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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#591

Post by lmm »

ahartmetz wrote: post #581
lmm wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a contingent fact about the place and era you live in. Medieval peasants - the majority of people who have ever lived - were not dumbasses, not all of them - but there simply wasn't a way for even the smartest to accumulate long-term wealth. At best you could maybe get your neighbours to owe you a few more favours, and maybe once in a generation if you played every card right there might be a chance for a patr…

Money was useful - not as much as today, sure. But traders and tradespeople existed in the middle ages, so you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house... Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline. I'm a bit sho…

> you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house

You could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourself, buying an implement you couldn't maintain would be setting yourself up for trouble. Increasing your productivity with tools wasn't a huge help because you always had enough labor available to hit severely diminishing returns on the land you owned. And any object of value is always at risk of being seized by the local lord or a passing army or what have you.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#592

Post by botanrice »

my first thought reading this was that Ai might make coding more of an art or tradition. I felt admiration for those of us who still know how to write the now ancient coding languages of yonder.

But then i read this at the end:

> This piece, like most all my words and software, was written by hand—mainly in Vim. I composed a Markdown outline in a mix of headers, bullet points, and prose, then reorganized it in a few passes. With the structure laid out, I rewrote the outline as prose, typeset with Pandoc. I went back to make substantial edits as I wrote, then made two full edit passes on typeset PDFs. For the first I used an iPad and stylus, for the second, the traditional pen and paper, read aloud.

Then you realize the context of this article, who is writing it. No hate to my man here but clearly this is someone who has the desire and time to make things difficult for themselves and take pride it in it. It's needless effort in this day and age. but hey, to his own analogy, plenty of gearheads love their old cars and making em work. Those guys are some of the most knowledgeable, and I respect that, but also.. that same group is gonna hate on any new technology and complain it isn't the old way.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#593

Post by BirAdam »

xienze wrote: post #513
23j423j423hj wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute. The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

And in a public transport-dominant society every neighbor is also someone in your way, taking up a spot at the restaurant you walk to, filling up the subway train and therefore making you late in your commute… There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

Humans are pack animals, not flock or herd. I think going beyond the Dunbar number is possibly the thing making people grumpy in highly dense areas. If people cannot know those around them in a meaningful way, do they even view them as human?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#594

Post by BirAdam »

archagon wrote: post #283
kraquepype wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you. In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car. If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.

It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.

Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#595

Post by [deleted] »

mumbisChungo wrote: post #588

I think it's shortsighted to dismiss the utility of these technologies for learning. I find personally that putting the LLM into an argumentative state then having it challenge my assertions forces me to learn and develop my own thoughts and feelings more effectively than writing does these days, and I find that interrogating a model on a subject can teach me more about the subject per unit time than reading a textbo…

[deleted]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#596

Post by BirAdam »

the_af wrote: post #495
munksbeer wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet. So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who…

> So we reach this post scarcity society A full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it needs most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is. I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed right now , no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight too…

Powerful people like to wield power over others. They want the masses to exist specifically so that they can feel superior and exercise their authority over others. They simply want the masses to be forever below them.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#597

Post by coderenegade »

nehal3m wrote: post #217
prescriptivist wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

I wouldn't be surprised if it contributed significantly because of the lack of (access to) third places [0] it breeds, but that is conjecture on my part, so fair enough. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

If anything, the golden age of third places coincided with the golden age of suburbanization, which was obviously heavily car dependent. Their death almost certainly has more to do with financialization making it harder for small businesses to stay afloat, a drop in demand due to competition for attention, and decreasing work-life balance eroding people's ability to socialize.

In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#598

Post by hackable_sand »

nradov wrote: post #254
spprashant wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of wh…

Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.

Yeah, completely unpredictable

No possible way to know

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#599

Post by infinite8s »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #553
rowanG077 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent did not always have had an edge, all else being equal.

> all else being equal. "Load bearing phrase", as they say. A stupid ass that just keeps pushing on often goes further than a smart ass who gets distracted.

But they might be pushing in the wrong direction.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#600

Post by somewhatgoated »

noosphr wrote: post #558
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

In the same way that numeracy skills were in the blast radius of the Colossus. People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve. A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are. This isn't the end of thinking any more than th…

I don’t know about you but where I live only some rich people ride horses for fun sometimes; they are mostly irrelevant otherwise.
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