Comment by caseyy
21 days ago
I haven't read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, but I think he introduced your second point in that book, in 1964. He claims that the content of each new medium is a previous medium. Video games contain film, film contains theater, theater contains screenplay, screenplay contains literature, literature contains spoken stories, spoken stories contain folklore, and I suppose if one were an anthropologist, they could find more and more chain links in this chain.
It's probably the same in AI — the world needs AI to be chat (or photos, or movies, or search, or an autopilot, or a service provider ...) before it can grow meaningfully beyond. Once people understand neural networks, we can broadly advance to new forms of mass-application machine learning. I am hopeful that that will be the next big leap. If McLuhan is correct, that next big leap will be something that is operable like machine learning, but essentially different.
Here's Marc Andreessen applying it to AI and search on Lex Fridman's podcast: https://youtu.be/-hxeDjAxvJ8?t=160
Why are we comparing LLMs to media? I think media has much more freedom in a creative sense, its end goal is often very open-ended, especially when it's used for artistic purposes.
When it comes to AI, we're trying to replace existing technology with it. We want it to drive a car, write an email, fix a bug etc. That premise is what gives it economic value, since we have a bunch of cars/emails/bugs that need driving/writing/fixing.
Sure, it's interesting to think about other things it could potentially achieve when we think out of the box and find use cases that fit it more, but the "old things" we need to do won't magically go away. So I think we should be careful about such overgeneralizations, especially when they're covertly used to hype the technology and maintain investments.
Media in this case is a plural of medium — something that both contains information and describes its interface.
I think the idea is a bit different than what you describe. New media contains in itself the essence of old media, but it does not necessarily supersede it. For example, we have theater and film.
This “rule” of media doesn’t help us predict how or whether AI will evolve, so it is difficult to relate it to hyping. It is an exclusionary heuristic for future predictions — it helps us exclude unlikely ones. But doesn’t help us come up with any.
I personally am hopeful that AI will evolve into something else that has more essence to it than mere function. But that’s just hope, which is rather less promising than hype.
Oral cultures had theater.