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Cal Newport has an analogy to "putting a weed wacker on a dog's back to mow your lawn." The dog will wander around the yard and it may mow the lawn, but the dog
by jordanb 20d ago
Cal Newport has an analogy to "putting a weed wacker on a dog's back to mow your lawn." The dog will wander around the yard and it may mow the lawn, but the dog will also chase after birds or run up to visitors for pets and the weed wacker could do a lot of damage.
It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild.
- DrewADesign 20d agoYeah I like Cal’s take on it, though in this context I’d argue LLMs have even less agency, and are even less deserving of anthropomorphization than a dog is.
- visarga 20d agoThe difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference. We also run agents, but for shorter spans between supervisions, and with much lower total budget.
- oarsinsync 20d ago> > It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild. > The difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference. So put one weed whacker on one dog, you're to blame. Put a million weed whackers on a million dogs backs and ... you're still to blame? Arguably even more so?
- verzali 20d agoYou forgot the part where you spend billions to put your man in a position of power.
- 1718627440 18d agoThe you are responsible even more, and also proved you did it intentionally. What are you even arguing for? This way you do not absolve your responsibility, you just manipulate the way to enforce it.
- ryankrage77 20d agoIt goes even further though, as the dog does have agency. It can choose to run and around chase squirrels with no human intervention. An LLM on the other hand, is just inert data on disk until a human takes deliberate action to run it and prompt it.
- singpolyma3 20d agoDogs have agency and can choose? That seems like a rather uncommon take on dogs...
- mock-possum 20d agoNot if you have a dog. They’re very clearly aware, have minds, have thoughts, gather information, make decisions, second guess themselves, reflect on the immediate consequences, change their mind… and most importantly, you can observe them doing all these things undirected, while left alone with their thoughts.
- singpolyma3 20d agoI have had many dogs. This sounds like anthropomorphisation.
- pegasus 20d agoSounds like you weren't paying attention. A lot of dog owners don't, so it's not at all unusual in my experience. The only thing I'd push back on is of dogs having thoughts, everything else checks out.
- singpolyma3 20d agoWe're still not even sure if humans have thoughts. So being sure if dogs do will be pretty hard
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- dfxm12 20d agoPower tools and many other consumer products have reasonable safety features built in, and not necessarily because it is required by regulation, but because it is common sense. This should be included as part of an analogy. It would also address a point at the top of this thread that seems to be going unchallenged...
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