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> I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. You want to make i

> I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? > The optimistic case for AGI is that if nobody had to work they could spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? People don't generally spend time on hobbies and creative passions because of the output, they spend time on it because they enjoy the time they spend on it, because of the process and the joy of it. No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. Just like I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. > No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. > I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me. Yes, but at least programming now has a point. I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making something that didn’t exist before, that took effort to create, and that helped you or someone else, even if another person could have done it faster. Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? I doubt it.
- SirMaster 4y ago
  This makes no sense. I do all my hobbies because I enjoy doing them. I don’t care how much better a machine is or other people are. Look at all the people who still play chess for example even though counters are much better than us. I would still want to go see humans perform live music even if computers can “generate” music. I can think of endless examples.
- skavi 4y ago
  chess
- teolandon 4y ago
  I get tremendous amounts of joy playing my guitar, with my mediocre guitar skills, playing songs that my computer or John Mayer can play a million times better than I can. I get tremendous amounts of joy speedrunning Celeste, knowing that a TASbot can do it in a way I will never ever be able to replicate.
- komali2 4y ago
  > I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. I think I have a grasp on where you're coming from, and here's what I'm feeling: better philosophy, and better general education in philosophy, could be a good solution. One reason I think this is that for some reason you don't already think everything is completely futile. Because... it is, one could argue. So, maybe you already have a culturally defined reason this is not the case (developed by philosophers, and this includes priests if that's the case for you), or you have undergone a rigid philosophical introspection and determined for yourself why think isn't the case, or, maybe you just haven't thought of it, and when you do, a couple thousand years of philosophical insights will be ready for you to choose why, for you, things aren't futile (even if they are!). I want to think about this in broader scope though, because to me this is the question at the root of industrialization. I keep asking the people in charge whenever I meet them, "what do we do when automation has driven the value of human labor to pennies?" And nobody ever has an answer. It's a somewhat similar question to "what do we do when we don't have to work to stay alive?" At least, I think it's similar, because there's two answers to both questions, both answers are the same, and both answers could apply today if we didn't prop up artificial scarcity: "Nothing, and, whatever we want." You mention "creating something that didn't exist before." One of the things that depressed me when I was studying writing, and often depresses young writers, is the realization that one way or the other, all stories have already been written, mostly by shakespeare (or at least, written down by him), or by a couple greeks, or a few rare influxes in the modern era as anthropologists finally started writing down what indigenous cultures have been saying for a few millenia. But that can't be true, right? New, interesting stories get written every year. It's true if you break them down into their requisite parts, basically tokenize the tropes. I mean at some level it's always either Comedy or Tragedy. Clearly though, new stories have value, and meaning, because people spend their time reading them and talking about them, voluntarily. To bring it back to your analogy, building something that's already been built, can still be valuable to someone, depending on your definition of "already been built" (there's already an code editor, why build another? oh wow this one has modal editing, that is cool) and also because even if it's a very similar copy (as avatar is of pocahontas) there's value in the "flavor," the different taste. Even identical copies can have value: an open source version of a closed source tool with identical APIs. And even if it's a uselessly identical copy, it can have value simply in the effort you put in to build it yourself, such as fools like me that deploy our own email servers, or, repair our own watches, whatever. Of course someone can do it better than me. It's actually kinda stupid for me to do it myself, I might break something. But there's value to me in doing it myself. Circling all the fuckin way back because I don't know how to stay on topic: A world where AI can do everything for us is basically no different than today. With some honestly relatively minor changes, we can automate most things we need to the point that human labor effort required is minimal. We decided we needed same day deliver from amazon, and so we maintain a massively inefficient system (and also artificial scarcity to keep the exploited classes in line) to create systems to cater to this need, but if we let go of "needs" like that the system ceases to be necessary. But wait, there's more: change nothing, and I can find you plenty of people who don't need to work another millisecond in their life, and still have a highest-in-all-of-human-history quality of life. Why haven't they killed themselves yet? Why haven't they, as you suggest, dismantled the system that made their labors effectively meaningless from a "struggle to survive" standpoint? In fact, it seems almost everyone wants to achieve what these lucky few have achieved. It seems almost nobody finds "because it keeps me alive" to be the desirable driver for their efforts. "that is completely futile in the end here" is the key thing. Why is it futile to grow tomatoes when you can buy them at the store for dirt cheap? Why is it futile to continue to have sleepless nights and lead teams and try to build businesses when your net worth is already 200 million? TLDR my thesis: Currency is a shit motivator, "because it keeps me alive" is a shit motivator our system set up to extract labor from people, we don't need "tricks" to get people to be productive, people just like being productive. We don't need artificial scarcity to lend meaning to people's lives: people have spent ten thousand years finding all sorts of ways to make a meaningless existence under any system, meaningful. Some books I think are relevant: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - you are in the worst conditions ever created on earth for a human and will likely be there the rest of your life, why not just kill yourself sooner and get it over with? Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks - more fun. Post scarcity more than achieved, yet people still do things. Read and find out what they get up to, and see for yourself that it's perfectly believable.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  > Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? AI, as it stands, has no agency of thought^ All AI works requires instruction, and that instruction is given by a creative human. So artisans could then become instructors with incredible new abilities afforded by AI tools, or they could just create like the old artisans for the love of creation. ^ If an AI agent did, I would actually consider it to be 'conscious' in the same way Martin Pistorius was conscious but completely immobile.
- NickM 4y ago
  I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. By your logic, nobody would ever want to take up running as a hobby either, since no human could ever run as fast as a cheetah. Chess is still popular, despite AI being able to defeat the best humans.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. We’ve had photographs for a long time, and people still do representational art of real places and things; we have superior industrial mass production and people do inferior handicrafts, etc.; we’ve tested your theory extensively and its false. No, economic demands mean many people can’t do as much of these things as they like because they need to do something that will pay the bills, and demand for those types of crafts is lower than it once was. So, distributional economics is a concern. But will people do things even when there’s a “better” higher-tech way? Yes, absolutely.
  - davesque 4y ago
    > We’ve had photographs for a long time, and people still do representational art of real places and things; we have superior industrial mass production and people do inferior handicrafts, etc.; we’ve tested your theory extensively and its false. Their theory is only technically false. Yes, people still do those things. But how common is it that anyone who isn't independently wealthy actually lives a comfortable life doing that for a living? Practically speaking, no one makes a living doing art or being an artisan of one kind or another. It feels very much lately like the next decade will see huge swaths of knowledge work made obsolete. And it will feel really self-serving when the people at the helm of that trend tell everyone who's been displaced by it that they just need to adapt or start a technology company like they did.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      > But how common is it that anyone who isn't independently wealthy actually lives a comfortable life doing that for a living? Practically speaking, no one makes a living doing art or being an artisan of one kind or another. What?? This is the kind of comment happens when we no longer have yellow pages and business cards and bored kids with nothing to do but stare at them. I assure you that there are in fact many people making a satisfying and secure living taking photographs and making things. I’m honestly floored by your comment.
    - 4y ago
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  People still play chess and Go despite those games being dominated by computers. People still draw despite other human artists being better etc. For most people the point of a hobby is not done in anticipation that they will become the best in the world, but rather just because they like doing it.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > > > I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. > > You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? > It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. It's literally the words that you posted, verbatim, and wrote at the start of your comment: You want to effectively ban LLMs & AI as a whole, just because your emotions about it made you want to, with no further justifications as to why it should be illegal. You just feel that it is.
waboremo 4y ago
>Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? Yes, yes we should. Especially when we are making absolutely zero progress on improving safety nets. Or, we could be flabbergasted every time there's a new statistic on how many people are killing themselves. Whichever sounds more fun to you.
- fastball 4y ago
  The solution to "people are killing themselves because they have no purpose outside their jobs and their job just got automated" is not outlawing technology, it is helping people find purpose outside of work.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    That's essentially the same thing that GP said. I know I'd rather safety nets be improved for this future rather than outlawing, but don't see it happening until some major suffering and upheaval happen. Likely, they have a similar outlook.
    - fastball 4y ago
      I don't think "I'd outlaw technology if I could" is the same as saying "technology is good actually, let's find ways to make people happy in ways where automation doesn't matter". Thinking that the latter will be difficult does not justify the former position at all.
- ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
  I don't understand the frame of reference where it makes more sense to fight to outlaw automation than it does to improve safety nets. If I had the political capital to do the latter, I can't imagine wasting it on the former.
- parineum 4y ago
  > we are making absolutely zero progress on improving safety nets. Citation needed. Progress is being made. Andrew Yang ran for President on UBI and was taken seriously. Universal Healthcare has more support now than ever (and growing). It takes time for people to change their minds.
diego_sandoval 4y ago
For some people, including me, a big part of the enjoyment comes from thinking that I could become one of the best in [my region/my country/the world] at a particular skill. Maybe I'm more competitive than the average person, but I'm sure that there are millions of people out there that feel the same way as me. And I think that when we realize that we're not the dominant species in the planet anymore, it's going to be a big emotional shock to a lot of people. We need to feel superior, or at least we need the possibility of being superior.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Here’s something - for every “best” person in a given field, there is almost certainly several other people alive who could perform similarly but didn’t have the same opportunities. In your given scenario, there are _already_ so-called “losers” who lose “fairly”, but also lots of “losers” who really shouldn’t have lost. Did you ever consider any of those people before this? Don’t you think they’ve been similarly depressed by the unfair advantages it seems others have in life? How is that _at all_ different from being inferior to an automatic process, in terms of the impact, and why are you only worrying about this issue now that it’s more likely to effect your chances specifically? Is it possible that viewing the world through a competitive lens is toxic? That humans should seek out happiness rather than awards? Peace rather than conflict? I’m not saying it isn’t going to be hard for people to readjust. But certainly, the notion that “I’m gonna be the best” is something that results in a more toxic world, AI or no.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > We need to feel superior, or at least we need the possibility of being superior. As far as I know, Jimmy Hendrix never got depressed due to an inability to make those distorted guitar effects using only his mouth. These large language models are instruments. While I'm uneasy about camping out feeding data to a prompt controlled by a company I know nearly nothing about, I'm certainly excited by the prospect of playing with a decent local, low-octane open source version. To not play with these things out of a feeling of inferiority seems like the height of vanity to me. Either that, or a signal that someone didn't get a decent liberal arts education.
- 4y ago
AlexandrB 4y ago
I think what's depressing is that AI is poised to automate tasks that are creatively or intellectually fulfilling. And because GPT has advanced faster than mobile robotics what's left for humans is the tedious, repetitive, physical tasks that are hard on the body and uninspiring on the mind. Instead of each person commanding a household of personal robots - a la Jetsons - we're going to be ordered around to pick up garbage and clean windows by machines.
- trekkie1024 4y ago
  100% agree. It always irks me that we’re using AI to solve “problems” that don’t exist (the automation of creativity and relationships, things that make us human) while not putting as much effort into real issues facing the world today (poverty etc.)
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Hackers mainly hack on things that personally affect them and things they find personally gratifying to work on. Someone who is inclined to like images, AI, ML and programming are likely to work on "problems" where all of those intersect. There is also the thing where some things are really not about technology, but are larger issues. They cannot be solved by just writing software. And if you're looking for something to solve via writing software, you won't attempt to solve that thing. Poverty falls into this bucket, where no matter how much software you write, you cannot solve poverty by just deploying programs. Not everyone can or want to save the world. Some people just want to have fun while they can, because eventually you end up in the dirt, no matter what you do (unless you come up with a way for humans to be immortal), like the rest of humanity. But, seemingly you feel strongly about wanting people to work on those issues, so what do you spend your time on, on a daily basis? I'm guessing you are on the front line trying to solve one of these big issues?
    - lawtalkinghuman 4y ago
      > Hackers mainly hack on things that personally affect them and things they find personally gratifying to work on. We're not talking about some rando hacker cranking out a cool Emacs module, these are projects backed by companies like Google and Microsoft and are being integrated into some of the most widely used tech products in the world like Google Search, Android, iOS, Facebook etc.

School-Cotton 4y ago

> You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. > No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. > I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me. Yes, but at least programming now has a point. I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making something that didn’t exist before, that took effort to create, and that helped you or someone else, even if another person could have done it faster. Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? I doubt it.

SirMaster 4y ago
This makes no sense. I do all my hobbies because I enjoy doing them. I don’t care how much better a machine is or other people are. Look at all the people who still play chess for example even though counters are much better than us. I would still want to go see humans perform live music even if computers can “generate” music. I can think of endless examples.
skavi 4y ago
chess
teolandon 4y ago
I get tremendous amounts of joy playing my guitar, with my mediocre guitar skills, playing songs that my computer or John Mayer can play a million times better than I can. I get tremendous amounts of joy speedrunning Celeste, knowing that a TASbot can do it in a way I will never ever be able to replicate.
komali2 4y ago
> I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. I think I have a grasp on where you're coming from, and here's what I'm feeling: better philosophy, and better general education in philosophy, could be a good solution. One reason I think this is that for some reason you don't already think everything is completely futile. Because... it is, one could argue. So, maybe you already have a culturally defined reason this is not the case (developed by philosophers, and this includes priests if that's the case for you), or you have undergone a rigid philosophical introspection and determined for yourself why think isn't the case, or, maybe you just haven't thought of it, and when you do, a couple thousand years of philosophical insights will be ready for you to choose why, for you, things aren't futile (even if they are!). I want to think about this in broader scope though, because to me this is the question at the root of industrialization. I keep asking the people in charge whenever I meet them, "what do we do when automation has driven the value of human labor to pennies?" And nobody ever has an answer. It's a somewhat similar question to "what do we do when we don't have to work to stay alive?" At least, I think it's similar, because there's two answers to both questions, both answers are the same, and both answers could apply today if we didn't prop up artificial scarcity: "Nothing, and, whatever we want." You mention "creating something that didn't exist before." One of the things that depressed me when I was studying writing, and often depresses young writers, is the realization that one way or the other, all stories have already been written, mostly by shakespeare (or at least, written down by him), or by a couple greeks, or a few rare influxes in the modern era as anthropologists finally started writing down what indigenous cultures have been saying for a few millenia. But that can't be true, right? New, interesting stories get written every year. It's true if you break them down into their requisite parts, basically tokenize the tropes. I mean at some level it's always either Comedy or Tragedy. Clearly though, new stories have value, and meaning, because people spend their time reading them and talking about them, voluntarily. To bring it back to your analogy, building something that's already been built, can still be valuable to someone, depending on your definition of "already been built" (there's already an code editor, why build another? oh wow this one has modal editing, that is cool) and also because even if it's a very similar copy (as avatar is of pocahontas) there's value in the "flavor," the different taste. Even identical copies can have value: an open source version of a closed source tool with identical APIs. And even if it's a uselessly identical copy, it can have value simply in the effort you put in to build it yourself, such as fools like me that deploy our own email servers, or, repair our own watches, whatever. Of course someone can do it better than me. It's actually kinda stupid for me to do it myself, I might break something. But there's value to me in doing it myself. Circling all the fuckin way back because I don't know how to stay on topic: A world where AI can do everything for us is basically no different than today. With some honestly relatively minor changes, we can automate most things we need to the point that human labor effort required is minimal. We decided we needed same day deliver from amazon, and so we maintain a massively inefficient system (and also artificial scarcity to keep the exploited classes in line) to create systems to cater to this need, but if we let go of "needs" like that the system ceases to be necessary. But wait, there's more: change nothing, and I can find you plenty of people who don't need to work another millisecond in their life, and still have a highest-in-all-of-human-history quality of life. Why haven't they killed themselves yet? Why haven't they, as you suggest, dismantled the system that made their labors effectively meaningless from a "struggle to survive" standpoint? In fact, it seems almost everyone wants to achieve what these lucky few have achieved. It seems almost nobody finds "because it keeps me alive" to be the desirable driver for their efforts. "that is completely futile in the end here" is the key thing. Why is it futile to grow tomatoes when you can buy them at the store for dirt cheap? Why is it futile to continue to have sleepless nights and lead teams and try to build businesses when your net worth is already 200 million? TLDR my thesis: Currency is a shit motivator, "because it keeps me alive" is a shit motivator our system set up to extract labor from people, we don't need "tricks" to get people to be productive, people just like being productive. We don't need artificial scarcity to lend meaning to people's lives: people have spent ten thousand years finding all sorts of ways to make a meaningless existence under any system, meaningful. Some books I think are relevant: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - you are in the worst conditions ever created on earth for a human and will likely be there the rest of your life, why not just kill yourself sooner and get it over with? Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks - more fun. Post scarcity more than achieved, yet people still do things. Read and find out what they get up to, and see for yourself that it's perfectly believable.
h0l0cube 4y ago
> Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? AI, as it stands, has no agency of thought^ All AI works requires instruction, and that instruction is given by a creative human. So artisans could then become instructors with incredible new abilities afforded by AI tools, or they could just create like the old artisans for the love of creation. ^ If an AI agent did, I would actually consider it to be 'conscious' in the same way Martin Pistorius was conscious but completely immobile.
NickM 4y ago
I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. By your logic, nobody would ever want to take up running as a hobby either, since no human could ever run as fast as a cheetah. Chess is still popular, despite AI being able to defeat the best humans.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. We’ve had photographs for a long time, and people still do representational art of real places and things; we have superior industrial mass production and people do inferior handicrafts, etc.; we’ve tested your theory extensively and its false. No, economic demands mean many people can’t do as much of these things as they like because they need to do something that will pay the bills, and demand for those types of crafts is lower than it once was. So, distributional economics is a concern. But will people do things even when there’s a “better” higher-tech way? Yes, absolutely.
- davesque 4y ago
  > We’ve had photographs for a long time, and people still do representational art of real places and things; we have superior industrial mass production and people do inferior handicrafts, etc.; we’ve tested your theory extensively and its false. Their theory is only technically false. Yes, people still do those things. But how common is it that anyone who isn't independently wealthy actually lives a comfortable life doing that for a living? Practically speaking, no one makes a living doing art or being an artisan of one kind or another. It feels very much lately like the next decade will see huge swaths of knowledge work made obsolete. And it will feel really self-serving when the people at the helm of that trend tell everyone who's been displaced by it that they just need to adapt or start a technology company like they did.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > But how common is it that anyone who isn't independently wealthy actually lives a comfortable life doing that for a living? Practically speaking, no one makes a living doing art or being an artisan of one kind or another. What?? This is the kind of comment happens when we no longer have yellow pages and business cards and bored kids with nothing to do but stare at them. I assure you that there are in fact many people making a satisfying and secure living taking photographs and making things. I’m honestly floored by your comment.
  - 4y ago
ALittleLight 4y ago
People still play chess and Go despite those games being dominated by computers. People still draw despite other human artists being better etc. For most people the point of a hobby is not done in anticipation that they will become the best in the world, but rather just because they like doing it.
x-complexity 4y ago
> > > I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. > > You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? > It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. It's literally the words that you posted, verbatim, and wrote at the start of your comment: You want to effectively ban LLMs & AI as a whole, just because your emotions about it made you want to, with no further justifications as to why it should be illegal. You just feel that it is.

waboremo 4y ago

>Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? Yes, yes we should. Especially when we are making absolutely zero progress on improving safety nets. Or, we could be flabbergasted every time there's a new statistic on how many people are killing themselves. Whichever sounds more fun to you.

fastball 4y ago
The solution to "people are killing themselves because they have no purpose outside their jobs and their job just got automated" is not outlawing technology, it is helping people find purpose outside of work.
- Tostino 4y ago
  That's essentially the same thing that GP said. I know I'd rather safety nets be improved for this future rather than outlawing, but don't see it happening until some major suffering and upheaval happen. Likely, they have a similar outlook.
  - fastball 4y ago
    I don't think "I'd outlaw technology if I could" is the same as saying "technology is good actually, let's find ways to make people happy in ways where automation doesn't matter". Thinking that the latter will be difficult does not justify the former position at all.
ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
I don't understand the frame of reference where it makes more sense to fight to outlaw automation than it does to improve safety nets. If I had the political capital to do the latter, I can't imagine wasting it on the former.
parineum 4y ago
> we are making absolutely zero progress on improving safety nets. Citation needed. Progress is being made. Andrew Yang ran for President on UBI and was taken seriously. Universal Healthcare has more support now than ever (and growing). It takes time for people to change their minds.

diego_sandoval 4y ago

For some people, including me, a big part of the enjoyment comes from thinking that I could become one of the best in [my region/my country/the world] at a particular skill. Maybe I'm more competitive than the average person, but I'm sure that there are millions of people out there that feel the same way as me. And I think that when we realize that we're not the dominant species in the planet anymore, it's going to be a big emotional shock to a lot of people. We need to feel superior, or at least we need the possibility of being superior.

ShamelessC 4y ago
Here’s something - for every “best” person in a given field, there is almost certainly several other people alive who could perform similarly but didn’t have the same opportunities. In your given scenario, there are _already_ so-called “losers” who lose “fairly”, but also lots of “losers” who really shouldn’t have lost. Did you ever consider any of those people before this? Don’t you think they’ve been similarly depressed by the unfair advantages it seems others have in life? How is that _at all_ different from being inferior to an automatic process, in terms of the impact, and why are you only worrying about this issue now that it’s more likely to effect your chances specifically? Is it possible that viewing the world through a competitive lens is toxic? That humans should seek out happiness rather than awards? Peace rather than conflict? I’m not saying it isn’t going to be hard for people to readjust. But certainly, the notion that “I’m gonna be the best” is something that results in a more toxic world, AI or no.
jancsika 4y ago
> We need to feel superior, or at least we need the possibility of being superior. As far as I know, Jimmy Hendrix never got depressed due to an inability to make those distorted guitar effects using only his mouth. These large language models are instruments. While I'm uneasy about camping out feeding data to a prompt controlled by a company I know nearly nothing about, I'm certainly excited by the prospect of playing with a decent local, low-octane open source version. To not play with these things out of a feeling of inferiority seems like the height of vanity to me. Either that, or a signal that someone didn't get a decent liberal arts education.
4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago

I think what's depressing is that AI is poised to automate tasks that are creatively or intellectually fulfilling. And because GPT has advanced faster than mobile robotics what's left for humans is the tedious, repetitive, physical tasks that are hard on the body and uninspiring on the mind. Instead of each person commanding a household of personal robots - a la Jetsons - we're going to be ordered around to pick up garbage and clean windows by machines.

trekkie1024 4y ago
100% agree. It always irks me that we’re using AI to solve “problems” that don’t exist (the automation of creativity and relationships, things that make us human) while not putting as much effort into real issues facing the world today (poverty etc.)
- capableweb 4y ago
  Hackers mainly hack on things that personally affect them and things they find personally gratifying to work on. Someone who is inclined to like images, AI, ML and programming are likely to work on "problems" where all of those intersect. There is also the thing where some things are really not about technology, but are larger issues. They cannot be solved by just writing software. And if you're looking for something to solve via writing software, you won't attempt to solve that thing. Poverty falls into this bucket, where no matter how much software you write, you cannot solve poverty by just deploying programs. Not everyone can or want to save the world. Some people just want to have fun while they can, because eventually you end up in the dirt, no matter what you do (unless you come up with a way for humans to be immortal), like the rest of humanity. But, seemingly you feel strongly about wanting people to work on those issues, so what do you spend your time on, on a daily basis? I'm guessing you are on the front line trying to solve one of these big issues?
  - lawtalkinghuman 4y ago
    > Hackers mainly hack on things that personally affect them and things they find personally gratifying to work on. We're not talking about some rando hacker cranking out a cool Emacs module, these are projects backed by companies like Google and Microsoft and are being integrated into some of the most widely used tech products in the world like Google Search, Android, iOS, Facebook etc.