Do you really feel that skipping LLMs would be like skipping the industrial revolution, electricity, or the internet? Twenty years from now where do you see societies that "embrace" this technology vs. ones that don't?
It's obvious what electricity and mass production can do to improve the prosperity and happiness of a given society. It's not so obvious to me what benefits we'd be missing out on if we just canceled LLMs at this point.
LLMs aren’t the end all be all of anything. But they’re clearly a step towards augmenting human cognition and in giving machines the ability to perform cognitive tasks. And when Google says a quarter of its code is being written by LLMs, and DeepMind is making tremendous progress on protein folding and DNA understanding with fundamentally the same technology, it seems pretty clear that we’d miss out on a lot without this.
Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.
So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.
When I look at the problems in my life, in my country, or in the world around me, not once has it occurred to me that they were due to a lack of advanced pattern recognition or DNA prediction.
When people were dying of hunger then being able to create more food was obviously a huge win. Likewise for creating light where people used to live in darkness.
But contemporary technologies solve non-problems and take us closer to a future no one asked for, when all we want is cheaper rent, cheaper healthcare, and less corruption.
I said cheaper. Not better. What difference does it make if it's better if only a few people can afford it. I also don't accept longer lifespans as something that is always worth pursuing.
You also didn't address my point that those technologies do nothing to solve the real problems that real people want solved. There's a strong possibility that they'll just exacerbate them.
I guess your argument could be leveled against any transformational technology, from the industrial age through to the internet (which many doubted would have any meaningful economic impact, and clearly didn't solve many of the most pressing problems of the day for humanity).
By "Luddite," you mean "resist progress, therefore bad." Progress is not inherently bad. Luddites didn't say it is; this blog post doesn't say it is either. We are currently rushing forward with implementing AI everywhere, as much as possible, and what these posts (thinking about Xe Iaso) urge you to think about is how this new revolutionary technology affects us, society, the people who will be displaced by it. If it will yield a disproportionate amount of misery, then we should oppose it on the moral grounds. There's no guarantee of ASI heaven or hell, so it's merely prudent to think about the repercussions. We didn't think - damn, we couldn't even approach imagining - all of the repercussions of replacing traditional agriculture with industrial agriculture, of the industrial revolution, of the internet, so maybe, with technology this powerful, it would be sensible to think about the repercussions before we upend the social order once again.
> The idea that we could just reject the technology feels kind of like a Luddite reaction to it.
The luddites were a labor movement protesting how a new technology was used by mill owners to attack collective worker power in exchange for producing a worse product. Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
> Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
Hard to say. They sort of represented the specialist class being undermined by technology de-specializing their skillset. This is in contrast to labor strikes and riots which were executed by unskilled labor finding solidarity to tell machine owners "your machine is neat but unless you meet our demands, you'll be running around trying to operate it alone." Luddites weren't unions; they were guilds.
One was an attempt to maintain a status quo that was comfortable for some and kept products expensive, the other was a demand that given the convenience afforded by automation, the fruits of that convenience be diffused through everyone involved, not consolidated in the hands of the machine owners.
They were wrong to believe that technological progress could be stopped. The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. That tactic has never and will never work.
> The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines.
This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
I don't want to start a snippy argument, so sorry if this sounds combative, but when you realize that there isn't a "policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed", then what would you suggest?
Unionization and collective action does work, it's why we have things like the concept of the weekend. It's also generally useful when advocating change to have a more extreme faction.
But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
This is a good point. When has breaking stuff and disrupting productivity as a form of protest ever worked? It’s not like battles are fought with violence. They are fought through people doing Policy in their heads, which sort of just naturally becomes Policy out in the world on its own.
That isn’t what luddites did though. I wrote my earlier post quite a while after several other folks clearly and eloquently explained that in response to your post. I figured you would’ve been up to speed about tactics vs goals vis a vis the luddites by the time you got to that post
> Any information processing technology can be argued to be a surveillance technology.
The telemetric enclosure movement and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity, and advancements in technology are now doing more harm than good. Life expectancy is dropping for the first time in ages, and the generational gains in life expectancy had a lot of inertia behind them. That's all gone now.
Any sources to back that up? All I can find is rising life expectancy across the board globally, with a dip during the pandemic that almost all countries have recovered from. The US has been a bit sluggish there, but still.
Yes. There has been a regression in these metrics for white folks in the US. This is the first generation of whites in America who can expect to earn less and live shorter lives than their parents. However, that doesn’t generalize to the rest of the population, or world, and in America the reasons are policy: healthcare and education. Not because AI or tech broadly is particularly pernicious.
