[satisfice]

This strikes me as babbling. 70 percent fever dream.

To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls.

I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doesn’t. On balance, any benefit is drowned out by the effort it takes me to check its work.

I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves, or who have crippling impostor syndrome.

[bm3719]

The thinking-averse outnumber the thinking-inclined. They've tried this thinking thing, and want nothing to do with it. They all went to public school, after all, and the rare times thinking happened it was painful and had to be forced upon them. Their ideal of Being is to react to content, experience positive emotional immediacy, or dull their intellects: all feeling, no thinking.

They'll win in the short term, due to the tyranny of convenience. Then, when all economic value has been extracted from them and the possibility of future value made nil, they'll lose. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll win though.

[isoprophlex]

It's a negative-sum game that breaks the fourth wall; even not playing makes you lose.

[incone123]

They all went to public school?

[actionfromafar]

Yeah, that stuck out to me too.

[satisfice]

Public school in America is normal school.

[incone123]

Yes. It came off as sneering.

[Kon5ole]

>To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers.Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake.

That's an uncharitable take of what he actually said, he was clearly talking about being able to get information presented as if it was explained by a particular person. The training data contains everything that person ever wrote, so it might be pretty close. Fake sure, but also often correct and presented in a familiar way.

I've often thought that many concepts I struggled with in school came down to the teacher explaining them in ways that was "incompatible" (for lack of a better word) with my way of thinking for that particular concept. Not that I was special, I think every student experiences this from time to time.

Being able to continue asking questions about dinosaurs or atoms or the roman empire long after any human teacher would get tired will help many a curious kid learn faster than they could before.

>I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves

I find this take strange - you still have to think but LLM's help you. Googling things or tracking down a breaking change in version 9.2 from 8.7 or why a regexp is not working correctly is not thinking. It's just busywork.

Spreadsheets removed the satisfaction of "carrying the one" with pen and paper and a whole bunch of valued skills lost value - but it turned out fine. Same with going from assembly to C or C to Java. We ended up with more programmers and more software, not less.

I think once the dust settles LLM's will be a similar change, if perhaps much larger in scope.