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If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok any conceivable topic has “no economic impact,” you should probably question how you measure of econo
by ppqqrr 2y ago
If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok any conceivable topic has “no economic impact,” you should probably question how you measure of economic impact - perhaps even your very definition of the economy, the nature of human labor and collaboration. Fundamental changes at the base of the hierarchy will always escape the attention of high level managerial class, because the one thing they’re never taught to do is to consider the possibility that their inherited power structure may become irrelevant.
- wmf 2y agoThe simplest explanation is just that people aren't using it yet.
- Terr_ 2y ago> If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok any conceivable topic If you think that's happened, then you and I are living on very different Internets with different individuals. :P
- realharo 2y agoOr maybe that already happened decades ago with the Internet and search engines.
- ppqqrr 2y agoArguably, but imho the difference between search engines and GPTs is akin to punch card coding vs modern IDE - theoretically the same activity, vastly different in practice.
- realharo 2y agoFor generating output, sure, but when it comes to "helping individuals grok any conceivable topic" like the original comment said, you're still bottlenecked by how fast you can read and understand text, so it won't make as much difference there. Plus, from my experience, the more obscure topics, which are not easy to google, also tend to suffer the most from hallucinations when using LLMs. The topics which ChatGPT can explain perfectly usually have well-written explanations at the top of search results too.
- Terr_ 2y agoMy (snarky) point is that I do not think LLMs have dramatically enabled the average person to grok (to gain a deep and intuitive understanding of) new topics, because I haven't observed the corresponding sea-change in (mostly online) people that I would expect to go with that. To offer a competing hypothesis: LLMs are merely augmenting or replacing other routes that people may take to acquire facile knowledge. In addition, the fundamental way those tools operate limits them to imparting facile knowledge.