anything active. Even when you're not working you sit behind a desk staring at a screen. He wonders why you bother will all the technology when it made your life…
And yeah, you could make a list of struggles we have today he never did. But that’s kind of my point - it’s complicated.
I'm not sure why this is at the top of the page; it's not that it's wrong, it's just a sequence of truisms.
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While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime). Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pas…
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- None of these are as flexible as writing. They're more expressive, more engaging (arguably, at least to some), and might even be good at succinctly saving certain specific types of knowledge.
Knot systems typically parallel the abacus, having been used for accounting and to keep a record of tax levies. Certainly this isn't the *only* thing they were used for, but this was the case in a number of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, as well as in some Asian civilizations. Certain dances might be good at representing the motions you have to go to while working fields or performing other societal tasks, sure. But a good writing system, in its relative blandness, is incredibly versatile, and can encode not just a wide breadth of information, but also include information about *why* the information is what it is, to the extent that the authors knew.
- I don't understand what you mean by things like "stories with self-correction." In many cultures with an oral tradition, the stories do get distorted because of people misremembering, or through conscious changes in response to social conditions at the time of a retelling; if a 1,000-year-old story with no written record backing it is told today, it's almost certainly not the original story, but the culmination of a thousand years and dozens of generations of sometimes-subtle, sometimes not reinterpretation.
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The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber
the question was rhetorical. but, since you responded – do you think that there are limits to who can or should use ai? if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable? some knowledge is likely "cached" in the plumber. maybe he doesn't ask the same question twice. i'm sympathetic to the plumber, but i think your concerns of erosion of knowledge or skill are worth pushing on further.
I don't think there should be imposed limits, but there might be an upper bound where expertise becomes atrophied by depending on AI too much.
> if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable?
In the short term sure, and maybe even in the long term for the customer. I think the risk to the plumber is losing some of their expertise by outsourcing to AI. But who knows, maybe the plumber has excellent memory and only accumulates knowledge each time they use AI.
Some of the article is lost in the plumber example. I doubt plumbers are spending much time exploring new ways of solving problems, and might even benefit from having a narrower range of outcomes. Other fields that require both expertise and novel solutions will be at a disadvantage if they become more homogenized by depending on AI. Not only is the range of solutions reduced, but getting there is faster, so people end up in a local maxima. Maybe they get stuck there, maybe not, but that's the risk I see.
You don't imagine any long term risks by outsourcing expertise to AI?
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>like, is he allowed to just put in any old toilet, or is there a gpf restriction? And if the LLM gets that wrong? It's his job to know the codes or how to go to a reliable resource to find out the correct codes.
Hopefully he would be using the LLM as an enhanced search engine that can point him to relevant authoritative sources that he can use to fact-check its output. I have done that in the past to some effect.
One thing that's always been true with human communication that is becoming increasingly obvious to me through my interactions with LLMs is the art of asking a good question. The framing of questions massively affects the results you get from discussion with humans, and I'd argue it's even more pronounced with LLMs.
Yep. And this is why as hard as AI companies are pushing that these tools can be a replacement for expertise, it's ironic that the experts are the ones that often get the highest ROI because they know how to converse about the relevant subjects with a high degree of precision (and know what to look for, what to challenge, etc.).