Comment by qarl2
13 hours ago
Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
13 hours ago
Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
>Ok... but are automobiles also a virus?
Yes.
>Because we've become dependent on them?
Because we're burning the planet down with them.
>Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?
Yes, because in places we do people enjoy higher qualities of life and happiness. Along with things like health improvement from doing more excersize.
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Moreso we've become dependent on eating processed junk over the past 50 years and gotten fat as shit.
So yea, maybe think a little more deeply about your analogies?
>What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
Don't straw man me. My question was not about processed food. My question was about cooking food.
Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?
Well, do you consider humans a virus like entity that's taken over a planet and is trying to spread to another?
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Hmm maybe it always feels "different" to every generation going through automation of something previously un-automated, but don't you feel that to some extent this is different.
Humans have been the dominant species because of our ability to think, not our ability to get from A to B in any particular way/cook food. If we abstract ~the bulk of our thinking to LLMs, don't we lose something as a species which makes us more vulnerable... Or is it always the case during an automation?
In cooking food we lose a great deal of our immunity to parasitic infections. Cooking food absolutely does make us more vulnerable to uncooked food.
> Or is it always the case during an automation?
Obviously. Any time we make a useful discovery and begin using it, we become dependent on using it.
> In cooking food we loose a great deal of our immunity to parasitic infections
... and eliminate many parasites.
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> Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage
Yes?
That's why I added the part about food. Or heck, computers. Or telephones. Or any incredibly useful technology.
Toothbrushes! What will we do if we come to rely on toothbrushes??? The use of toothbrushes travels from person to person exactly like a virus!!!
I'm not sure what the point you're making is.
We're in the midst of figuring out what the tradeoffs are of LLM usage - all the things you list are already mostly known and found worth it. You trade a tiny amount of time and fuel to cook food in exchange for not getting sick. How is that relevant to anything?
> I'm not sure what the point you're making is.
I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.
If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.
Jared Diamond explores this in his book Collapse.
The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.
But... It's worked so far?
> What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.
In evolutionary time, we lost the ability to digest raw meat because we offloaded so much of process of the digestion to the cultural technology of cooking.
Do you like the looks of a future where that happens but for thinking?
Even if AI were superhuman at all thinking tasks, that doesn't mean we'd lose our abilities.
Chess and games can be a lot more demanding than a lot of people's work lives - and AI is already superhuman there.
The heaviest thing I need to lift in my daily life is a laptop and yet I've gotten significantly stronger over the last few years from strength training.
If AI took over all the boring but hard things I'm required to do it'd free up lots of time for me to spend thinking about things, and solve problems I find more interesting.
Do you truly believe that AI will prevent people from thinking?
It seems clear to me that people will continue to think, but in different ways.
I hate to bring this analogy up again, but it seems impossible to escape: did losing the ability to do long division really impact humanity?
I’ve encountered several people now who consult LLMs constantly for nearly every decision. Some proportion of people will absolutely cede their thinking to these things, and some already have.
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> Do you truly believe that AI will prevent people from thinking?
It is already relieving people of need for thinking. Today the need; tomorrow the ability.
No, because walking around or eating raw food wasn't essential to being human. Thinking is.
Didn't realise thinking was being banned.