4 ms·

As long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without

by kibwen 2y ago

As long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without LLMs in the same way that most people in developed countries are incapable of growing their own food. Intellectual lock-in will be their moat.

adamc 2y ago
You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.
- kennethrc 2y ago
  Define "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    People who can't guide themselves without relying entirely on the app. Normally, I just glance at what action I should take next (i.e. continue straight for 2km and then take a left turn at X) and then follow the road signs to do so. But I've noticed some Uber drivers and other people who keep their eyes almost permanently at the app for locating themselves, even when there's a clear GPS or network disconnection, like in an underground pass. This often results in wasted time when the app doesn’t catch up with reality, and the driver misses a turn.
  - Version467 2y ago
    I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map. I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it. And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“
    - kingofthehill98 2y ago
      That's unfathomable to me. I live in a 1kk metropolitan area and I can go basically anywhere without a navigation system, in fact I'll only pull the GPS if I'm going to some remote neighborhood. P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      GPS is super-convenient when you're in an unfamiliar area. I sometimes catch myself thinking how did we ever get along without it. But we did. You just looked at a map before you set off, noted street names and turns, and paid attention. You would do the same thing and manage pretty well if you had to.
      - adamc 2y ago
        Of course it's convenient. But I learned to drive before we had it, and learned to find my way around without it. Maps helped, but you can do a lot with logic and by understanding direction.
    - nicolas_t 2y ago
      You don't ever walk in your city without gps? Wouldn't you know the streets after a while?
      - vel0city 2y ago
        Lots of people don't live in walkable cities. There's no realistic way they'd get to where they're going by walking. They might walk their neighborhood and know that, but these days lots of people don't even bother walking around their neighborhood. So they'll end up driving everywhere they go. Work, groceries, restaurants, etc. Always driving. Many won't go down paths that weren't previously suggested by their GPS. And often those destinations aren't designed to be walkable either. Massive parking lots separating the various storefronts. Corporate campuses completely surrounded by a sea of parking lots and garages. Nowhere to walk. That said, there's still exploring possible in a car-centric place. I tend to take alternate paths to get places, purposefully "get lost" driving around, and explore places I've never been before. But that has costs and lots of people don't bother doing that.
  - adamc 2y ago
    Find your way around an unfamiliar city or area without google maps or similar.
- malfist 2y ago
  I don't really see that as a bad thing. Einstein famously didn't memorize phone numbers because you could look it up in book. Quick external lookups are a huge productivity boost since you don't have to spend all the time memorizing something.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    It's not a bad thing so long as GPS works forever, I also think driving is much more enjoyable when you don't need to be thinking about GPS, it's nice to just focus on where you're going. I have an awesome sense of direction which I attribute to almost never using navigation apps unless I'm really worried about traffic, and even then, I can usually find a less crowded non-recommended router, because I know my way around.
  - kevlened 2y ago
    This is true to a point. You can get huge performance gains using L1 cache rather than accessing network storage.
    - malfist 2y ago
      I like your analogy. I agree. This doesn't fit all cases, and it really depends on how often and how long it takes you to look something up. Memorizing directions though? Nah. Takes a while to memorize and is quick to lookup and not used frequently. Knowing basic syntax for a programming language? That needs to be in RAM.
  - rectang 2y ago
    A conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle: > That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. > "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." > "To forget it!" > "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..." > "But the Solar System!" I protested. > "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.
  - kennethrc 2y ago
    Nah, this "older folk" loves my cameras and it's an excellent enhancement
  - scblock 2y ago
    I wish I had a camera in my Jeep. As I get older it gets harder to just turn around, and new cars have pretty bad sight lines. I think this is just using the tools available to you.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      > new cars have pretty bad sight lines This is really a big part of the reason for them. Newer cars are all aerodynamically contoured and this results in a high rear deck and a shallow angle on the rear window. It's much harder to see behind the car. I still turn my head and also use the wing mirrors to reverse. It's habit and I find it easier than looking at a screen.
  - umbra07 2y ago
    What is this based off of? Most young people (who have a car) have an old car, without backup cameras.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Backup cameras were mandated in the US in 2018 and were already getting to be pretty popular on even midrange trim vehicles by that time. Every six year old car has a backup camera, and a large percentage of 7–10-year-old cars do as well.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    I cannot reverse my car without looking at the camera but that's because cars these days are so high off the ground, the rear windows are so tiny, and the pillars are so huge that I can't see much turning around. Someone about four feet tall can easily walk past the rear of my car and aside from the half second of them in the side mirrors (which I can't see if I'm looking backwards anyways) there's no way I'd be able to see them looking backwards. But the ultra-wide angle camera mounted low on the gate I'd see them easily. Plus, with the position of the camera at the end of the vehicle and its FOV, there are angles I wouldn't possibly be able to see with a car parked on either side of me. Coupled with radar sensors able to detect cross traffic before its even possibly visible in that situation the sensors greatly enhance by ability to see the situation than if I was entirely relying on turning around. I do turn around while reversing, but more of just a double check of the overall scene. Same with double checking side mirrors while reversing. But a large amount of what I'm looking at is the screen.
golergka 2y ago
8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills. Industrial agriculture and related technologies have radically increased the amount of food we can grow compared to individual small farmers.
- atwrk 2y ago
  Both of these points can be true at the same time (and IMO are). Tech changes society, but society should also reflect on these changes - and decide whether this is the direction we want to go, the tradeoff we want to have.
- ghusto 2y ago
  > 8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills In the way we currently live, no they wouldn't. But it sounds like you're saying "wouldn't be able to", full stop, which I don't believe is true. There is no reason that all 8 billion people (with the "necessary skills") couldn't grow their own food, theoretically. It would require the west giving up the way we live, but it's worth noting that this doesn't make it impossible.
  - golergka 2y ago
    Well, if by "the way we live" you mean "not having widespread malnutrition problems and hunger periodically killing significant parts of the population", then sure thing.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Sooner or later, think tanks are going to start coming up with price charts showing how much your bills would be with and without crypto and AI. And that's going to be a huge political hot potato for these companies to manage. I hope they're ready to invest in massive solar farms.
djcooley 2y ago
This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.
- golergka 2y ago
  What's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    A more apt comparison might be asking the abacus what it thinks of the calculator.
  - m4tthumphrey 2y ago
    Does calculating numbers based on concrete rules require "thinking" in the same way OP talks about? I think not.
  - foobazgt 2y ago
    You don't allow students to use calculators for operations they haven't personally mastered. If you don't learn how to add two numbers on your own, the rest of your learning is in serious jeopardy. This is the author's lament. These students are skipping over personal mastery.
  - helboi4 2y ago
    I will occasionally do long multiplication in my minds eye just to make sure I can lol. Anything more complicated than that, most people will not be doing anyway. University students however, almost universally do need to write sometimes. Similarly if I had decided to do something maths heavy at uni I would be expected to be able to do some pretty complex maths without a calculator first, even if I don't need to do that all the time. It's pretty standard that higher education requires a level of intellectual rigour that is totally unecessary for day to day life. In the case of ChatGPT, it's allowing people to completely bypass that process even in those settings. Meaning you NEVER learn to do it, not just that you don't do it day to day.
fulafel 2y ago
Maybe in the future the "alien intelligences" for next generations will be people who had classic educations before social media and LLMs.
gorbachev 2y ago
But think of 8 billion people paying $40 / month to OpenAI. Put yourself on the OpenAI IPO waiting list right now! /s
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I find Claude to be better...

by kibwen 2y ago

adamc 2y ago

You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.

kennethrc 2y ago
Define "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.
- mrbungie 2y ago
  People who can't guide themselves without relying entirely on the app. Normally, I just glance at what action I should take next (i.e. continue straight for 2km and then take a left turn at X) and then follow the road signs to do so. But I've noticed some Uber drivers and other people who keep their eyes almost permanently at the app for locating themselves, even when there's a clear GPS or network disconnection, like in an underground pass. This often results in wasted time when the app doesn’t catch up with reality, and the driver misses a turn.
- Version467 2y ago
  I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map. I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it. And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“
  - kingofthehill98 2y ago
    That's unfathomable to me. I live in a 1kk metropolitan area and I can go basically anywhere without a navigation system, in fact I'll only pull the GPS if I'm going to some remote neighborhood. P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    GPS is super-convenient when you're in an unfamiliar area. I sometimes catch myself thinking how did we ever get along without it. But we did. You just looked at a map before you set off, noted street names and turns, and paid attention. You would do the same thing and manage pretty well if you had to.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Of course it's convenient. But I learned to drive before we had it, and learned to find my way around without it. Maps helped, but you can do a lot with logic and by understanding direction.
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    You don't ever walk in your city without gps? Wouldn't you know the streets after a while?
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Lots of people don't live in walkable cities. There's no realistic way they'd get to where they're going by walking. They might walk their neighborhood and know that, but these days lots of people don't even bother walking around their neighborhood. So they'll end up driving everywhere they go. Work, groceries, restaurants, etc. Always driving. Many won't go down paths that weren't previously suggested by their GPS. And often those destinations aren't designed to be walkable either. Massive parking lots separating the various storefronts. Corporate campuses completely surrounded by a sea of parking lots and garages. Nowhere to walk. That said, there's still exploring possible in a car-centric place. I tend to take alternate paths to get places, purposefully "get lost" driving around, and explore places I've never been before. But that has costs and lots of people don't bother doing that.
- adamc 2y ago
  Find your way around an unfamiliar city or area without google maps or similar.
malfist 2y ago
I don't really see that as a bad thing. Einstein famously didn't memorize phone numbers because you could look it up in book. Quick external lookups are a huge productivity boost since you don't have to spend all the time memorizing something.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  It's not a bad thing so long as GPS works forever, I also think driving is much more enjoyable when you don't need to be thinking about GPS, it's nice to just focus on where you're going. I have an awesome sense of direction which I attribute to almost never using navigation apps unless I'm really worried about traffic, and even then, I can usually find a less crowded non-recommended router, because I know my way around.
- kevlened 2y ago
  This is true to a point. You can get huge performance gains using L1 cache rather than accessing network storage.
  - malfist 2y ago
    I like your analogy. I agree. This doesn't fit all cases, and it really depends on how often and how long it takes you to look something up. Memorizing directions though? Nah. Takes a while to memorize and is quick to lookup and not used frequently. Knowing basic syntax for a programming language? That needs to be in RAM.
- rectang 2y ago
  A conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle: > That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. > "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." > "To forget it!" > "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..." > "But the Solar System!" I protested. > "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Workaccount2 2y ago
I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.
- kennethrc 2y ago
  Nah, this "older folk" loves my cameras and it's an excellent enhancement
- scblock 2y ago
  I wish I had a camera in my Jeep. As I get older it gets harder to just turn around, and new cars have pretty bad sight lines. I think this is just using the tools available to you.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    > new cars have pretty bad sight lines This is really a big part of the reason for them. Newer cars are all aerodynamically contoured and this results in a high rear deck and a shallow angle on the rear window. It's much harder to see behind the car. I still turn my head and also use the wing mirrors to reverse. It's habit and I find it easier than looking at a screen.
- umbra07 2y ago
  What is this based off of? Most young people (who have a car) have an old car, without backup cameras.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Backup cameras were mandated in the US in 2018 and were already getting to be pretty popular on even midrange trim vehicles by that time. Every six year old car has a backup camera, and a large percentage of 7–10-year-old cars do as well.
- vel0city 2y ago
  I cannot reverse my car without looking at the camera but that's because cars these days are so high off the ground, the rear windows are so tiny, and the pillars are so huge that I can't see much turning around. Someone about four feet tall can easily walk past the rear of my car and aside from the half second of them in the side mirrors (which I can't see if I'm looking backwards anyways) there's no way I'd be able to see them looking backwards. But the ultra-wide angle camera mounted low on the gate I'd see them easily. Plus, with the position of the camera at the end of the vehicle and its FOV, there are angles I wouldn't possibly be able to see with a car parked on either side of me. Coupled with radar sensors able to detect cross traffic before its even possibly visible in that situation the sensors greatly enhance by ability to see the situation than if I was entirely relying on turning around. I do turn around while reversing, but more of just a double check of the overall scene. Same with double checking side mirrors while reversing. But a large amount of what I'm looking at is the screen.

golergka 2y ago

8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills. Industrial agriculture and related technologies have radically increased the amount of food we can grow compared to individual small farmers.

atwrk 2y ago
Both of these points can be true at the same time (and IMO are). Tech changes society, but society should also reflect on these changes - and decide whether this is the direction we want to go, the tradeoff we want to have.
ghusto 2y ago
> 8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills In the way we currently live, no they wouldn't. But it sounds like you're saying "wouldn't be able to", full stop, which I don't believe is true. There is no reason that all 8 billion people (with the "necessary skills") couldn't grow their own food, theoretically. It would require the west giving up the way we live, but it's worth noting that this doesn't make it impossible.
- golergka 2y ago
  Well, if by "the way we live" you mean "not having widespread malnutrition problems and hunger periodically killing significant parts of the population", then sure thing.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Sooner or later, think tanks are going to start coming up with price charts showing how much your bills would be with and without crypto and AI. And that's going to be a huge political hot potato for these companies to manage. I hope they're ready to invest in massive solar farms.

djcooley 2y ago

This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.

golergka 2y ago
What's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  A more apt comparison might be asking the abacus what it thinks of the calculator.
- m4tthumphrey 2y ago
  Does calculating numbers based on concrete rules require "thinking" in the same way OP talks about? I think not.
- foobazgt 2y ago
  You don't allow students to use calculators for operations they haven't personally mastered. If you don't learn how to add two numbers on your own, the rest of your learning is in serious jeopardy. This is the author's lament. These students are skipping over personal mastery.
- helboi4 2y ago
  I will occasionally do long multiplication in my minds eye just to make sure I can lol. Anything more complicated than that, most people will not be doing anyway. University students however, almost universally do need to write sometimes. Similarly if I had decided to do something maths heavy at uni I would be expected to be able to do some pretty complex maths without a calculator first, even if I don't need to do that all the time. It's pretty standard that higher education requires a level of intellectual rigour that is totally unecessary for day to day life. In the case of ChatGPT, it's allowing people to completely bypass that process even in those settings. Meaning you NEVER learn to do it, not just that you don't do it day to day.

fulafel 2y ago

Maybe in the future the "alien intelligences" for next generations will be people who had classic educations before social media and LLMs.

gorbachev 2y ago

But think of 8 billion people paying $40 / month to OpenAI. Put yourself on the OpenAI IPO waiting list right now! /s

bamboozled 2y ago
I find Claude to be better...