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by CamperBob2 36 days ago
What's happening is the verbal/linguistic equivalent of the invention of calculus. No intellectual field will ever be the same again. Who wouldn't find that exciting, and want to experience it?
3 comments

I don't think change is inherently exciting.
Maybe plumbing, masonry, or mining would have been a better career fit, then. Tech isn't for everybody.
People who enjoy thinking. Ya know, the "intellectual" part.
This is the beginning of thinking, not the end...
It depends. If you are in a disadvantaged class it is very likely going to err towards a dismal result long term. However if you are a privileged intellectual these models can accelerate and expand your horizon. It isn't the end, surely. It is, however, both impressive and depressive simultaneously and that perspective only depends on your point of view.
But when the bar to entry is beyond expertise in a field or subfield, how does an individual ever hope to attain an unexplored space to explore?

It may be the beginning of thinking, but to many who view things on a longer timeline. It starts to look like it will breakdown the frameworks of which are required to get to that position. Otherwise, you just end up retreading explored ground. This removing the joy of discovery from any humans hand/mind.

Recently I've found my mind reawaken. It's about asking good questions now. The models can find the answers, but you have to know what to ask. Sometimes the model is wrong and you have to challenge it to find an alternative. Being able to explore problem spaces quickly is interesting.
Why would having more thinking companions stop you from thinking? Knowledge compounds.
The so called "progressives" prove that they were the same ones crying after the printing press, automobile, calculator, washing machine, etc
You made up a group in the past and you made up things they say and then draw the inference that a different group in the present is somehow morally disadvantaged by obvious inference.

Perhaps your name-calling is not actually as logically grounded as you think. It definitely seems to depend on unfounded leaps.

I'm not sure I grasp the analogy to the invention of calculus. Calculus helped us solve new and interesting math/physics problems. Repeated for emphasis: helped *us* solve.

This technology is solving interesting math/physics problems for us, which is completely different.

Before the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus, enormous ingenuity and whole careers were spent doing calculations which the fundamental theorem trivialized. To be clear, I'm not just saying that the people involved were doing lots of mechanical arithmetic (though they did that, too). I'm saying they did creative, inspired, nontrivial mathematics to calculate certain things, all of which was then trivialized and made obsolete by the fundamental theorem of calculus.
After Newton and Leibniz, math did things nobody thought it could do. After Vaswani et al., language does things nobody thought it could do.