As an older techy I’m with you on this, having seen this ridiculous fight so many times.
Whenever a new tech comes out that gets big attention you have the Tech Companies saying everyone has to over it in Overhype.
And you have the proud luddites who talk like everyone else is dumb and they’re the only ones capable of seeing the downsides of tech
“Buy an iPhone, it’ll Change your life!”
“Why do I need to do anything except phone people and the battery only lasts one day! It’ll never catch on”
“Buy a Satnav, it’ll get you anywhere!”
“That satnav drove a woman into a lake!”
“Our AI is smart enough to run the world!”
“This is just a way to steal my words like that guy who invented cameras to steal people’s souls!”
🫤
Tech was never meant to do your thinking for you. It’s a tool. Learn how to use it or don’t, but if you use tools right, 10,000 years of human history says that’s helpful.
The thing is, some “tech” is just fucking dumb, and should have never been done. Here are just a few small examples:
“Get connected to the city gas factory, you can have gaslamps indoors and never have to bother with oil again!”
“Lets bulldoze those houses to let people drive through the middle of our city”
“In the future we’ll all have vacuum tubes in our homes to send and deliver mail”
“Airships are the future of transatlantic travel”
“Blockchain will revolutionize everything!”
“People can use our rockets to travel across the ocean”
“Roads are a great place to put solar panels”
“LLMs are a great way of making things”
There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius
which redefines and transcends those boundaries.
Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn nonetheless for the latter.
EDIT: and in slightly more content-related answer: I picked those examples because there’s a range of reason why these things were stupid. Some turned out to be stupid afterwards, like building highly polluting gasworks in the middle of cities or airships. Some turned were always stupid even in their very principles, like using rockets for airtravel, solarpanel roads or blockchain.
LLMs are definitely in the latter category. Like solar roadways, blockchains or commute-by-rocket, the “solution” just doesn’t have problem or a market.
I agree. People are often dumb, especially the smart ones.
When you go through life seeing the world differently it’s easy to assume that other people just don’t get it, that they’re the problem as always, when they say your invention is useless, misguided, inappropriate or harmful.
No matter how smart these people are, reality always catches up in the end, hopefully with as few casualties as possible.
Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That’s the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.
You can hit your thumb if you use the tool wrong, and it can break, doing damage, if e.g. it is not stored properly. When you use a hammer, you accept these risks, and can choose to take steps to mitigate them by storing it properly, taking care when using it and checking it’s not loose before using it.
In the same regard, if you use LLMs for what they’re good at, and verify their outputs, they can be useful tools.
“LLMs pointless because I can write a shopping list myself” is like saying “hammers are pointless because I can just use this plank instead”. Sure, you can do that, but there’s other scenarios where a hammer would be kinda handy.
As an older techy I’m with you on this, having seen this ridiculous fight so many times.
Whenever a new tech comes out that gets big attention you have the Tech Companies saying everyone has to over it in Overhype.
And you have the proud luddites who talk like everyone else is dumb and they’re the only ones capable of seeing the downsides of tech
“Buy an iPhone, it’ll Change your life!”
“Why do I need to do anything except phone people and the battery only lasts one day! It’ll never catch on”
“Buy a Satnav, it’ll get you anywhere!”
“That satnav drove a woman into a lake!”
“Our AI is smart enough to run the world!”
“This is just a way to steal my words like that guy who invented cameras to steal people’s souls!”
🫤
Tech was never meant to do your thinking for you. It’s a tool. Learn how to use it or don’t, but if you use tools right, 10,000 years of human history says that’s helpful.
The thing is, some “tech” is just fucking dumb, and should have never been done. Here are just a few small examples:
“Get connected to the city gas factory, you can have gaslamps indoors and never have to bother with oil again!”
“Lets bulldoze those houses to let people drive through the middle of our city”
“In the future we’ll all have vacuum tubes in our homes to send and deliver mail”
“Airships are the future of transatlantic travel”
“Blockchain will revolutionize everything!”
“People can use our rockets to travel across the ocean”
“Roads are a great place to put solar panels” “LLMs are a great way of making things”
There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries.
Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn nonetheless for the latter.
Always upvote Alpha Centauri!
EDIT: and in slightly more content-related answer: I picked those examples because there’s a range of reason why these things were stupid. Some turned out to be stupid afterwards, like building highly polluting gasworks in the middle of cities or airships. Some turned were always stupid even in their very principles, like using rockets for airtravel, solarpanel roads or blockchain.
LLMs are definitely in the latter category. Like solar roadways, blockchains or commute-by-rocket, the “solution” just doesn’t have problem or a market.
I agree. People are often dumb, especially the smart ones.
When you go through life seeing the world differently it’s easy to assume that other people just don’t get it, that they’re the problem as always, when they say your invention is useless, misguided, inappropriate or harmful.
No matter how smart these people are, reality always catches up in the end, hopefully with as few casualties as possible.
Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That’s the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.
No, but I do use hammers despite the risks.
Because I’m aware of the risks and so I use hammers safely, despite the occasional bruised thumb.
You missed my point. The hammers you’re using aren’t ‘wrong’, i.e. smacking you in the face 15% of the time.
Said another way, if other tools were as unreliable as ChatGPT, nobody would use them.
You’ve missed my point.
ChatGPT can be wrong but it can’t hurt you unless you assume it’s always right
And assuming it’s always right is what the general public is doing.
Like the lady who drives into the lake because sat nav told her to.
Hammers are unreliable.
You can hit your thumb if you use the tool wrong, and it can break, doing damage, if e.g. it is not stored properly. When you use a hammer, you accept these risks, and can choose to take steps to mitigate them by storing it properly, taking care when using it and checking it’s not loose before using it.
In the same regard, if you use LLMs for what they’re good at, and verify their outputs, they can be useful tools.
“LLMs pointless because I can write a shopping list myself” is like saying “hammers are pointless because I can just use this plank instead”. Sure, you can do that, but there’s other scenarios where a hammer would be kinda handy.
This is the part the general public is not prepared for, and why the whole house of cards falls apart.
I agree - but that’s user error, not a bad tool