Comment by spacemark

8 days ago

Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn.

Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies.

There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.

6 comments

spacemark

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arjie  8 days ago

A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it.

> I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly.

and

> Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca.

and

> I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.

I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.

  • toraway  8 days ago

    Using fiction as an interpretive vehicle to explore, challenge and contrast our assumptions and perceptions about our own world isn't even in the same universe as "outsourcing their reasoning to a work of fiction".

    "Haha you're basically a human LLM!" is such a weak, boringly robotic rebuttal in nearly any context given how it can be generically applied to literally anything.

    • xaoz  5 days ago

      You used a lot of fancy words to describe something very simple and not very smart. Reading a story about what could be does not necessarily have any predictive power at all over complex real world systems.

    • renewiltord  7 days ago

      Pretty sure this is the prologue to The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster where everyone outsources their decisions to the Machine and communicates second-hand ideas.

  • MichaelZuo  8 days ago

    Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange to see HN users parroting other people’s thinking (sci-fi writers) like literal sub-sapient parrots, while simultaneously decrying the danger of machines turning people into sub-sapient parrots…

    Following that logic… the closest problem would be literally inbetween their ears.