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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

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Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#11

Post by arm32 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

I'm sure this comment will get buried, but I wholeheartedly agree with your take.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#12

Post by tacostakohashi »

bambax wrote: post #4

We always were the only people who ever knew how it worked. In 1990 people fellow students called me to fix their computer, they had absolutely no idea how any of this worked. No. Idea. Yes, the machine was being difficult; but their reaction wasn't to fight it, or understand it. It was to call someone to do it in their stead. I'm not sure things are very different now.

I feel that things are pretty different. Although the example of interrupts and jumper settings being common knowledge is a bit of a stretch... it's still amazing to recall that MS-DOS was regarded as an end-user / consumer OS, and that, more generally, it really was regarded as totally normal to need to invest some time in learning about the system, files, directories, typing, configuring/customizing settings and network options just to be able to do what you wanted to do.

I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#13

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tor0ugh wrote: post #7

It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…

> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.

We could do this forever.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#16

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #12
bambax wrote: post #4

We always were the only people who ever knew how it worked. In 1990 people fellow students called me to fix their computer, they had absolutely no idea how any of this worked. No. Idea. Yes, the machine was being difficult; but their reaction wasn't to fight it, or understand it. It was to call someone to do it in their stead. I'm not sure things are very different now.

I feel that things are pretty different. Although the example of interrupts and jumper settings being common knowledge is a bit of a stretch... it's still amazing to recall that MS-DOS was regarded as an end-user / consumer OS, and that, more generally, it really was regarded as totally normal to need to invest some time in learning about the system, files, directories, typing, configuring/customizing settings and ne…

Compare with what the drivers/operators of the earliest automobiles were expected to know vs. what the same category of people are expected to know today.

There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#17

Post by pram »

"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked.

So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them."

Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#18

Post by Finnucane »

This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#19

Post by Ekaros »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

I can already see future where there is group of people goading AI to right direction by repeatedly changing what they ask slightly. And then memorise the times when you got right incantation for seemingly right outcome. Without actually understanding or being able to reason about process in the middle. Possibly a seemingly inconsequential misspoken word or typo can lead to better or worse outcome. Or maybe just not saying "Please" will sometimes produce wrong output. and other times you must not use it...

Sounds like absolutely horrifying dystopia.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#20

Post by nostrademons »

This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939.

I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.

I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.

It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.

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