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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?

#641

Post by magic_hamster »

These are thoughts of someone who's very good at putting words together, but sadly has little experience with the subject matter.

> I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop.

This is exactly where it shows.

LLMs, agents and whatever comes next are not only the future of tech, but they are going to be national resilience drivers for the countries that will be able to support them with power, water and science.

Who is supposed to stop? The US? China? Russia? Everyone? Of course this won't happen. This is an arms race.

But even if it weren't, stopping is the wrong answer. You don't have to outsource your thinking, writing or reading. How you use LLMs is entirely up to you.

There is a way to use LLMs which is beneficial. I treat them as a private tutor available to me for questions. This solved a lot of friction I had with my relationship with LLMs.

More telling is that the author mainly thinks about their relationship with LLMs while in reality the space has moved on to automation with agents. You don't interact with LLMs as much as before, and if you still do, then soon you won't.

Ahents are not really ML. It's harnesses and parsing and memory and metrics. It's software. Should we stop this as well?

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

#642

Post by wombatpm »

dripdry45 wrote: post #527
DavidPiper wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately: "Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive] Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world…

I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headline…

A proto Torment Matrix so to speak.

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

#643

Post by margalabargala »

nhod wrote: post #639
hackable_sand wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Gender is mutable. Sex is determined by genetics, though in a handful of creatures, sex could be considered mutable.

You're right, but there was an article on here in the last week about genetic therapy correcting Down Syndrome.

I wonder how long before sex does actually become mutable.

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

#644

Post by SkyeCA »

Planktonne wrote: post #519
SkyeCA wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're deliberately misinterpreting terms Using the term "toxic" to describe things is an issue because people have an immediate negative reaction to it and go on the defence. Wording matters a lot and I'm unsure why there's such an insistence on calling things "toxic" when other words would both better describe issues and cause a less visceral reaction.

People deliberately and cynically choose to have that reaction (or pretend to). It's an adjective like any other, not even an inflammatory one.

Most people don't make a conscious decision in how they react to something emotionally, it just happens. If you want people to take what you say seriously you have to consider the PR side of things.

> not even an inflammatory one

I don't know how you can seriously claim this.

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

#645

Post by keeda »

chungusamongus wrote: post #20

Complaining about AI slop is starting to become its own kind of slop. There isn't anything novel in this little essay. It might as well have been written by AI because I've seen this type of dude complain about this exact type of thing countless times at this point, and none of them have a solution other than empty moralizing or call your representative or whatever. None of that’s going to work. Fortune, Gizmodo, The…

They're not looking for solutions, they're capitalizing on the AI backlash. It's just the new form of rageviews.

The only saving grace is that this is less cynical than typical rageviews, considering they have something of a point in that they are going to be negatively impacted by the same technology that has been trained on their content without compensation.

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

#646

Post by dalyons »

munificent wrote: post #472
abricq wrote: post #70

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

I feel for you deeply. I’m equally fearful of this for my children, but one small blessing of my kids being very young is at least the ambiguity will probably be over by the time they have to decide. I don’t expect there to be good choices, but at least it will be clear?

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

#647

Post by s5300 »

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.

[dead]

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

#648

Post by ghaff »

metabagel wrote: post #628
realo wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... 19th century engineer could have a large multi-story brownstone with family and , more importantly, servants and house personnel. A butler, etc... Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

I think that could be true for some engineers. I'm skeptical it was true for the majority.

"Famous" engineers--probably. I doubt the person taking care of the steam engines lived in a fancy house. I'd much more expect the steamship owners and captains to live in that sort of property.

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

#649

Post by orangecoffee »

camgunz wrote: post #256

We should consider how we came to be so powerless. The cringe "people gave their lives for that flag" line is actually true, and we're trading it away for what? Not having to get out of our gaming chairs? The reason you can't beat index funds is the people who build the market built a system that benefits them and them alone; the index fund is the pitchfork dividend (what you pay to avoid getting pitchforked). The re…

Noble thought, but words are empty. Have you perchance written up anything specific?

The only one who's written thus is Marx, but those ideas has not found broad socital support.

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

#650

Post by KPGv2 »

munificent wrote: post #456
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…

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills. You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

We're all hand-waving away the fact that there is no un-claimed farmland in the US. It's all owned already. You can't invent your way into possessing farmland. You will have to buy it from someone who no longer has any willingneess to sell it, unless you get lucky and find a dying person with no friends or family. If all we have is farming, no one would part with the land, as it's a valuable, vital resource.

None of this Jack inherits but wants to live in the big city and be an architect. He'll inherit and keep because there is no architecture job to be had.

As someone who grew up on a farm, "you may be a farmer but you could be a productive one" is so intensely depressing. Farming is a shitty job that requires insane amounts of back-breaking labor, never-ending toil, and all this at a time when climate change is going to utterly fuck over farmland and destroy crop yields.

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