There are ebbs and flows of absurdity, with the peaks being bubbly moments. I will never forget the fact that Dentacoin existed in 2017, and garnered attention for being a crypto token that you could use to pay your dentist. It's a multi billion dollar market! And the marketcap reached a $2 billion mark.
Conversely, it's possible that honing your actual skills by minimizing reliance on LLMs could become a very valuable trait in the coming future. But in that case, you'd be burning fewer tokens and you wouldn't be contributing to LLM company userbase growth which is a bad thing to do.
The loom, the steam engine, or the airplane did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
The social contract is being broken. Being broken just on paper, just on the hopes that it can be broken for good.
> The loom (...) did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
It absolutely did. Factory owners used their clout to put workers out of the job and then lobbied for military aid and capital punishment instead of negotiating with the workers. IMO, the only tactic for worker that has EVER had lasting success is solidarity through some form of unionization.
Read "Blood in the Machine" if you want to see what happened to the losers of the industrial revolution. The book does contain some fictional embellishments but that is explained up front, and noted when it comes up.
Those captains of industry almost certainly salivated over the idea of not needing weavers etc. any more. Is the difference you're seeing just that they're doing that publicly now?
The weavers had a rough go of it for sure, but at least they did not have to spend 4 years of their early adulthood being intellectually challenged in a higher education institution, often going into debt, in order to become qualified weavers.
Actually it was 7 years of physical training that deformed their bodies:
"But the work left the body callused, bent, and molded. You could
tell a cropper by his enormous forearms and by the “hoof” of callused
skin that built up on his wrist. In the spring of 1811, George was in his
early twenties, and he’d spent his post-adolescent life learning the trade.
Seven years of hard, exacting labor; seven years of paying his dues. That
led to pride and attachment to the work, to a brotherhood, to an
identity."
Merchant, Brian. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech. Little Brown & Co. (ADS), 2024.
Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding! Let me pivot then-- I still argue that it is a fundamentally different case when it comes to LLMs.
1. Threatening young and educated people with not being able to realize the potential that they believed they were building for themselves is toying with social uprising.
2. Weaving is an apt example of redundancy on account of technological innovation but it's a poor comparison to LLMs where the narrative is that they will continue to get better until they approach a general intelligence level which would put a much much higher percentage of the population at risk of losing their jobs. Again, the segment of the population that has invested most into their skills, and will be the most angry and capable of organizing should that come to pass.
Weaving doesn't as aptly represent the core of what we as a species are good at and excel at, as knowledge work does.
1. This is not enough on it's own for social uprising, but it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I feel a lot of the general vibe in the US is summed up in this excerpt from "All Hail" by The Devil Makes Three:
"Laugh if you want to, really is kinda funny
'Cause the world is a car and you're the crash test dummy
Herd's stampeding now, fences gone
Television is always on and it says "Save the children, but drop the bomb
Replace the word 'right' now with the word 'wrong'
Hey, there's a big sale on Tuesday, get it before it's gone
Get a picture with the four horsemen for a nominal sum
Now that they got everything, they'd like to sell you some!
All hail, all hail, to the greatest of sales
Everything in sight's got to be sold
All hail, all hail, 'cause it's to work or to jail
Man, they're closing them doors on the world"
Closing them doors on the world aka pulling the ladder up behind them is exactly what is happening, and has been happening, to young white Americans for decades now, and young Americans of color since forever.
2. Weaving is an ancestor of programming so I feel it's an apt comparison to discussions of modern technology, as much as any historic profession can be. But to more specifically address your point about continuing to get better and putting more of the population at risk of job loss, there were multiple innovations within the textile industry that worked together to automate different portions of the industry. The point is similar to the poem "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller, where it starts somewhere but it will come for all of us. So focusing on whether or not weaving specifically is a good comparison to LLMs misses the point that if we don't band together as workers, we will eventually be overpowered by capital, foregoing any discussion about the morality of capitalism but just looking at eternal struggle of profit incentives vs wages.
> It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research.
How so? Colloquially, AI currently means LLMs. Why would we revere LLMs as our greatest achievement?
Because we've built something that's (functionally) intelligent, comparable to humans in terms of its ability to exhibit (functional) understanding of complex topics, and produce novel correct output. There's nothing even remotely close to this in human history. This was all science fiction 10 years ago.
Maybe the comparison is imperfect, but: we also built a wonderful, novel and excellent bomb, the atom one, not remotely close to whatever humans did before, yet I'm not totally thrilled by it.
Because you can already fill a datacenter with hyper-productive PhD level autodidactic polymaths and we're still on the ground floor of the technology? These frontier models are like alpha builds and they're already ridiculous. AGI is marketing slop and machine learning doesn't need that promise to be the most impressive achievement in human history in my opinion.
I see this statement all the time and it's just strange to me. Yes, the LLMs struggle to form unique ideas - but so do we. Most advancements in human history are incremental. Built on the shoulders of millions of other incremental advancements.
What i don't understand is how we quantify our ability to actually create something novel, truly and uniquely novel. We're discussing the LLMs inability to do that, yet i don't feel i have a firm grasp on what we even possess there.
When pressed i imagine many folks would immediately jest that they can create something never done before, some weird random behavior or noise or drawing or whatever. However many times it's just adjacent to existing norms, or constrained by the inversion of not matching existing norms.
In a lot of cases our incremental novelties feel, to some degree, inevitable. As the foundations of advancement get closer to the new thing being developed it becomes obvious at times. I suspect this form of novelty is a thing LLMs are capable of.
So for me the real question is at what point is innovation so far ahead that it doesn't feel like it was the natural next step. And of course, are LLMs capable of doing this?
I suspect for humans this level of true innovation is effectively random. A genius being more likely to make these "random" connections because they have more data to connect with. But nonetheless random, as ideas of this nature often come without explanation if not built on the backs of prior art.
To be clear i agree with you, my question is more pointed at us - i'm not sure we have a good understanding of conciousness, nor that we are as we seem. Given how prone to hallucinations we are, how our subtle hormones can drastically alter what we perceive as our intelligence, self identity, etc.
I'm not convinced LLMs are anything amazing in their current form, but i suspect they'll push a self reflection on us.
But clearly i think humans are far more Input-Output than the average person. I'm also not educated on the subject, so what do i know hah.
“The people who make this stuff are losers. They’re not artists. They’re not creative,” she said at the “Hacks” press conference last month at the London hotel in West Hollywood. “And they’ve wanted their whole lives to be special. And they’re not special. So, they’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. And even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard. You are a loser. You will never be cool. And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school. I wanna put your head in the toilet and flush.”
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