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I’ll state an extreme belief: post-scarcity is likely within our grasp. LLMs are startlingly effective as virtual librarians that you can converse with as thoug

I’ll state an extreme belief: post-scarcity is likely within our grasp. LLMs are startlingly effective as virtual librarians that you can converse with as though they were an expert. I started using them to try tripping them up with hard and vague technical questions, but it’s so good at it that I get most of my prototyping done through it at this point. When this technology becomes portable and usable with natural human speech, this ease of access to the world’s knowledge made available to everyone could enable breakthroughs in a wide range of disciplines that simply reduce the cost of goods and services to the point where we can begin spending our limited time on this planet seeking fulfillment rather than making money for other people to live. I’m scared that this potential will be erased by fear and doubt, and we’ll all watch on the sidelines as the rich and powerful develop these capabilities anyways and lock the rest of us out.

Loughla 4y ago
There is absolutely no clear line from the massive capitalistic society we have today and the post scarcity utopia you see coming. There is a massive, massive shift in thinking required among people with the level of wealth and power that allows them to force their thinking on the rest of us via dialogue and propaganda and also violence when the first two don't work. Color me cynical, but I believe we're on a dead-end track and the train is running at full speed. There's no conductor and we're all just playing with our belly buttons while we wait for the end. I believe LLM's and eventually AGI will only be used to entrench power structures that exist today. I believe, as most tools, the positive effects will almost immediately be outweighed by the negative. I believe The Road and all that type of dystopian fiction was really just non-fiction that happened to be written 50-100 years too early. But maybe I'm too cynical. Who knows?
mcguire 4y ago
Technological advancements have always come with unintended consequences. While the potential benefits of language models and other technologies are exciting, you must also consider the potential negative effects they may have on society. Furthermore, the idea of post-scarcity assumes that resources are infinite, which is not necessarily true. While technology can certainly improve efficiency and reduce waste, there are still limits to the earth's resources that must be taken into account.
nathan_compton 4y ago
Every time I try to talk to ChatGPT4 about anything more complicated than doing madlibs with wikipedia and stack overflow entries, it goes off the rails immediately. My sense is that LLMs are just a convenient interface to _certain kinds_ of knowledge that are well represented in the training data. I expect that generalizing to other domains for which training data is not available will prove very difficult. I must admit, the characterization of the responses of ChatGPT as "being like that of an expert" strikes me as utterly absurd. In essentially every field where I have expertise, talking to chatgpt4 is an exercise is confusion (and not on my part).
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Your last sentence is what's actually going to happen. Post scarcity will never be a thing and barons gonna baron, but hey, you have a few years of peace where you can talk to your omniscient virtual librarian in the meantime. :)

Loughla 4y ago

There is absolutely no clear line from the massive capitalistic society we have today and the post scarcity utopia you see coming. There is a massive, massive shift in thinking required among people with the level of wealth and power that allows them to force their thinking on the rest of us via dialogue and propaganda and also violence when the first two don't work. Color me cynical, but I believe we're on a dead-end track and the train is running at full speed. There's no conductor and we're all just playing with our belly buttons while we wait for the end. I believe LLM's and eventually AGI will only be used to entrench power structures that exist today. I believe, as most tools, the positive effects will almost immediately be outweighed by the negative. I believe The Road and all that type of dystopian fiction was really just non-fiction that happened to be written 50-100 years too early. But maybe I'm too cynical. Who knows?

mcguire 4y ago

Technological advancements have always come with unintended consequences. While the potential benefits of language models and other technologies are exciting, you must also consider the potential negative effects they may have on society. Furthermore, the idea of post-scarcity assumes that resources are infinite, which is not necessarily true. While technology can certainly improve efficiency and reduce waste, there are still limits to the earth's resources that must be taken into account.

nathan_compton 4y ago

Every time I try to talk to ChatGPT4 about anything more complicated than doing madlibs with wikipedia and stack overflow entries, it goes off the rails immediately. My sense is that LLMs are just a convenient interface to _certain kinds_ of knowledge that are well represented in the training data. I expect that generalizing to other domains for which training data is not available will prove very difficult. I must admit, the characterization of the responses of ChatGPT as "being like that of an expert" strikes me as utterly absurd. In essentially every field where I have expertise, talking to chatgpt4 is an exercise is confusion (and not on my part).

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

Your last sentence is what's actually going to happen. Post scarcity will never be a thing and barons gonna baron, but hey, you have a few years of peace where you can talk to your omniscient virtual librarian in the meantime. :)