5 ms·

I see this as a rough parallel to "is the printing press a threat to illuminated manuscripts". Maybe it is under a very narrow view, but overall, improved propa

I see this as a rough parallel to "is the printing press a threat to illuminated manuscripts". Maybe it is under a very narrow view, but overall, improved propagation of ideas has led to improved dissemination of ideas, and it will this time too. People who's narrow world has been disrupted will perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to tell us how we're going to be worse off for it, but we won't. Ironically, internet discussion forums democratized specialist knowledge that you previously would have had to be in the right university or research circle to access. SO monetized that, and now we've moved on to complaints like this about further democratization of knowledge and (to quote another post) that knowledge being "stolen".

endisneigh 3y ago
Doesn’t seem like a valid comparison
2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
The problem with this sort of comparison is that up until now, new ideas came from humans and technology advances merely helped to spread ideas, or greased the wheels. Now you can generate new ideas. Often without any skill of your own. This is bad at first glance because look what happened when smart phones became popular: no one remembers phone numbers of their family, people can’t remember directions when driving. Now you don’t even need the ability to generate ideas. And it’s not clear to me that LLMs democratises information. LLM have guard rails, are potentially trained on copyrighted data. Need to be run by large companies…
- version_five 3y ago
  > when smart phones became popular: no one remembers phone numbers of their family, people can’t remember directions when driving. This is a concern, though I'd argue unrelated to the concern about people no longer contributing publicly online, and one that was already present with SO. I've seen SO posts specifically reference or criticize the "copy paste" crowd that is just taking the answer and putting it into their code without thought. Some people will use any technology blindly.
  - selestify 3y ago
    Why is that a concern? When’s the last time you needed to remember a phone number or directions for travel?
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Because of the implied effect on things like attention span, memory, and cognition in general. It's the same reason that mastering fundamental mathematics is critical, even though we have calculators. Trends in the Flynn Effect are relevant here. [1] The Flynn Effect is the observation that "real" IQ values were increasing, dramatically, for decades. In recent decades (since births in ~1970), this effect has not only decreased but reversed in the West. And it cannot be explained by dysgenics alone, since it even shows up in same-family cohorts. That suggests environmental causes are likely playing some role. Those coming to adulthood in the 90s were the first generation to really get to experience mass, endless, and cheap dopamine driven digital entertainment. Notably the [positive] Flynn effect is still in full swing in places like China and India, where digital entertainment market saturation has taken longer. So they'll effectively work as perfect experiments. If it reverses over the coming decades, as everybody over in these places now has their heads shoved in e.g. smart phones as much as anywhere else, it should be telling. [1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-reversal-20th-century-intelligence-boom-flynn-effect-intelligence https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...
      - selestify 3y ago
        What reasons are there to think that the reversed Flynn effect comes from a lack of memorization of rote knowledge like phone numbers, as opposed to attention-sucking social media apps?
    - fragmede 3y ago
      That's the point. People used to be able to memorize 7 digit numbers and now we can't because we don't have to. Where the brain is a muscle, it's atrophying. Those parts of the brain aren't being exercised and used, so we're getting dumber. Individually and as a society. The fear is that this will become an impediment to progress.
- hdior 3y ago
  Skill generating ideas is over rated. Implementation is when skill matters. I can imagine post scarcity Star Trek like ideas but not implement them. My skills at CE and SWE allow me to implement reasonable solutions there. Chasing ideas for the sake of chasing ideas is a form of bike shedding and premature optimization.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
    You can only say this right now where there are an abundance of ideas and less skill to implement them. But even implementation requires creative thinking and the ability to generate ideas. Now we want to take away the need for the first part. This is NOT like going from handwriting to printing or radio to TV. Something new is going on. I use ChatGPT for work in a limited way. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest that you do. This potentially paradigm shifting technology.
    - hdior 3y ago
      We could say this for a long time now; all the historical squabbles over religious story is evidence useless ideation is an innate human feature that wastes time/resources, and the advancement of skill at implementation is what’s actually improved our day to day.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
        That's a bit of a leap. Because one set of ideas were wrong therefore having ideas is useless? Even those wrong ideas generated new and useful ideas. I also don't understand how you intend to improve implementation without having more ideas.
jarjoura 3y ago
There is a weird sort of analogy where universities spent the last 20 years putting their classes online, or associate professors and grad students uploaded YouTube deep-dive videos, etc. Point is, enrollment at Universities are way down now and you could probably draw some kind of link between the two. However, there are also links between jobs that no longer care, and GenZ is a smaller cohort, and also maybe more of an interest in trades as a path forward. I'm not suggesting the paper linked here is right or wrong, but we should keep an open mind about all the other potential reasons why things suddenly shift. One random reason could be that during this overly oppressive year of layoffs engineers have either stopped needing to search or haven't had time to work on a project that needed it. Also there's smarter IDEs which are likely the #1 reason I've stopped searching the internet for one-off small things like "what's the API to deep copy an array in Rust." Documented autocomplete has gotten really good and things like copilot are just icing on the cake.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  There's also this "enrolment cliff" the universities have been worried about for a long time. Apparently the pool of students is itself shrinking. https://web.archive.org/web/20230315152647/https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiemerisotis/2023/03/15/the-college-problem-in-america-is-about-more-than-cost/?sh=47d19d2f34c7 https://web.archive.org/web/20230315152647/https://www.forbe...
23B1 3y ago
> improved propagation of ideas has led to improved dissemination of ideas Prove this.
xigoi 3y ago
Putting all knowledge in the hands of a for-profit company is the opposite of “democratization of knowledge”.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  It's not as if the rest of the internet is deleted just because an AI model has been trained on it.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Yeah, but people rely on it more and more, so it's going to shape society.
nologic01 3y ago
True democratization of knowledge would mean LLM's are open source and usable by everyone (the way of Wikipedia). Even then you'd want attribution to survive. Eliminating or changing the incentives people have for doing things is the absolutely surest way to change behavior. Postulating that all published work can be appropriated at will by certain private for-profit entities is the death knell of the knowledge economy as we know it.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Art generators are open source and right now there are multiple ongoing court cases attempting to kill them.
friendzis 3y ago
> improved propagation of ideas has led to improved dissemination of ideas, and it will this time too I sincerely hope you are shitposting. So called Web 2.0, the platformized web has placed huge incentives to stifle propagation and dissemination of ideas. However, these incentives are somewhat distributed under human review, therefore there can be bubbles with opposing ideas. LLMs centralize censorship, by design. Currently you can find "BrawndoLounge" and "ToiletWater" subreddits that heavily censor opposing ideas. Even if one is full of hate speech or whatever, there still are opposing ideas there. If LLM guardians decide that one of these sources is "toxic", in an LLM-led web that viewpoint simply vanishes.

endisneigh 3y ago

Doesn’t seem like a valid comparison

2muchcoffeeman 3y ago

The problem with this sort of comparison is that up until now, new ideas came from humans and technology advances merely helped to spread ideas, or greased the wheels. Now you can generate new ideas. Often without any skill of your own. This is bad at first glance because look what happened when smart phones became popular: no one remembers phone numbers of their family, people can’t remember directions when driving. Now you don’t even need the ability to generate ideas. And it’s not clear to me that LLMs democratises information. LLM have guard rails, are potentially trained on copyrighted data. Need to be run by large companies…

version_five 3y ago
> when smart phones became popular: no one remembers phone numbers of their family, people can’t remember directions when driving. This is a concern, though I'd argue unrelated to the concern about people no longer contributing publicly online, and one that was already present with SO. I've seen SO posts specifically reference or criticize the "copy paste" crowd that is just taking the answer and putting it into their code without thought. Some people will use any technology blindly.
- selestify 3y ago
  Why is that a concern? When’s the last time you needed to remember a phone number or directions for travel?
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Because of the implied effect on things like attention span, memory, and cognition in general. It's the same reason that mastering fundamental mathematics is critical, even though we have calculators. Trends in the Flynn Effect are relevant here. [1] The Flynn Effect is the observation that "real" IQ values were increasing, dramatically, for decades. In recent decades (since births in ~1970), this effect has not only decreased but reversed in the West. And it cannot be explained by dysgenics alone, since it even shows up in same-family cohorts. That suggests environmental causes are likely playing some role. Those coming to adulthood in the 90s were the first generation to really get to experience mass, endless, and cheap dopamine driven digital entertainment. Notably the [positive] Flynn effect is still in full swing in places like China and India, where digital entertainment market saturation has taken longer. So they'll effectively work as perfect experiments. If it reverses over the coming decades, as everybody over in these places now has their heads shoved in e.g. smart phones as much as anywhere else, it should be telling. [1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-reversal-20th-century-intelligence-boom-flynn-effect-intelligence https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...
    - selestify 3y ago
      What reasons are there to think that the reversed Flynn effect comes from a lack of memorization of rote knowledge like phone numbers, as opposed to attention-sucking social media apps?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    That's the point. People used to be able to memorize 7 digit numbers and now we can't because we don't have to. Where the brain is a muscle, it's atrophying. Those parts of the brain aren't being exercised and used, so we're getting dumber. Individually and as a society. The fear is that this will become an impediment to progress.
hdior 3y ago
Skill generating ideas is over rated. Implementation is when skill matters. I can imagine post scarcity Star Trek like ideas but not implement them. My skills at CE and SWE allow me to implement reasonable solutions there. Chasing ideas for the sake of chasing ideas is a form of bike shedding and premature optimization.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
  You can only say this right now where there are an abundance of ideas and less skill to implement them. But even implementation requires creative thinking and the ability to generate ideas. Now we want to take away the need for the first part. This is NOT like going from handwriting to printing or radio to TV. Something new is going on. I use ChatGPT for work in a limited way. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest that you do. This potentially paradigm shifting technology.
  - hdior 3y ago
    We could say this for a long time now; all the historical squabbles over religious story is evidence useless ideation is an innate human feature that wastes time/resources, and the advancement of skill at implementation is what’s actually improved our day to day.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
      That's a bit of a leap. Because one set of ideas were wrong therefore having ideas is useless? Even those wrong ideas generated new and useful ideas. I also don't understand how you intend to improve implementation without having more ideas.

jarjoura 3y ago

There is a weird sort of analogy where universities spent the last 20 years putting their classes online, or associate professors and grad students uploaded YouTube deep-dive videos, etc. Point is, enrollment at Universities are way down now and you could probably draw some kind of link between the two. However, there are also links between jobs that no longer care, and GenZ is a smaller cohort, and also maybe more of an interest in trades as a path forward. I'm not suggesting the paper linked here is right or wrong, but we should keep an open mind about all the other potential reasons why things suddenly shift. One random reason could be that during this overly oppressive year of layoffs engineers have either stopped needing to search or haven't had time to work on a project that needed it. Also there's smarter IDEs which are likely the #1 reason I've stopped searching the internet for one-off small things like "what's the API to deep copy an array in Rust." Documented autocomplete has gotten really good and things like copilot are just icing on the cake.

cmiles74 3y ago
There's also this "enrolment cliff" the universities have been worried about for a long time. Apparently the pool of students is itself shrinking. https://web.archive.org/web/20230315152647/https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiemerisotis/2023/03/15/the-college-problem-in-america-is-about-more-than-cost/?sh=47d19d2f34c7 https://web.archive.org/web/20230315152647/https://www.forbe...

23B1 3y ago

> improved propagation of ideas has led to improved dissemination of ideas Prove this.

xigoi 3y ago

Putting all knowledge in the hands of a for-profit company is the opposite of “democratization of knowledge”.

_Algernon_ 3y ago
It's not as if the rest of the internet is deleted just because an AI model has been trained on it.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Yeah, but people rely on it more and more, so it's going to shape society.

nologic01 3y ago

True democratization of knowledge would mean LLM's are open source and usable by everyone (the way of Wikipedia). Even then you'd want attribution to survive. Eliminating or changing the incentives people have for doing things is the absolutely surest way to change behavior. Postulating that all published work can be appropriated at will by certain private for-profit entities is the death knell of the knowledge economy as we know it.

zirgs 3y ago
Art generators are open source and right now there are multiple ongoing court cases attempting to kill them.

friendzis 3y ago

> improved propagation of ideas has led to improved dissemination of ideas, and it will this time too I sincerely hope you are shitposting. So called Web 2.0, the platformized web has placed huge incentives to stifle propagation and dissemination of ideas. However, these incentives are somewhat distributed under human review, therefore there can be bubbles with opposing ideas. LLMs centralize censorship, by design. Currently you can find "BrawndoLounge" and "ToiletWater" subreddits that heavily censor opposing ideas. Even if one is full of hate speech or whatever, there still are opposing ideas there. If LLM guardians decide that one of these sources is "toxic", in an LLM-led web that viewpoint simply vanishes.