[kykat]

I've read "amusing ourselves to death" and there the author also criticises the idea that new technologies are "just tools".

The invention of the telegraph changed how information is traded and the contents of newspapers, the invention of the TV changed politics, and so on.

The medium shapes the message and induces behaviours from us. We never thought about wanting to promt chatgpt, or watch people doing sports on a screen. But the possibility of doing these things makes us change.

LLMs obviously have and will continue shaping the world, and I am also afraid that it will create a worse future than the one that we had until now.

I think deployment should slow down and research should be financed and diversified.

[account42]

The difference is that TVs and other past inventions weren't pushed on everyone at all cost. You could and still can live a mostly TV-free live. Workplaces aren't making you watch TV while you work. There is no one insinuation that you'll be obsolete if you don't embrace TVs. Your existing appliances didn't suddenly sprout a TV screen. Instead, people bought TVs because they saw value in them, at a time of their choosing.

[kykat]

Even if you never watched TV your whole life, you still can't escape the consequences of other people watching TV.

That's the thing to keep in mind, it's not something an individual can "fix".

That's why policies and laws are so important.

[trhway]

>The medium shapes the message and induces behaviours from us.

Basically the Homo Sapiens history is the history of making and using tools. That is for example how we got the hands we've got, and our social organization was shaped by agriculture and later by the mass production and now more and more by information technology with AI becoming the major part of it.

>I am also afraid that it will create a worse future than the one that we had until now.

were hunters-gatherers better of worse than agricultural village dwellers? There is no clear answer. I feel that each stage of the progress made our lives better while some people want "back to the caves" though i think they probably never spent a night under open skies.

>I think deployment should slow down and research should be financed and diversified.

You can't slow down it in all countries at the same time. And thus slowing down it in any given country would just put that country behind.

[WelkinFolk]

But doesn't this argument presume that every technology must be adopted with as much zeal as possible. That every tool is good for the future of human race. Should we not question the technologies that we so readily adopt? I'm not against AI as a whole, and as Torvalds said, "genie is out of the bottle now", but does this mean that any effort to question or regulate technology translates to "primitivism", or is it just pragmatic to do so?

[trhway]

>does this mean that any effort to question or regulate technology translates to "primitivism"

more so than not. We are highly adaptable, and that is our strength as a species. We are that adaptable because of our brain, and we have such brain as a result of adapting again and again. We should pay more attention to how to adapt to new tech at individual and social levels, and that adaptation would in turn again advance us. Whereis strict-prohibition-like-measures really play against our adaptability as they favor slow-to-adapt traits of our species, again at individual and social level.

There are of course cases where our adaptation is very limited - like for example highly radioactive environments, and so we chose to strictly regulate nuclear tech.

Practically speaking i'm all for government funded job retraining where it is possible, and for strong safety net to soften social impact of new tech. And in particular nothing prevents the government to charge a modest tax on each token and use those collected taxes to support the affected people.

[bawolff]

> The invention of the telegraph changed how information is traded and the contents of newspapers, the invention of the TV changed politics, and so on.

Isn't that kind of the definition of a tool? Something that does something useful and as a result changes the way the world works (whether in a big way or a small way)? Wouldn't be much of a tool if it wasn't useful. It wouldn't be very useful if it didn't have an impact.