Comment by selfhoster1312

3 days ago

My two cents is there's some implicit arguments you're making here:

- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)

- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)

Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).

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selfhoster1312

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Razengan  3 days ago

Forget about AI, LLMs, governments, Al Whomever, and even the internet for a while,

do you agree or disagree with the following:

- Knowledge should not be gatekept.

- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.

- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.

- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.

  • card_zero  3 days ago

    I think the second point is a misconception. There's a common paranoia about breadth of human knowledge outpacing depth, so that we have a breakdown in explanations and understanding, and can't make sense of the world any more without some authority's assistance. But this isn't happening, because we're always explaining things and compressing knowledge down into understanding, except it sometimes feels like it's getting fragmented and bewildering to an overwhelmed individual ... who then extrapolates this into a perceived (and superficially logical) external trend.