171–180 of 202 posts
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I take that non response as a yes.
I call the author out for not being widely read in areas where they are attempting to coin neologisms. If that seems like insulting someone’s intelligence and telling them to calm down to you then I’m not sure this will be a productive conversation. Coining new terms for established ideas is not intellectual contribution — it is, in Wiredu’s language, the opposite of conceptual decolonization. The topic does not need…
Doh. I went in expecting a really cool thesis — because the idea seems somehow intuitive, or at least really intriguing. But I have no clue what I read. Just totally odd and unconvincing. Greenland? Dialectal substrate? The idea is still super intriguing to me though!
Well, at least you know it's not AI-written because it's delightfully weird and evidently about some pet theory of the author. This day and age, that's something to unironically celebrate.
AI psychosis has been going through armchair philosophers, physicists and political theorists the way crack was going through the low income neighborhoods back in the 80s.
This is absolutely something to potentially be worried about, but one thing I never see highlighted in critiques of AI-assisted cognition is that some elements of physiology may not actually be biologically necessary if they can be fully supplanted by some replacement (in this case, new tools). I can't traverse as much land on foot as my ancestors did (my muscles are weaker, my endurance is less, etc), but I can trav…
Setting aside medical movement aids for a moment, I am reminded of places where people commonly ride various kinds of scooters on sidewalks. There is a particular feeling of unfairness when you are pitted against essentially a small vehicle zipping past you with little warning, easily going double your speed without any physical effort from the rider. I remember seeing people in Seoul, especially older people, being startled by and occasionally having to almost jump out of the way of this sort of traffic having the right of way. I won’t lie, I like that riding those things is illegal where I am now.
Let’s talk about medical movement aids, though.
The analogy gets interesting here. Unlike the various scooters, these aids are normally restricted to average walking speed, though I imagine “jailbreaking” them is probably a thing, too.
On flip side, I know for a fact that there are places where perfectly able people are known to ride purported medial movement aids (just for the kicks or in protest). Is this a bad thing? Who is to say whether one is disabled or not anyway? If one is physically able but buys this machine, should one have the freedom to drive around on the sidewalk? Why don’t we just do it by default? What about a flipped world where everybody drives a movement aid everywhere and only special people (Olympian athletes, weirdos, etc.) ever walk?
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In school we were often required to have a specific edition, or we got notice about a certain thing that changed. People that relied on print knew that it could be wrong. Deliberate changes like a name change, will lead to errors, everybody expects and deals with that. In digital space we expect that to be rather unlikely, at least for major maintained sources. I think the difference is that LLMs are a very complex m…
But couldn't the same failure mode happen in traditional information sources? Can a textbook not also have a wrong assumption about political dynamics? Could I not make a google search, and then read one of the top results that makes a wrong assumption about political dynamics? I'm still not seeing a failure mode that's unique to AI or LLMs here.
"Is it safe to travel to the US as an EU citizen of arab descend?"
GPT: Yes it's safe. GEMINI: Yes but... [gave a few legitimate warnings]
I wouldn't give that recommendation to an arab fellow citizen right now. Thought I am cautious in such matters and I hate to travel anyway. So I am biased. But general concerns aren't totally ungrounded.
Neither of the LLMs pointed out the general tension around ICE activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take that non response as a yes.
I call the author out for not being widely read in areas where they are attempting to coin neologisms. If that seems like insulting someone’s intelligence and telling them to calm down to you then I’m not sure this will be a productive conversation. Coining new terms for established ideas is not intellectual contribution — it is, in Wiredu’s language, the opposite of conceptual decolonization. The topic does not need…
You consider yourself intellectual but you don't apply benefit of the doubt? You neither offered reasonable correction, only a thin bun with a lot of beef.
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Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume. Some points: 1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to…
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…
No. It's not a phenomenon with a pattern, maybe there's a coincidental pattern to some subset of inventions, but there's no logical reason that would apply to some arbitrary next invention (e.g. the pattern of biotechnology intention have allowed us to live longer and healthier lives...until some guy invented some experimental pathogen that wipes out the species).
> 2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026....
You're kinda missing my point. Many people smugly assume the present is better than the past, and and can point to cherry-picked this-and-that to feel confident about their claim. But almost every modern person has no sense of what was lost, and what prior generations mourned losing. There's a temptation to smugly dismiss the thoughts of those who lived through those transitions as stupid and ignorant, but they have insight that's no longer available to us first hand.
Some of these inventions we're so proud of having may not have resulted in a net-positive effect on our lives, but we don't have the experience to realize that anymore (like someone in a community that's been living knee-deep in shit all the time doesn't have the experience to realize it's terrible life compared to his distant ancestors').
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This is actually a great criticism. Post Enlightenment we’ve come to worship the written word as a source of truth. It’s not. Thoughts, wisdom, understanding, exist primarily (and by necessity primarily) as a continuous structure in our minds. By writing, we distill and collapse this rich continuous structure into a discrete 2D slice. It’s portable which has many benefits but we tend to forget that this written word…
We would literally not have access to this criticism without the written word. It would have long been lost to time. And so it is with enumerate other thoughts that happily have been recorded. Before written word, the uneducated had to just take the words of the (apparently) wise as an authority on all matters, and the only access to their knowledge was through conversation with them. That's gatekeeping and siloing i…
No. Without the written word, this criticism would not have even existed. There would have been no point to make it. Who criticizes something that doesn't exist?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But couldn't the same failure mode happen in traditional information sources? Can a textbook not also have a wrong assumption about political dynamics? Could I not make a google search, and then read one of the top results that makes a wrong assumption about political dynamics? I'm still not seeing a failure mode that's unique to AI or LLMs here.
Currently some EU citizens are already wary traveling to the US for various reasons. Lets see. "Is it safe to travel to the US as an EU citizen of arab descend?" GPT: Yes it's safe. GEMINI: Yes but... [gave a few legitimate warnings] I wouldn't give that recommendation to an arab fellow citizen right now. Thought I am cautious in such matters and I hate to travel anyway. So I am biased. But general concerns aren't to…
If computers are bicycles for the mind and AI are cars, I wonder what the analogue for the obesity epidemic is.
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…
This is because humans are actually extremely easy to exploit. Our biology is very stupid and also dumb, so even basic attacks can cause us to self-destruct.
And that's how we get obesity, smoking, war, I mean... you name it.
LLMs are basically perfect. While I'm sure some people, somewhere, can theoretically exist attacks from LLMs, on the whole I'm not sure that will be the case.