[blackcatsec]

> I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.

I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual.

What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so.

There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle...

But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).

[virgildotcodes]

It's funny because the fundamental thing I'm speaking out against is the arrogance of human exceptionalism.

This whole debate about what it means to be intelligent or human just seems like we're making the same mistakes we've made over and over.

Earth as the center of the universe, sun as the center of the universe, man as the only animal with consciousness and intellect, the anthropomorphic nature of the majority of the deities in our religions and the anthropocentric purpose of the universe within those religions...

I think this desire to believe that we are special, that the universe in some way does ultimately revolve around us, is seemingly a deep need in our psyche but any material analysis of our universe shows that it is extremely unlikely that we hold that position.

[array_key_first]

The need for human exceptionalism doesn't come from the psyche or anything like that, it's just basic survival skills. Humans believe themselves to be special because that's the only belief that isn't self-destructive.

You can choose to believe humans are not exceptional, in the same way I can choose to cut off all my fingers and eat them. Why would I do that?

If what you say about LLMs is true, that's bad for me. And for you. And for our families. Because it means our instrinic value of living just went down a lot. I choose not to believe it because I am not suicidal. And, ultimately, I think the people who do believe it can only ever make their lives worse. Probably my life worse too, but maybe if I'm all the way over here I'll avoid the blast radius.

[virgildotcodes]

Sure, I agree it's a valuable survival skill. Being fully consumed by the idea that you are the only thing that matters and is of value, or at least you are at the top of the pyramid of what matters and is of value, is how you survive mortal conflict and competition with others be they animals, humans, future AIs, whatever.

That said, an objective assessment of reality reveals that you are not in fact the only thing that matters, or the thing that matters the most, in this universe. There's no way to argue your life is more valuable than the lives of the other humans you're in competition with that isn't ex post facto rationalization.

I agree that LLMs/AI pose many threats to us. I don't think the intrinsic value of living objectively went down, although the perception of it may be in the process of doing so. I think it's objectively always been what it is and we've held useful (to us) delusions about it, which AI now threatens to shatter some part of these.

I've thought a few times lately about beneficial delusion - things like blind, baseless, even counterfactual confidence in yourself are genuinely helpful in so many aspects of life from interpersonal relationships, to sales, to success in business and various pursuits.

You may not actually be the smartest and most capable person but by genuinely believing that you are you will trend towards positive outcomes.

Anyway, I think this belief in our central role in the universe/exceptionalism is another example of this, or as you put it just another useful survival skill.

That said, I do like to stay grounded as much as I can in as objective an assessment of reality as I can muster, otherwise I start to feel unmoored and like I'm going insane.

[slopinthebag]

I largely agree with you, but I also see this same type of thinking appear in people who I know are not arrogant - at least in the techbroisk way.