Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Destroys Institutions

papers.ssrn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#31

Post by terminalshort »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

In most cases those people are members of the upper class who hold credentials issued by those institutions, and often are in professions protected by state enforced cartels where the ticket for entry is one of said credentials.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#32

Post by __loam »

terminalshort wrote: post #24

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

Enough people have gotten owned for using these things in court that I think the more likely response is laughing at the ignorance then feeling threatened.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#33

Post by terminalshort »

dgb23 wrote: post #19
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success. Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that. What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the in…

Martin Luther was clergy, but he was absolutely not "the same clergy."

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#34

Post by rfv6723 »

raincole wrote: post #28
rfv6723 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge. The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing…

> Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM. If you actually ask them, I bet…

You've mistaken the battlefield. This isn't about descriptive grammar. It's about the decades-long dominance of Chomsky's entire philosophy of language.

His central argument has always been that language is too complex and nuanced to be learned simply from exposure. Therefore, he concluded, humans must possess an innate, pre-wired "language organ"—a Universal Grammar.

LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise. They prove that with a vast enough dataset, complex linguistic structure can be mastered through statistical pattern recognition alone.

The panic from Chomsky and his acolytes isn't that of a humble linguist. It is the fury of a high priest watching a machine commit the ultimate heresy: achieving linguistic mastery without needing his innate, god-given grammar.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#35

Post by hojofpodge »

phoe-krk wrote: post #10
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.

The current bubble's effect on hardware is alarming but if they think they are going to create a permanent economic manipulation they are deluded. The US' hold on controls is eroding at a faster rate and China will be making good enough all the faster if its price/spec ratio is absurdly high.

Crypto currency makers can have artificial limits but no amount of limiting gpt-next access is cutting access to good enough.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#36

Post by terminalshort »

phoe-krk wrote: post #10
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.

Better that I'm forced to rent an LLM from a tech monopolist for a few dollars than be forced to hire a member of the lawyers cartel for $500 an hour.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#37

Post by DannyBee »

terminalshort wrote: post #24

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

Care to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush?

I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start?

I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken their classes :)

Also, this is an op-ed, not a science paper. Which you'd know if you had bothered to read it at all.

You say elsewhere you didn't bother to read anything other than the abstract, because "you didn't need to", so besides being a totally uninformed opinion, complaining about something else being speculation when you are literally speculating on the contents of the paper is pretty ironic.

I also find it amazingly humorous given that Jessica's previous papers on IP has been celebrated by HN, in part because she roughly believes copyright/patents as they currently exist are all glorified BS that doesn't help anything, and has written many papers as to why :)

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#38

Post by mawadev »

rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

I think this could be applied to most fields where LLMs move in. Let's take the field we are probably most familiar with.

Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.

In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.

In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.

If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#39

Post by __0x01 »

terminalshort wrote: post #24

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

> This is nothing but speculation

Did you read the paper?

Post reply on HN