Comment by runarberg
21 days ago
If this resembles the feeling you had when you first used the internet, it is drastically different from when I used the internet.
When I first used the internet, it was not about doing things faster, it was about doing things which were previously simply unavailable to me. A 12 year old me was never gonna fax my previous classmate who moved to Australia, but I certainly emailed her.
We are not talking about a creator nor an accelerator, we are talking about an avenue (or a road if you will). When I use the internet, I am the creator, and the internet is the road that gets me there.
When I use an LLM it is doing something I can already do, but now I can do it without using my brain. So the feeling is much closer to doomscrolling on social media where previously I could just read a book or meet my pals at the pub. Doomscrolling facebook is certainly faster then reading a book, or socializing at the pub. But it is a poor replacement for either.
I didn't have friends in other countries.
I could however greatly enrich my general knowledge in ways I couldn't do with books I had access to.
Prior to the internet I used my school library for that (or when I was very young, books at my grandparent’s house). So for me personally that wasn’t a new capability. It wasn’t until I started using Wikipedia around 2004 (when I was 17 years old) that the internet replaced (or rather complemented) libraries for that function.
But I can definitely see how for many people with less access to libraries (or worse quality libraries then what I had access to) the internet provided a new avenue for gaining knowledge which wasn’t available before.