AI Destroys Institutions

I have learned one foreign language just by being exposed to it almost daily, by watching movies spoken in that language, without using any additional means, like a dictionary or a grammar (because none were available where I lived; this was before the Internet). However, I have been helped in guessing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the language, not only by seeing what the characters of the movie were doing, correlated to the spoken phrases, but also by the fact that I knew a couple of languages that had many similarities with the language of the movies that I was watching.

In any case, the amount of the spoken language to which I had been exposed for a year or so, until becoming fluent in it, had been many orders of magnitudes less than what is used by a LLM for training.

I do not know whether any innate knowledge of some grammar was involved, but certainly the knowledge of the grammar of other languages had helped tremendously in reducing the need for being exposed to greater amounts of text, because after seeing only a few examples I could guess the generally-applicable grammar rules.

There is no doubt that the way by which a LLM learns is much dumber than how a human learns, which is why this must be compensated by a much bigger amount of training data.

Seeing how the current inefficiency of LLM training has already caused serious problems for a great number of people, who either had to give up on buying various kinds of electronic devices or they had to accept to buy devices of a much worse quality than previously desired and planned, because the prices for DRAM modules and for big SSDs have skyrocketed, due to the hoarding of memory devices by the rich who hope to become richer by using LLMs, I believe that it has been proven beyond doubt that the way how LLMs learn, for now, is not good enough and it is certainly not a positive achievement, as more people have been hurt by it than the people who have benefited from it.

I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but so far the parts of the argument I can pull out are about how Institutions actually work, as in a collection of humans. AI, as it currently stands, interacts with humans themselves in ways that hollow out the kind of behavior we want from institutions.

“ Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control”

An analogy that I find increasingly useful is that of someone using a forklift to lift weights at gym. There is an observable tendency when using LLMs, to cede agency entirely to the machine.

It's like for some reason we thought that like some good percentage of us aren't just tribal worker drones who fundamentally just want fats, sugars, salts, dopamine and seratonin. People actively vote against things like UBI, higher corporate taxes, making utilities public. People actively choose to believe misinformation because it suits their own personal tribal narratives.