You’ve probably heard of the Luddites, the group who destroyed textile mills in the early 1800s. If not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Luddites often get a bad rap, probably in large part because of employer propaganda and influence over the writing of history, as well as the common tendency of people to react against violent means of protest. But regardless of whether you think they were heroes, villains, or something else, the fact is that their efforts made very little difference in the end, because that kind of technological progress is hard to arrest.
A better approach is to find ways to continue to thrive even in the presence of problematic technologies, and work to challenge the systems that exploit people rather than attack tools which can be used by anyone.
You can, of course, continue to flail at the inevitable, but you might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.
> Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history “The Luddites” that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made."[10] Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large-scale strikes.
Of course, there would have been people who just saw it as striking back at the machines, and leaders who took advantage of that tendency, but the point is it probably wasn’t as simple as the popular accounts suggest.
Also, there’s a kind of corollary to the lump of labor fallacy, which is arguably a big reason the US is facing such a significant political upheaval today: when you disturb the labor status quo, it takes time - potentially even generations - for the economy to adjust and adapt, and many people can end up relatively worse off as a result. Most US factory workers and miners didn’t end up with good service industry jobs, for example.
Sure, at a macro level an economist viewing the situation from 30,000 feet sees no problem - meanwhile on the ground, you end up with millions of people ready to vote for a wannabe autocrat who promises to make things the way they were. Trying to treat economics as a discipline separate from politics, sociology, and psychology in these situations can be misleading.
I'm glad I was able to inspire a new username for you. But aren't you concerned that if you let other people influence you like that, you're frying your brain? Shouldn't everything originate in your own mind?
> They don't provide any value except to a very small percentage of the population who safely use them to learn
There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? Ban those things? Post exclamation-filled comments exhorting people not to use them? This comes back to what I said at the end of my previous comment:
You might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.
Do you know the answer to that?
> A language model is not the same as a convolution neural network finding anomalies on medical imagining.
Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves?
The last paragraph of your other comment was literally the Luddite argument. (Sorry I can't quote it now.) Do you know how to weave cloth? No? Your brain is fried!
The world changes, and I find it more interesting and challenging to change with it, than to fight to maintain some arbitrary status quo. To quote Ghost in the Shell:
All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.
For me, it's not about "getting ahead" as you put it. It's about enjoying my work, learning new things. I work in software development because I enjoy it. LLMs have opened up new possibilities for me. In that 5 year future you mentioned, I'm going to have learned a lot of things that someone not using LLMs will not have.
As for being dependent on Altman et al., you can easily go out and buy a machine that will allow you to run decent models yourself. A Mac, a Framework desktop, any number of mini PCs with some kind of unified memory. The real dependence is on the training of the models, not running them. And if that becomes less accessible, and new open weight models stop being released, the open weight models we have now won't disappear, and aren't going to get any worse for things like coding or searching the web.
> Keep falling for lesswrong bs.
Good grief. Lesswrong is one of the most misleadingly named groups around, and their abuse of the word "rational" would be hilarious if it weren't sad. In any case, Yudkowsky advocated being ready to nuke data centers, in a national publication. I'm not particular aware of their position on the utility of AI, because I don't follow any of that.
What I'm describing to you is based on my own experience, from the enrichment I've experienced from having used LLMs for the past couple of years. Over time, I suspect that kind of constructive and productive usage will spread to more people.
