Comment by 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.
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.
Nothing of this can be reasoned about without taking psychopath governments in account.
This: we live in a material world and "should" does not imply "is".