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Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

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Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#61

Post by glaslong »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #51

"The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true." - Jean Baudrillard Aligned with the theory of Bullshit Jobs - LLMs expose the fact that the white collar work most of us have been doing at this point were actually bullshit. When LLMs "fake" work, it actually hides the reality that there was no meaningful work here in the first place.

Layers of reading internal docs to synthesize new docs to turn into slides to aggregate into docs, where a different set of people only partially read or understand what they're seeing at any given mutation cycle...... it's all a farce of earnest but ultimately useless Productivity. The LLMs are just making it more obvious.

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#62

Post by matrix87 »

trueno wrote: post #52
vivid242 wrote: post #45

With AI, we‘re cargo-culting understanding. We‘re reproducing the surface of having understood something, but we‘re robbing ourselves the time and effort to truly do it.

i been telling my coworker this who's only use case he can conjure up with AI is simply "im going to give claude snowflake cortex, our integration code, all our documentation, jira tickets and its gonna make everything so much better. we'll be able to ask him anything and get the answer" and he's just lost the plot because there wasn't much of a plot. Sci-fi's infused him with how great it would be to have something…

I feel the exact same way, it helps speed up development a lot (and eliminates a lot of really annoying grunt work). But I see people I work with doing shit with it that doesn't make any sense, e.g. writing 50k lines of code for a "compiler" when it's really just an interpreter under the hood. Like they never take the time to understand the domain more deeply, they just use claude to sling some shit that barely works

> i'm not sure what gap people are trying to close building themselves some proverbial great library here, but i would encourage people to just sit back and trust that their brain is still one of the greatest technologies at their disposal.

Culturally I think this is going to fuck things up significantly. If I take the time to read all of the latest papers in the LLM space, I'm damn well not going to summarize it or document what I've learned for anyone. (Maybe this is why there are not many high quality books aggregating all of this information in all the latest papers, all of the advancements, etc. All the people doing this work would rather (smartly) milk the cash cow and maintain the information asymmetry.)

Or think about open source, this will kill it for people trying to make money off a product and keep it open source. Because someone could spin up a competitor overnight.

AI is going to make the information easier to acquire for cheap. But it's going to absolutely destroy the incentive structure and trust required to have an open exchange of information. It was already bad enough because the industry is not incentivized to produce quality literature for educational purposes like academia is. But after this, it'll be a complete shit show

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#63

Post by ornornor »

bensyverson wrote: post #10

The article asserts that the quality of human knowledge work was easier to judge based on proxy measures such as typos and errors, and that the lack of such "tells" in AI poses a problem. I don't know if I agree with either assertion… I've seen plenty of human-generated knowledge work that was factually correct, well-formatted, and extremely low quality on a conceptual level. And AI signatures are now easy for people…

> And AI signatures are now easy for people to recognize. In fact, these turns of phrase aren't just recognizable—they're unmistakable. You might spot these very obvious constructs and still miss 99% of AI generated text because it has no tells. Yet you don’t know that 99% was generated, and since you spot 100% of the pattern you outlined you think no AI generated text makes it past you.

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#64

Post by simianwords »

JackSlateur wrote: post #24
simianwords wrote: post #16

The FUD about LLM's will never get old. The way I know and trust LLM's is the same way a manager would trust their reportees to do good work. For most tasks, the complexity/time required to verify a task is I wrote a post detailing this argument https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verificat...

FUD ? You are missing the point entierly, and so does your blog post Are LLM a good dictionary of synonyms ? Perhaps, but is it relevant ? Not at all Are you biased when a solution is presented to you ? Yes, like all humans. Is it damageful when said solution is brain-dead ? Obsiously. Are you failing to understand that most (if not all) manager's work is human centric and, as such, cannot be applied to a non-human ?…

Are you asking yourself questions and answering them without seeing my point? Yes

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#65

Post by aroman »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #57
hellohello2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can do things on its own, without you understanding them yes. But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI.

> But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI Could not disagree more. The best way to understand something deeply is to practice it. AI is anti-practice. It's like trying to learn something by following a YouTube video step by step. It has an outcome and it feels productive but it's not going to stick in your head at all. It's not practice

I would say a better analogy is using Google… you can use it as a tool to seek information and deepen your understanding. But it requires your brain to be engaged and to be putting that stream of knowledge into practice.

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#66

Post by yobbo »

bensyverson wrote: post #10

The article asserts that the quality of human knowledge work was easier to judge based on proxy measures such as typos and errors, and that the lack of such "tells" in AI poses a problem. I don't know if I agree with either assertion… I've seen plenty of human-generated knowledge work that was factually correct, well-formatted, and extremely low quality on a conceptual level. And AI signatures are now easy for people…

> I don't know if I agree with either assertion…

Yes, I don't think this matters. Much of "knowledge work" was always a proxy for something else.

High quality in terms of typos and errors is mainly a signal of respect in a similar way to wearing ironed white shirts with neck-ties. "Walls of text" that no one is expected to read in depth. Basically a symbolic demonstration of sacrifice and subservience (or something). LLMs remove this mode of signalling.

If quality of content wasn't examined before, it was probably never particularly important.

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#67

Post by loa_in_ »

What if subatomic particles are actually whole universes, and their properties are a reflection of... what kind of peoples dominated, conquered their universe, and what kind of automation was left running after them themselves were gone. Some kinds of entropy harvesting automata that perpetually self build and become everything in their spacetime.

We're creating forces bigger than ourselves, and we may reach a point of no return.

Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

#68

Post by somesortofthing »

I find AI code usually looks worse than it actually is. It's overly verbose, confusing, and littered with fallbacks that mean that if something goes wrong it falls through a million layers of try/catch and moves the stack trace somewhere completely unrelated to where the error actually happened, but in terms of the actual functionality it works much better than any similar-looking code written by a human would.
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