Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
6 hours ago
Engineering will always be difficult.
Right now, we're in a "honeymoon" stage, where non-engineers think that they can somehow, magically produce stuff that is comparable to what experienced and disciplined engineers can do.
That won't last long.
Despite all the caterwaulin', LLMs are just another engineering tool, and good engineers will figure out how to implement them, in ways that absolutely blow away the garbage produced by non-engineers.
It's like that rich, no-talent guy that buys a PRS guitar, and thinks he'll beat the experienced musician that still uses his beat-up old strat, but consistently makes hits.
I wonder.
In my optimistic days, I think we'll start putting mechanisms in place that will have LLMs help develop cognition, skills and expertise. It'll usher in an era of mastery and wonder.
On my bad days, I despair that the siren song of "good enough" slop will overwhelm even the most disciplined minds, and we're facing the atrophy of civilization.
Will this just end up exaggerating the pereto distribution? Will there end up being this tiny percentage of people that are driven by natural curiosity to do the very hard work of really understanding hard things? Will society even have any sort of reward for those people?