Comment by dang
2 days ago
Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.
Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.
Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things.
That may or may not be true, but the expression of thought and creativity matters to transfer meaning. If you average that out, it loses momentum. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346935. Compare the posters first and second, LLM assisted, paragraph. The second one is just bleak. If I had to read several pages like that, my eyes would glaze over. It cannot hold attention.
> Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.
The why not is: human beings are valuable in and of themselves, not just because of what they can do. If you raise the bar too high, you kick people out. And our society just isn't setup for that, and is unlikely to ever be in our lifetimes.
And I'm talking about a radical shift in the concept of ownership, where shareholding is radically democratized. Basically every random Joe needs the option to live comfortably on passive income generated by things he owns.