Comment by collingreen
3 days ago
I like your take and the metaphors are good at helping demonstrate by example.
One caveat I wonder about is how this kind of constant context switching combines with the need to think deeply (and defensively with non humans). My gut says I'd struggle at also being the brain at the end of the day instead of just the director/conductor.
I've actively paired with multiple people at once before because of a time crunch (and with a really solid team). It was, to this day, the most fun AND productive "I" have ever been and what you're pitching aligns somewhat with that. HOWEVER, the two people who were driving the keyboards were substantially better engineers than me (and faster thinkers) so the burden of "is this right" was not on me in the way it is when using LLMs.
I don't have any answers here - I see the vision you're pitching and it's a very very powerful one I hope is or becomes possible for me without it just becoming a way to burn out faster by being responsible for the deep understanding without the time to grok it.
> I've actively paired with multiple people at once
That was my favorite part of being a professional cook, working closely on a team.
Humans are social animals who haven't -- including how our brains are wired -- changed much physiologically in the past 25,000 years. Smart people today are not much smarter than smart people in Greece 3,000 years ago, except for the sample size of 8B people being larger. We are wired to work in groups like hunters taking down a wooly mammoth.[0]
[0] https://sc.edu/uofsc/images/feature_story_images/2023/featur...
Being wired to work in groups is different than being wired to clean up the mess left by a bunch of LLM agents.
I do this "let it go do the crap while I think about what to do next" somewhat frequently. But it's mostly for easy crap around the edges (making tools to futz with logs or metrics, writing queries, moving things around). The failure rate for my actual day job code just is too high, even for non-rocket-science stuff. It's usually more frustrating to spend 5 minutes chatting with the agent and then fixing it's stuff than to just spend 5 minutes writing the code.
Cause the bot has all the worst bits of human interactions - like ambiguous incomplete understanding - without the reward of building a long-term social relationship. That latter thing is what I'm wired for.
I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be subtle vgenetic variations and evolutions on that scale of generations. But the real gains in "smartness" will be on a societal level. Remember: humans without society are not very different from "dumber" animals like apes and dogs. You can see this very well with the cases of heavy neglect. Feral children are very animal-like and quite incapable of learning very effective...
i think the premise is if we plucked the average baby from 25,000 years and transported them magically into the present day, into a loving and nurturing environment, they would be just as “smart” as you and i.
what if we actually get dumber? There are multiple cases of people in the past that are way smarter than the current thought leaders and inventors. There are a higher % of smart people nowadays but are they smarter than Leonardo Da Vinci?
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there's intelligence and there's wisdom. I may know how, eg Docker works and an ancient Greek man may not, but I can't remember a 12 digit number I've only seen once, or multiply two three digit numbers in my head without difficulty.
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