More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

Basically, yea. As sometimes BS is right enough to find a vulnerability, but rarely good enough to patch it, kinda like finding a small leak compared to metal being welded to cover it.

Yea, I fear for the future of open source. There may be some asymmetries built into LLM tech and its uses that simply undercuts the FOSS system as we know it.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Nuclear energy and its problems, has seemed to me a firing analogy for a while.

Theoretically, as an energy technology, there’s plenty to gain.

But radiation and inherently catastrophic danger are fundamentally incompatible with biology and wellbeing, and so humanity mostly rejected the technology.

LLMs likely have some similar incompatibilities, despite whatever promise they may or may not have.

• EDIT -

So the responses to this are funny. For the record, I’m likely as much a pro-nuclear person as much as anyone here (Or used to be I guess). It should be a net-gain technology with solvable problems, and sticking with fossil fuels instead has likely been just dumb.

But I still think the point holds. There’s something about an invisible danger - radiation - that triggers wariness in people, and there’s something reasonable about that. Especially when you factor in the reliability of groups of people to do what’s in the collective interest even when there are high stakes.

And yea, CO2 is invisible too … but look where that has got us! Main difference is that its ill effects are not direct, individualistic, or relatively quick compared to radiation.

Then, compared renewables, you start to get a clearer picture, and analogy too. Maybe, sometimes, the worse technology that is more compatible with human nature is better overall.

For sure!

My only addition to the communal dimension you highlight, in line with my previous comment, is that a communitarian dimension can certainly develop around written text. You can get to know someone by their books and writings, and if you’re game to write your thoughts too, they may know you too. Not to mention letters and other more casual written formats.

Mass media, including the internet generally, even before social media, undercuts this dynamic, I think, through a saturation of both our social and content (a word I chose over “information”) bandwidths. A giant pipe of algorithmically curated content doesn’t leave much room for even noticing the author let alone forming a communal bond. Consumerism over conversation, one could say.

Additionally, moving the causal conversational exchanges online likely disincentivises real life communal engagements around written texts, such as book clubs, fan gatherings etc.

Which is all a hand wavy way of speculating that writing before the internet may have been something different than afterward with respect to how eroded the social dimensions of oral traditions have been. Of course there are trade offs again, especially with reach and connectedness. But once doomscrolling became the norm, I feel like a real categorical shift occurred.

Anyhoo, don’t let me chew your ear off! Very much appreciate the chat!

Yea.

The writing/reading vs oral one is interesting to me. Obviously we’re both on one side of that transition, and so biased by that experience. And I certainly would like to have been exposed to more of a traditional oral approach to knowledge. But like you I think it’s a reasonable choice on balance because it can naturally complement what came before. Writing can extend the reach of what one can gain access to and memorise and then share and engage with orally. While engaging with a text orally, by speaking it out loud or to an audience while you’re completing the writing process can likely aid the reader quality of the written text. If used correctly I suppose.

The point being that maybe there are technologies which necessarily involve more or more categorical de-skilling than others. And maybe that’s a property of technologies that can be assessed and tracked.

Totally fair.

Where I was coming from was trying to balance our consumeristic imagination with enough time to get bored by it and value something more.

Even if that’s possible, that longer life would also just feed wealth accumulation and feudalism, as you say, is a point well made.

A bigger question then seems to be whether human nature can handle technological progress. As you imply - tenuous at best!

Enjoying the ride is perhaps all we have!

And yea, the liminal space point is very good point, part of the human condition you could say I think. Like I was saying, the potential is there, it seems, but we’re just a bit too reward seeking and lazy, as our evolutionary baggage likely dictates.

The only thing I see changing the balance is categorically longer life. If the average age of all humans at any given time was like 100yrs, that could be a massive addition of calm centerdness.

I hear you. There’s a good amount of diversity in humanity, I think, and a good amount of dynamics in the ensuing interactions. My fear is that there’s a lot of “good enough is good enough” and consumerism and materialism in humanity. Maybe not everyone, but enough. And that makes for a hungry species. Add large social structures on top, and you amplify the social trends that may be governed by only a small amount of choices or people.

I hope too, but I think I’ve concluded that humanity is just a bit of a headless chicken of a species.

They all look pretty big to me on a map.

Yea, it’s the thing I find myself repeating to anti-AI peeps (of which I count myself) … you don’t realise how behind you are.

Not behind on missing out on knowing how to use AI, but on how much things have shifted and the world turned and how much heavy momentum is involved and far back the facilitating patterns go.

Same with the fediverse to be honest. It’s a reaction to the state of social media in ~2010.

Having never visited … I’m still blown away by this being a lake (that is fresh water right?)

I think the threat is greater still.

Without jobs, and living off of whatever state based support, what leverage will the jobless have in society? How easy will it be to simply dismiss and ignore this economically disenfranchised cohort? To forcefully abuse them if it’s politically convenient? To completely prevent them from moving economic class. It certainly won’t be a clean jump to Star Trek “utopia”.

And beyond that of course are AI apocalypse scenarios. With machines increasingly running the world, what leverage will humanity have over it?

Hmmm … what would be the evolutionary perspective on this? A Lamarckian process overlaid on a Mendelian/genetic process through epigenetic modulation, passing on modifications based on parents’ local experiences of the current environment?

To us expecting to live 80 years, it might seem silly. But for mammals hoping to just survive, it may make lots of sense.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.

And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.

Generally, I’m completely with you.

The questions this prompts for me …

Are there limits to what technologies can be aligned with a “healthy” human life and society?

I’m inclined to think so, which, if true, means that steering technological progress toward what’s “healthy” would totally make sense.

How adaptable are people over time/generations such that they can naively learn to tolerate poorer forms of society and technology? I’d say a lot, which makes the former question slippery. But, if true, suggests that maximising society should involve more experimentation and exploration over shorter inter-generational time lines …?

How privileged are we in this outlook of yours in being accustomed to controlling the solution and work from conception to materialisation? A work force of automation supervisors is maybe both viable and natural under capitalism (however dark)?