[btschaegg]

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

[croon]

It's not so much the technologies that are good/bad, but IMHO that the pipeline between invention of and abuse of technology is increasingly short.

[soloto]

There are just too many examples by now that immoral and even illegal behavior will not be prosecuted or otherwise punished, especially if you make money with it. No wonder the pipeline is getting shorter.

[benterix]

It's funny because I was watching a lot of amazing new tech appear after I was 35 and most of it was exciting. Learning these things was fun and rewarding. You could say it made me happier.

Not sure why LLMs feel the opposite. Maybe it's because of the terrible marketing and pushing it down everyone's throats. Maybe it's because of the personality of people like sama, or how it's being used to produce the so-called AI slop globally. Maybe something completely different. But there's something bleak and off-putting in it.

[archagon]

Kinda funny that you're quoting a real author who would never in a million years have resorted to using slop generators.

"I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki

[raddan]

I’m not so sure. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist who worked on two interactive fiction games: the famously-cruel Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide and Starship Titanic. I don’t remember whether there was anything free-form about the dialogue in the HHGG game, but Starship Titanic had many bots you could talk to. It was immensely fun, and I suspect he would have loved the ability to spin out dialogue a little more naturally.

On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…

[intended]

I WANT to be excited by LLMs.

But it has been so frustrating to listen to the hype and then contend with the actual results.

How bizarre is this tool, that I have been forced to conduct interviews across all domains, to see where people are having actual productivity gains?

I never had to do this with the iPhone, or with word, excel or any number of cool technological inventions.

The early internet empowered people, and we created some of our most amazing collaborative intellectual achievements like wikipedia.

Today, aside from being built by harvesting the IP of people, LLMs are shuttering our entire information economy. Sites I go to for info are either going behind paywalls or shutting down because they are being rapaciously harvested by bots.

Yes, history rhymes and repeats; however there are other tunes that have been played that sound similar but end differently.

[JKCalhoun]

I have been treating LLMs as a research assistant (and sometimes tutor) as I have explored analog computing for a hobbyist project that I have been working on for 6 months now.

To my mind, saying the AI will cause me to forget how to learn is equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn.

[sph]

> equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn

I see plenty of “classically trained” people (as opposed to self-taught) that have no idea how to learn things on their own and at their pace.

I mean, in the era of youtube and the internet, any subreddit is filled with posts like ‘where do I start with X?’ or a endless rehashing of the same beginner questions from people that are not even able to use Google.

I am biased as a self-taught person that dropped out of high school, and it is baffling to see people have forgot how to learn things by themselves past 10 years old. There wouldn’t be so many people with student debts if that were the case.

[happytoexplain]

True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.

[RajT88]

Happy Service!