10 ms·

Life After Language

147 points by jger15 3y ago

chaxor 3y ago
The joke photo is much closer to reality than many ight believe, according to OpenAI at least. OpenAI employees have claimed they can search direct strings generated by the system for expanding bullet points on their whole database and receive a "mirrored pair" of another user putting in the long form text and receiving bullet points in a very large percentage of samples. So the real joke here is that 1) OpenAI clearly spends an enormous time just looking through all text you give to them manually all day, and 2) were pushing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in order to expand and contract text over and over with tons of compute cycles, essentially wasted for what nobody wants.
- prox 3y ago
  I don’t understand your comment, what is happening? So it copies answers?
  - dcminter 3y ago
    I think the suggestion is that it's acting as a wildly inefficient broker between people who want their summaries turned into long form text and people who want their long form text turned into summaries! It's an entertaining thought.
    - pohl 3y ago
      I was struck by how invested the author was in asserting that the “joke fails”. I thought that cartoon was the highlight of the piece.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        In a strong sense, syntax and semantics are adjoint. In a weaker sense, long emails and single bullet points may have adjunctions between them. (every single bullet point may be expanded to any of a set of long emails, but one suspects that many long emails are incapable of being summarised by single bullet points) The cartoon is interesting in ways that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840240 fails to be.
notmypenguin 3y ago
That’s what they call a “puff piece” I found myself persuaded into the opposite point of view with the passage of each intellectually bankrupt paragraph. Congratulations, I’m thoroughly dissuaded of any such conceits by the end of reading this, I want my 5 minutes back. Tell me a chatbot wrote this without telling me a chatbot wrote this
- newswasboring 3y ago
  Would you like to elaborate on what makes you think this is a puff piece? Or what you disagree on?
rizz0 3y ago
Something in my gut tells me it’s not going to play out the way this guy thinks it will.
- runlaszlorun 3y ago
  This applies to so many avenues these days…
CamperBob2 3y ago
If you and I don’t need to share a language to discuss Shakespeare (remember, we already don’t read Shakespeare’s plays in the original Elizabethan), do we need to share a language at all? What does he mean by this? There's no real difference between the language in the First Folio and what's published today. A few spelling tweaks here and there, pretty much.
- vages 3y ago
  I was also confused by this parenthesis. My best guess is that he refers to the pronunciation (which was markedly different before the great vowel shift), but I don’t think that’s a valid or particularly interesting point to make.
- MikeBVaughn 3y ago
  The only reading I can come up with, and it's really stretching generosity here, is that the works were written smack in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift. Some of the rhymes are lost/opaque for modern speakers. But that doesn't really change the core inanity of the parenthetical.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  I suspect they are referring to modern English translations of Shakespear's plays like the ones on this website: https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati... Or perhaps exactly those. Maybe the article author means that's how Shakespear is read by everyone today?
vladharbuz 3y ago
> Berduck is already a more interesting companion than 90% of humans online Sounds like the article is predicated on having completely missed the point of talking to another human being? Perhaps part of the problem is that we are so bad at teaching communication skills that we find it difficult to connect to other people?
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Maybe my prompt-fu just sucks, but I have yet to get something interesting (ie both novel and good) from https://anonchatgpt.com https://anonchatgpt.com . What is an example of a prompt that produces an interesting response?
  - erwincoumans 3y ago
    (by ChatGPT) Here are a few example prompts that could lead to interesting responses: "Write a short story about a detective who solves crimes by talking to plants." "Imagine a world where time flows backward. Describe a day in the life of someone living in that world." "Compose a poem about the beauty of the night sky as seen from the perspective of an astronaut on the moon." "Create a fictional conversation between a philosopher from ancient Greece and a modern-day scientist about the nature of reality." "Design a magical creature that has never been seen before, and describe its unique abilities and habitat." Remember that "interesting" is subjective, and what one person finds interesting, another may not.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      Thanks. I guess I have no shortage of purely creative material it's possible to consume, but do have a distinct shortage of creative material that has enough structure corresponding to our world that it's possible to map onto other topics, or other readings into it. From that point of view, the two examples that seemed the most promising where 4 (fictional conversation) and 2 (time flows backward), but the results I got were anything but novel: the fictional conversation hit the usual tropes, with nothing particularly related to ancient Greek philosophy or to modern science specifically, and for some reason the backwards time world still had meals ordered in breakfast/lunch/dinner sequence. Nice for essays from an elementary schooler (or an AI?), but nothing one would wish to pay attention to read. On the other hand, at least the backwards time response reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI , which did meet my criteria for interesting when I first ran into it, so there's that... (note that "Entropic Time" has multiple possible tangential successors, based on the various details in its interpretation. that's a sense in which it contrasts to the —to my perception— sterility of the AI responses) Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I found "Entropic Time" to be a strong move in a Hessian Glass Bead Game, but I guess at this point instead of quibbling about the weakness of the AI moves, I should be impressed that it plays at all. cf https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4e764a05ced04.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...
klausnrooster 3y ago
My favorite read in, I think, years. Great seed (prompt?) for a novel, lol. Better communication. Improved cognition. No need for paper clips!
lionkor 3y ago
I would suggest the author actually talk to some real people. Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real people. Hell, you can even get away with joining a small discord server and joining a voice chat there. Anything but the large, hype- and drama-driven user generated content ad farms.
- jasode 3y ago
  >I would suggest the author actually talk to some real people. Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real people. Friendly fyi in case you got the impression he was a recluse isolated in a basement ... The author "talks to real people" all the time. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Venkatesh+Rao https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Venkatesh+Rao
  - lionkor 3y ago
    I didnt make assumptions about the kind of lifestyle the author leads, at least not purposefully. I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not completely detached from real, normal human interactions.
    - jasode 3y ago
      >I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not completely detached from real, normal human interactions. Your statement makes it seems like you've misunderstood his thesis. He's envisioning a future where humans-to-humans conversation is more intimate, more meaningful because it's not limited to textual language. Example excerpt from his article: >"We’ll all be like children inventing secret languages for talking to imaginary friends, except they will be real friends." His attachment to real human interactions is letting him see a future where real interactions can be "post-language". The post-language "secret language" could be images, or dynamic translations customized for the particular person's brain.
      - eternalban 3y ago
        > more meaningful How could it possibly be more meaningful. Languages mature over time, bits of other langauges are integrated, vocabularies expand, new forms of expression in the langauge appears, by serious practioners of writing or speaking in the language. > We’ll all be like children Oh great. Goo goo ga ga level civilization then. Curious as to how "children" discover the mutual new language and start communicating in it. > His attachment to real human interactions is letting him see a future where real interactions can be "post-language". The post-language "secret language" could be images, or dynamic translations customized for the particular person's brain. Sorry, but this is actually a silly notion of the OP. It shows an utter lack of understanding of the role of language in human society. Language is a repository of cultural memory broken down to composable bits.
slushh 3y ago
TikTok could be seen as that life. People communicate in dance. One step further, how are humans going to exist when AI handles everything? Why communicate at all if days can be passed in a drug induced stupor of bliss?
freehorse 3y ago
I half agree with the author, though I see LLMs more like the harbingers of the upcoming language apocalypse rather than of the post-language age, considering the limits of their world is the limits of our language, how much faith and hype we start to be putting in it and the degree we depend on language that makes it a perfect tool to manipulate us in the deepest level. The LLMs are just tools, if we do not see past language ourselves (and considering what I read and discuss last months, we generally do not) the post-language era will never happen. Even the fact that the author held the conversations they had with a LLM higher than human conversation proves exactly this point.
great_tankard 3y ago
>Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings one way or another about the economic fates of career writers) but in the sense of being incoherent. It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is not something that ChatGPT can understand. Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-efficient economy for?
- voidhorse 3y ago
  Yeah, this. As humans and as the inventors of these technologies, we get to decide what kind of values we uphold and how our politics and policies should reflect them. These think pieces that subscribe to an unspoken underlying technological determinism are so disgusting to me, they have a really narrow and pathetic view of what it means to be human (it mostly boils down to "economic agent") Half the time I wonder if the authors themselves even have requisite humanity, and I also wonder if the obsession around digital technology is partially driven by our having made machines of ourselves in the first place (all we care about is economy, work, etc. We've lost the old notion of the "human spirit" at great cost). More people in power and decision making positions need to start broadening their reading lists with Goethe, William Blake, Novalis, and other awakened poets and start letting some of these imaginative ideas about humanity's potential drive their lives more than purely economically motivated crapped out thinkpieces.
leroy-is-here 3y ago
I think the author is not taking language far enough. The animals which cannot speak do have a language, their language is just body language — one of actions. This is why when learning how to train dogs or cats, a human must learn how to control themselves and their actions. Yes, there is not reason why AI must “speak” in English or any other human language, but any language it speaks in will be lossy in the same way. Fundamentally, all of communication is lossy including our computer programs. This is why things like undefined behavior exist and also why people misunderstand.
jaystraw 3y ago
I wake up with songs in my head. And as a professional musician in bands of different genres, and fills in for other genres, the "languages" are far removed. My banjo player recently told me our mandolin player describes things in flats because he's originally a trumpet player. My best friend is classically trained with a masters in vocals and couldn't jam with rock musicians because of the way they call out keys. And Western music is an established, though often debated, language. I just don't see the difference between any of this. It's still language. Whether, as in the article it's the language a kid invent with their imaginary friend, how I think about and remember the songs I wake up with...language conveys information. And I don't understand what the author of this piece is trying to convey about language, except perhaps a connotation of the word language I don't understand.
throwaway290 3y ago
I was sincerely admiring vgr until he went off the deep end into crypto and now AI. The basic meta mistake in many similar arguments that I since heard from others in the space is exemplified in this: > That’s… not how technology works. It's... not about technology, tech is not the end goal, human is. Tech serves human, and if it hurts human guess who should take precedence.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  If it hurts some humans while helping others immensely, the question becomes murkier. Some questions are easy to dispense with, though: should we hold back the progress of ML because of the job-security concerns of some Hollywood writers? Answer: "No."
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI services) and hurts some (everyone else). For added irony many from the second group is who mostly produced content on which AI is trained.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI services) and hurts some (everyone else). Gonna throw up a nice big [Citation Needed] flag on that one. A rising tide lifts all boats in the end. All of them. No exceptions.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        Citation needed on whether it is that kind of rising tide. I think ML use should be regulated until economy is adapted with UBI or something. Benefit eventually does not justify unnecessary suffering now. Maybe in countries with stronger employment protections fewer people will be affected, but the topic is about US workers
        3y ago
efficax 3y ago
sometimes people can know just enough to make them stupider than they’d be if they knew much less
blueridge 3y ago
https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1621203955509334016 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1621203955509334016 "There's a new kind of dystopia that's seeming increasingly plausible. A post-literate society where the written word has been debased by LLMs and where those who can focus and consume long form prose will increasingly be unable to effectively communicate with those who can't."
sdfhioknionio 3y ago
Meanwhile, I still feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The prose these systems can generate is low-quality and incoherent. They are able to regurgitate textbook responses to simple questions but cannot display any sort of original reasoning. Fluent content-free drivel is now essentially free, whatever that's worth.
tonnydourado 3y ago
I can't tell whether this is an exercise in scifi-ish speculation, a la Julio Vernes, in which case is kinda interesting, or an attempt at seriously exploring possible near future, in which case I hate it. There's a weak and strong version of what I feel is the core idea, "what if human communication becomes largely intermediated by machines". The weak version is already here, as the article points out. We (at least we, chronically online people) already talk in memes and gifs quite a lot. And how AI will shape it is worth thinking about. I saw that happening on real time on TikTok with people using alternatives for words they feel get their content deprioritized, like suicide, murder, sex, etc. A literal AI model changing language. The strong version, though, is purely star-trek/Asimov level of speculation. Let alone the same neighborhood, current technology is not even in the same country as that. The article kinda mixes both things back and forth for a bit, and then fully dives into the scify version, which makes me wondering if the author genuinely believe they will see anything like this. If they do, boy will they be disappointed. Now, assuming it's all fun scify speculation of a future we'll never see, but hey, might happen, I have some problems with the ideas, but I'll highlight two. > Plenty of other species manage fine with simpler languages or no language at all. No they don't. Only species doing well right now are the ones we breed or our parasites. We can potentially erase almost all non-microscopic life forms by accident, let alone if we really put our minds to it. Humans have effects on a geological scale, that's a very select group of species. > And it is not clear to me that intelligence has much to do with the linguistic fabric of contemporary society. Kinda see the above comment? I don't think we even have a concept of intelligence that isn't somehow based on language, even if that language is not necessarily some form of spoken language. We certain can't evaluate intelligence without it. And as far as I know, humans don't develop language without socialization. Sure, you could envision a future where the machines do the socialization, but I think that would be a civilization that would be too fragile to exist for much long.
- prox 3y ago
  Interesting take. I think it also matters how broad or small you define language or communication. Personally and in a philosophical way spoken and written language is the main differentiation between us and and animals. We can quickly and specifically make intent and meaning mediated between us. I also think we are hilariously bad at it in a modern context, the complexity of the current society makes communication (and by extend community!) unnecessarily (?) noisy. Another interesting point is the idea of Logos, Word, Speech as the divine attribute par excellence in some religious and mythological contexts. That said I am not sure what the author wants to optimize. I mean if AI can mediate meanings and intent, that sounds interesting. If it is to AI have their own chats, I doubt that is useful from a human context.
hn_throawlles 3y ago
I like to think about how we are now faced with changes not seen in 10000 (ten thousand years)! this is a play on a Chinese media quip attributed to Xi Jinping that says "changes not seen in the world in 100 years" https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/great-changes-unseen-in-a-century https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/great-changes-... we have just found (in the 20th century) something that I think is as BIG as writing itself. Writing taken as the underlying technology behind (or under?) the concept of LAW itself (hence, a foundation for the notion of 'rule of, by, from, LAW" and everything and anything founded on this notions has become candidate for revision and re-evaluation). all because we invented a way to write that can change itself; this is usually better known as computing. I write some words that say how some other words must change. It really is all substitutions of arbitrary symbols (or sequences of symbols) for other symbols (or sequences thereof) all the way to the bottom. At the bottom there's a first number and a huge debate (and confusion) around whether this first number is one or zero (LOL).
deleted 3y ago
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melagonster 3y ago
If the core remains a human individual, the prediction will not come to fruition. As humans, we are only capable of comprehending a sequence of sounds and writing in a linear manner. This is the essence of our evolution, both a blessing and a curse. Even when we achieve AGI, we will still rely on communicating through singular, linear forms of sound and text, as this is the path we have traversed throughout our evolutionary history.
JohnCurran 3y ago
> the longest regular conversations I’ve had in the last week have been with an AI-powered rubber duck I think, and am basing this off of nothing objective, but it feels like the vast majority of content today is written by people who spend, frankly, too much time online. I think the fact I’m writing a comment about this says that I, too, spend too much time online. The bubble that the tech world and this website in particular differs so much so from reality that I don’t know what to make of the articles that front page here. All the twitter doomsaying, trump will never be president, all entirely wrong. I don’t know what to make of it - maybe I should log off for a while
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  "Trump will never be president" is an excellent support of TFA's thesis: it was said by people who were not so much terminally online as terminally reading, and who were therefore convinced that no one who is demonstrably illiterate (having a command of the oral register but not the written) in his mother tongue could become president*. In 2016, some large percentage of the US electorate was already post-language (or at least post-literacy), as they agreed the lack of literacy(/language) was no impediment. * despite having been indoctrinated for years that the genius of the States is that "anyone can become president"?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chmod600 3y ago
    The genius of the US is that, no matter who becomes president, the country still functions pretty well.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  After watching the first head-to-head debate it was apparent that Trump could win - whereas Trump was clearly a deeply flawed human being, Clinton came across as a smiley robot.
  - 3y ago
ukuina 3y ago
This was a fantastic read. I can see us getting here in a few decades of constant exposure to LLMs. Couple this with some form of advanced VR, and human-to-human collaboration will make everyone look and sound either: a) the way they would LIKE to be presented to the world, or b) an overriden version of how the OBSERVER would prefer them to look and sound. Either way, it's terrifylingly isolationist.
iamnotsure 3y ago
Can humans emulate chatgpt?
- notmypenguin 3y ago
  I’m seeing plenty of that already.
visarga 3y ago
> Reaction gifs constitute a kind of primitive post-idiomatic hyper-language comprising stock phrases and non-verbal whole-body communication fragments. Imagine a world a few centuries in the future, where humans look back on the era of reaction gifs as the beginning of the world after language. > Now that a future beyond language is imaginable, it suddenly seems to me that humanity has been stuck in a linguistically constrained phase of its evolution for far too long. I’m not quite sure how it will happen, or if I’ll live to participate in it, but I suspect we’re entering a world beyond language where we’ll begin to realize just how deeply blinding language has been for the human consciousness and psyche. I think the LLM revolution tell us something else - it is language that crystallises and captures almost all the human intelligence. By training a random initialised transformer on language you get chatGPT. Doing the same to a baby leads to a modern human. It was not the brain or the transformer that are intelligent, it is language running on them that is. Language is a self replicator, but it needed humans, now it works on LLMs too. In the long term I expect AI will discover things that are hard to express in our language and probably need to develop and teach new concepts to us. And of course AI can help create languages, it can do that quite well, if that's our thing. We can develop private (hyper-)languages and have it translate back and forth.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  What did you have in mind for new features of these created languages? (cf Delaney, Babel 17)
- frabcus 3y ago
  I think it is more that language is a convenient way to capture high quality human intellectual capabilities to train an AI easily. LLMs have highly curated training text to keep that quality high. In reality we think not just in words but in pictures, sounds, abstract unsymbolized concepts. We also just do with our bodies and just watch with our hearts. Image models capture some of that. We don’t have a way of capturing our unsymbolized thinking or doing yet. Expect lots of video data to be used to train AI in human body movements. Unsymbolized, and worse subconscious, thinking will be harder. My assumption is we will have AIs which can learn directly from the world rather than via curated human culture by that point, so won’t need it.

147 points by jger15 3y ago

The joke photo is much closer to reality than many ight believe, according to OpenAI at least. OpenAI employees have claimed they can search direct strings generated by the system for expanding bullet points on their whole database and receive a "mirrored pair" of another user putting in the long form text and receiving bullet points in a very large percentage of samples. So the real joke here is that 1) OpenAI clearly spends an enormous time just looking through all text you give to them manually all day, and 2) were pushing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in order to expand and contract text over and over with tons of compute cycles, essentially wasted for what nobody wants.

prox 3y ago
I don’t understand your comment, what is happening? So it copies answers?
- dcminter 3y ago
  I think the suggestion is that it's acting as a wildly inefficient broker between people who want their summaries turned into long form text and people who want their long form text turned into summaries! It's an entertaining thought.
  - pohl 3y ago
    I was struck by how invested the author was in asserting that the “joke fails”. I thought that cartoon was the highlight of the piece.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      In a strong sense, syntax and semantics are adjoint. In a weaker sense, long emails and single bullet points may have adjunctions between them. (every single bullet point may be expanded to any of a set of long emails, but one suspects that many long emails are incapable of being summarised by single bullet points) The cartoon is interesting in ways that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840240 fails to be.

notmypenguin 3y ago

That’s what they call a “puff piece” I found myself persuaded into the opposite point of view with the passage of each intellectually bankrupt paragraph. Congratulations, I’m thoroughly dissuaded of any such conceits by the end of reading this, I want my 5 minutes back. Tell me a chatbot wrote this without telling me a chatbot wrote this

newswasboring 3y ago
Would you like to elaborate on what makes you think this is a puff piece? Or what you disagree on?

rizz0 3y ago

Something in my gut tells me it’s not going to play out the way this guy thinks it will.

runlaszlorun 3y ago
This applies to so many avenues these days…

CamperBob2 3y ago

If you and I don’t need to share a language to discuss Shakespeare (remember, we already don’t read Shakespeare’s plays in the original Elizabethan), do we need to share a language at all? What does he mean by this? There's no real difference between the language in the First Folio and what's published today. A few spelling tweaks here and there, pretty much.

vages 3y ago
I was also confused by this parenthesis. My best guess is that he refers to the pronunciation (which was markedly different before the great vowel shift), but I don’t think that’s a valid or particularly interesting point to make.
MikeBVaughn 3y ago
The only reading I can come up with, and it's really stretching generosity here, is that the works were written smack in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift. Some of the rhymes are lost/opaque for modern speakers. But that doesn't really change the core inanity of the parenthetical.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
I suspect they are referring to modern English translations of Shakespear's plays like the ones on this website: https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati... Or perhaps exactly those. Maybe the article author means that's how Shakespear is read by everyone today?

vladharbuz 3y ago

> Berduck is already a more interesting companion than 90% of humans online Sounds like the article is predicated on having completely missed the point of talking to another human being? Perhaps part of the problem is that we are so bad at teaching communication skills that we find it difficult to connect to other people?

082349872349872 3y ago
Maybe my prompt-fu just sucks, but I have yet to get something interesting (ie both novel and good) from https://anonchatgpt.com https://anonchatgpt.com . What is an example of a prompt that produces an interesting response?
- erwincoumans 3y ago
  (by ChatGPT) Here are a few example prompts that could lead to interesting responses: "Write a short story about a detective who solves crimes by talking to plants." "Imagine a world where time flows backward. Describe a day in the life of someone living in that world." "Compose a poem about the beauty of the night sky as seen from the perspective of an astronaut on the moon." "Create a fictional conversation between a philosopher from ancient Greece and a modern-day scientist about the nature of reality." "Design a magical creature that has never been seen before, and describe its unique abilities and habitat." Remember that "interesting" is subjective, and what one person finds interesting, another may not.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    Thanks. I guess I have no shortage of purely creative material it's possible to consume, but do have a distinct shortage of creative material that has enough structure corresponding to our world that it's possible to map onto other topics, or other readings into it. From that point of view, the two examples that seemed the most promising where 4 (fictional conversation) and 2 (time flows backward), but the results I got were anything but novel: the fictional conversation hit the usual tropes, with nothing particularly related to ancient Greek philosophy or to modern science specifically, and for some reason the backwards time world still had meals ordered in breakfast/lunch/dinner sequence. Nice for essays from an elementary schooler (or an AI?), but nothing one would wish to pay attention to read. On the other hand, at least the backwards time response reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI , which did meet my criteria for interesting when I first ran into it, so there's that... (note that "Entropic Time" has multiple possible tangential successors, based on the various details in its interpretation. that's a sense in which it contrasts to the —to my perception— sterility of the AI responses) Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I found "Entropic Time" to be a strong move in a Hessian Glass Bead Game, but I guess at this point instead of quibbling about the weakness of the AI moves, I should be impressed that it plays at all. cf https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4e764a05ced04.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...

klausnrooster 3y ago

My favorite read in, I think, years. Great seed (prompt?) for a novel, lol. Better communication. Improved cognition. No need for paper clips!

lionkor 3y ago

I would suggest the author actually talk to some real people. Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real people. Hell, you can even get away with joining a small discord server and joining a voice chat there. Anything but the large, hype- and drama-driven user generated content ad farms.

jasode 3y ago
>I would suggest the author actually talk to some real people. Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real people. Friendly fyi in case you got the impression he was a recluse isolated in a basement ... The author "talks to real people" all the time. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Venkatesh+Rao https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Venkatesh+Rao
- lionkor 3y ago
  I didnt make assumptions about the kind of lifestyle the author leads, at least not purposefully. I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not completely detached from real, normal human interactions.
  - jasode 3y ago
    >I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not completely detached from real, normal human interactions. Your statement makes it seems like you've misunderstood his thesis. He's envisioning a future where humans-to-humans conversation is more intimate, more meaningful because it's not limited to textual language. Example excerpt from his article: >"We’ll all be like children inventing secret languages for talking to imaginary friends, except they will be real friends." His attachment to real human interactions is letting him see a future where real interactions can be "post-language". The post-language "secret language" could be images, or dynamic translations customized for the particular person's brain.
    - eternalban 3y ago
      > more meaningful How could it possibly be more meaningful. Languages mature over time, bits of other langauges are integrated, vocabularies expand, new forms of expression in the langauge appears, by serious practioners of writing or speaking in the language. > We’ll all be like children Oh great. Goo goo ga ga level civilization then. Curious as to how "children" discover the mutual new language and start communicating in it. > His attachment to real human interactions is letting him see a future where real interactions can be "post-language". The post-language "secret language" could be images, or dynamic translations customized for the particular person's brain. Sorry, but this is actually a silly notion of the OP. It shows an utter lack of understanding of the role of language in human society. Language is a repository of cultural memory broken down to composable bits.

slushh 3y ago

TikTok could be seen as that life. People communicate in dance. One step further, how are humans going to exist when AI handles everything? Why communicate at all if days can be passed in a drug induced stupor of bliss?

freehorse 3y ago

I half agree with the author, though I see LLMs more like the harbingers of the upcoming language apocalypse rather than of the post-language age, considering the limits of their world is the limits of our language, how much faith and hype we start to be putting in it and the degree we depend on language that makes it a perfect tool to manipulate us in the deepest level. The LLMs are just tools, if we do not see past language ourselves (and considering what I read and discuss last months, we generally do not) the post-language era will never happen. Even the fact that the author held the conversations they had with a LLM higher than human conversation proves exactly this point.

great_tankard 3y ago

>Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings one way or another about the economic fates of career writers) but in the sense of being incoherent. It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is not something that ChatGPT can understand. Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-efficient economy for?

voidhorse 3y ago
Yeah, this. As humans and as the inventors of these technologies, we get to decide what kind of values we uphold and how our politics and policies should reflect them. These think pieces that subscribe to an unspoken underlying technological determinism are so disgusting to me, they have a really narrow and pathetic view of what it means to be human (it mostly boils down to "economic agent") Half the time I wonder if the authors themselves even have requisite humanity, and I also wonder if the obsession around digital technology is partially driven by our having made machines of ourselves in the first place (all we care about is economy, work, etc. We've lost the old notion of the "human spirit" at great cost). More people in power and decision making positions need to start broadening their reading lists with Goethe, William Blake, Novalis, and other awakened poets and start letting some of these imaginative ideas about humanity's potential drive their lives more than purely economically motivated crapped out thinkpieces.

leroy-is-here 3y ago

I think the author is not taking language far enough. The animals which cannot speak do have a language, their language is just body language — one of actions. This is why when learning how to train dogs or cats, a human must learn how to control themselves and their actions. Yes, there is not reason why AI must “speak” in English or any other human language, but any language it speaks in will be lossy in the same way. Fundamentally, all of communication is lossy including our computer programs. This is why things like undefined behavior exist and also why people misunderstand.

jaystraw 3y ago

I wake up with songs in my head. And as a professional musician in bands of different genres, and fills in for other genres, the "languages" are far removed. My banjo player recently told me our mandolin player describes things in flats because he's originally a trumpet player. My best friend is classically trained with a masters in vocals and couldn't jam with rock musicians because of the way they call out keys. And Western music is an established, though often debated, language. I just don't see the difference between any of this. It's still language. Whether, as in the article it's the language a kid invent with their imaginary friend, how I think about and remember the songs I wake up with...language conveys information. And I don't understand what the author of this piece is trying to convey about language, except perhaps a connotation of the word language I don't understand.

throwaway290 3y ago

I was sincerely admiring vgr until he went off the deep end into crypto and now AI. The basic meta mistake in many similar arguments that I since heard from others in the space is exemplified in this: > That’s… not how technology works. It's... not about technology, tech is not the end goal, human is. Tech serves human, and if it hurts human guess who should take precedence.

CamperBob2 3y ago
If it hurts some humans while helping others immensely, the question becomes murkier. Some questions are easy to dispense with, though: should we hold back the progress of ML because of the job-security concerns of some Hollywood writers? Answer: "No."
- throwaway290 3y ago
  It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI services) and hurts some (everyone else). For added irony many from the second group is who mostly produced content on which AI is trained.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI services) and hurts some (everyone else). Gonna throw up a nice big [Citation Needed] flag on that one. A rising tide lifts all boats in the end. All of them. No exceptions.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Citation needed on whether it is that kind of rising tide. I think ML use should be regulated until economy is adapted with UBI or something. Benefit eventually does not justify unnecessary suffering now. Maybe in countries with stronger employment protections fewer people will be affected, but the topic is about US workers
      - 3y ago

efficax 3y ago

sometimes people can know just enough to make them stupider than they’d be if they knew much less

blueridge 3y ago

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1621203955509334016 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1621203955509334016 "There's a new kind of dystopia that's seeming increasingly plausible. A post-literate society where the written word has been debased by LLMs and where those who can focus and consume long form prose will increasingly be unable to effectively communicate with those who can't."

sdfhioknionio 3y ago

Meanwhile, I still feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The prose these systems can generate is low-quality and incoherent. They are able to regurgitate textbook responses to simple questions but cannot display any sort of original reasoning. Fluent content-free drivel is now essentially free, whatever that's worth.

tonnydourado 3y ago

I can't tell whether this is an exercise in scifi-ish speculation, a la Julio Vernes, in which case is kinda interesting, or an attempt at seriously exploring possible near future, in which case I hate it. There's a weak and strong version of what I feel is the core idea, "what if human communication becomes largely intermediated by machines". The weak version is already here, as the article points out. We (at least we, chronically online people) already talk in memes and gifs quite a lot. And how AI will shape it is worth thinking about. I saw that happening on real time on TikTok with people using alternatives for words they feel get their content deprioritized, like suicide, murder, sex, etc. A literal AI model changing language. The strong version, though, is purely star-trek/Asimov level of speculation. Let alone the same neighborhood, current technology is not even in the same country as that. The article kinda mixes both things back and forth for a bit, and then fully dives into the scify version, which makes me wondering if the author genuinely believe they will see anything like this. If they do, boy will they be disappointed. Now, assuming it's all fun scify speculation of a future we'll never see, but hey, might happen, I have some problems with the ideas, but I'll highlight two. > Plenty of other species manage fine with simpler languages or no language at all. No they don't. Only species doing well right now are the ones we breed or our parasites. We can potentially erase almost all non-microscopic life forms by accident, let alone if we really put our minds to it. Humans have effects on a geological scale, that's a very select group of species. > And it is not clear to me that intelligence has much to do with the linguistic fabric of contemporary society. Kinda see the above comment? I don't think we even have a concept of intelligence that isn't somehow based on language, even if that language is not necessarily some form of spoken language. We certain can't evaluate intelligence without it. And as far as I know, humans don't develop language without socialization. Sure, you could envision a future where the machines do the socialization, but I think that would be a civilization that would be too fragile to exist for much long.

prox 3y ago
Interesting take. I think it also matters how broad or small you define language or communication. Personally and in a philosophical way spoken and written language is the main differentiation between us and and animals. We can quickly and specifically make intent and meaning mediated between us. I also think we are hilariously bad at it in a modern context, the complexity of the current society makes communication (and by extend community!) unnecessarily (?) noisy. Another interesting point is the idea of Logos, Word, Speech as the divine attribute par excellence in some religious and mythological contexts. That said I am not sure what the author wants to optimize. I mean if AI can mediate meanings and intent, that sounds interesting. If it is to AI have their own chats, I doubt that is useful from a human context.

hn_throawlles 3y ago

I like to think about how we are now faced with changes not seen in 10000 (ten thousand years)! this is a play on a Chinese media quip attributed to Xi Jinping that says "changes not seen in the world in 100 years" https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/great-changes-unseen-in-a-century https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/great-changes-... we have just found (in the 20th century) something that I think is as BIG as writing itself. Writing taken as the underlying technology behind (or under?) the concept of LAW itself (hence, a foundation for the notion of 'rule of, by, from, LAW" and everything and anything founded on this notions has become candidate for revision and re-evaluation). all because we invented a way to write that can change itself; this is usually better known as computing. I write some words that say how some other words must change. It really is all substitutions of arbitrary symbols (or sequences of symbols) for other symbols (or sequences thereof) all the way to the bottom. At the bottom there's a first number and a huge debate (and confusion) around whether this first number is one or zero (LOL).

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melagonster 3y ago

If the core remains a human individual, the prediction will not come to fruition. As humans, we are only capable of comprehending a sequence of sounds and writing in a linear manner. This is the essence of our evolution, both a blessing and a curse. Even when we achieve AGI, we will still rely on communicating through singular, linear forms of sound and text, as this is the path we have traversed throughout our evolutionary history.

JohnCurran 3y ago

> the longest regular conversations I’ve had in the last week have been with an AI-powered rubber duck I think, and am basing this off of nothing objective, but it feels like the vast majority of content today is written by people who spend, frankly, too much time online. I think the fact I’m writing a comment about this says that I, too, spend too much time online. The bubble that the tech world and this website in particular differs so much so from reality that I don’t know what to make of the articles that front page here. All the twitter doomsaying, trump will never be president, all entirely wrong. I don’t know what to make of it - maybe I should log off for a while

082349872349872 3y ago
"Trump will never be president" is an excellent support of TFA's thesis: it was said by people who were not so much terminally online as terminally reading, and who were therefore convinced that no one who is demonstrably illiterate (having a command of the oral register but not the written) in his mother tongue could become president*. In 2016, some large percentage of the US electorate was already post-language (or at least post-literacy), as they agreed the lack of literacy(/language) was no impediment. * despite having been indoctrinated for years that the genius of the States is that "anyone can become president"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chmod600 3y ago
  The genius of the US is that, no matter who becomes president, the country still functions pretty well.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
After watching the first head-to-head debate it was apparent that Trump could win - whereas Trump was clearly a deeply flawed human being, Clinton came across as a smiley robot.
- 3y ago

ukuina 3y ago

This was a fantastic read. I can see us getting here in a few decades of constant exposure to LLMs. Couple this with some form of advanced VR, and human-to-human collaboration will make everyone look and sound either: a) the way they would LIKE to be presented to the world, or b) an overriden version of how the OBSERVER would prefer them to look and sound. Either way, it's terrifylingly isolationist.

iamnotsure 3y ago

Can humans emulate chatgpt?

notmypenguin 3y ago
I’m seeing plenty of that already.

visarga 3y ago

> Reaction gifs constitute a kind of primitive post-idiomatic hyper-language comprising stock phrases and non-verbal whole-body communication fragments. Imagine a world a few centuries in the future, where humans look back on the era of reaction gifs as the beginning of the world after language. > Now that a future beyond language is imaginable, it suddenly seems to me that humanity has been stuck in a linguistically constrained phase of its evolution for far too long. I’m not quite sure how it will happen, or if I’ll live to participate in it, but I suspect we’re entering a world beyond language where we’ll begin to realize just how deeply blinding language has been for the human consciousness and psyche. I think the LLM revolution tell us something else - it is language that crystallises and captures almost all the human intelligence. By training a random initialised transformer on language you get chatGPT. Doing the same to a baby leads to a modern human. It was not the brain or the transformer that are intelligent, it is language running on them that is. Language is a self replicator, but it needed humans, now it works on LLMs too. In the long term I expect AI will discover things that are hard to express in our language and probably need to develop and teach new concepts to us. And of course AI can help create languages, it can do that quite well, if that's our thing. We can develop private (hyper-)languages and have it translate back and forth.

082349872349872 3y ago
What did you have in mind for new features of these created languages? (cf Delaney, Babel 17)
frabcus 3y ago
I think it is more that language is a convenient way to capture high quality human intellectual capabilities to train an AI easily. LLMs have highly curated training text to keep that quality high. In reality we think not just in words but in pictures, sounds, abstract unsymbolized concepts. We also just do with our bodies and just watch with our hearts. Image models capture some of that. We don’t have a way of capturing our unsymbolized thinking or doing yet. Expect lots of video data to be used to train AI in human body movements. Unsymbolized, and worse subconscious, thinking will be harder. My assumption is we will have AIs which can learn directly from the world rather than via curated human culture by that point, so won’t need it.