[bitlad]

I think AI is powertool. Period. If you give it to people who are skill, it will create a mess.

I think democratization of intelligence is going to be interesting. You could say the same with same about internet. I think it is part of evolution. May be intelligence or expertise is what does not make us special. May be it is that we are ingenious amd creative with tools and thats how we evolve.

[choilive]

There are some studies that suggest human brain sizes have been shrinking over the last 20,000 years. The theory is that as civilization developed the demand for individual humans to be independently intelligent has weakened because we developed a "collective brain" and also self-domesticated to be more cooperative.

[veidelis]

Honestly there might be truth to it, I don't get the downvotes - why?

[Someone]

The correlation between brain volume and intelligence is fairly weak. Neanderthals had larger brains than humans, for example. Looking outside the hominids, we have fairly smart corvids with relatively tiny brains.

That means the chain of thought “brains volume decreased, so individuals must have gotten less intelligent. Yet, societies grew smarter, so there must be herd intelligence” breaks at “so individuals must have gotten less intelligent”.

I think/guess that argument may have merit when replacing brain volume by number of neurons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...)

[steve_adams_86]

> democratization of intelligence

I'm not trying to be pedantic; I think this is an interesting topic and there's a worthwhile distinction to make here. It isn't really being democratized for a couple reasons (at least).

One, access to information isn't truly knowledge in and of itself. People allowing information from LLMs to pass through their brains are not necessarily retaining any of it, and their ability to synthesize and utilize disparate information from LLMs isn't inherently improved by this technology. So the premise of knowledge isn't very sturdy in my mind.

Two, LLMs function across very broad fields of capability, accuracy, content, and so on, and the best models are not accessible to many people. I find people tend to mean the technology is widely available and accessible when they say 'democratization', but that's not necessarily true nor what that word means to begin with.

True democratization would mean something more like "everyone participates in, shapes, regulates, and grows this technology with their own inputs". I don't think that's what happens at all, and in fact, it has been quite the inversion of that so far.

I mention all of this because I agree that it will be interesting to watch what happens, but I don't agree that it will be for the same reasons. I worry about it specifically because there is not an egalitarian distribution of knowledge, and it is not democratically built or shared.

[ekidd]

> May be it is that we are ingenious amd creative with tools and thats how we evolve.

And every time you use the AI to be ingenious or creative, that will be added to the training data. Then someday the AI can be ingenious and creative without you! (It might take a few more breakthroughs. But investors will literally spend trillions chasing those breakthroughs.)

The endgame here is to replace all human intelligence and labor with machines that are smarter and work cheaper. But who controls the machines?

[bitlad]

> And every time you use the AI to be ingenious or creative, that will be added to the training data That's part of evolution.

We as humans have always outsmarted the tools.