The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves.
IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.
>This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way.
Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.
The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).
I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.
Man, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't know how you can spend even 5 minutes on Facebook looking at the absolutely bonkers shit one's own relatives and neighbors post and still come away thinking that most people are "thoughtful".
Are humans capable of profound creativity? Of course. Are they actually doing it? No, not very often.
I do not spend even 5 minutes on facebook. Aside from a comment or two per day on HN, the only human interactions I have on the internet are with coworkers, a of whom I regularly see in person.
If you find yourself consuming more than 5 minutes of content you don't find thoughtful per day, I would ask why. "Touch grass" seems to be the common advice to combat this.
Okay, and you're not wrong, but it sounds like you're filtering out most of the shit that humanity is producing and then lecturing folks that say LLMs are smarter than most people.
It's kind of like you hang out in a Buddhist monastery saying, "I don't know what you guys are talking about - people are so peace-loving!"
No, I'm interacting with people in person. I'd debate your claim that "most of the shit that humanity is producing" is internet-mediated, but your choice of noun renders that rather moot. Stop ingesting shit. There's a whole world out there.
You are heavily self-selecting what part of humanity you interact in the real world as well. You pick your friends, places you live, places you frequent, times you choose to go out and so on.
I didn't know how wide the humanity variance is before I had to go to a government office to exchange identity card (as the old one expires after some years). In the queue, when I looked to my left and right I saw some of the most bizarre people I ever saw. Because they were picked fully randomly just by having their identity documents sort of "off by one" in relation to mine. Humans and their output, when taken representatively are at most tolerable.
I'm guessing they're referring to the unexpected finding that most people don't have an "inner voice" - they don't think in words. It at least partially influenced the NPC meme.
Isn’t that just an incorrect interpretation of the descriptive experience sampling tests? The frequency of having inner monologue varies, but I don’t think it was shown that many people have anendophasia.
It's a genuinely fascist tendency. Only the elite few are "real people" who think. Everyone else is irrelevant, democracy is a failed experiment, wealth = worth, etc etc etc
Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to.
The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity.
This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue.
I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.
Thank you for the human algorithm. But I read the article at the link you sent, and there are points where our thoughts differ significantly. However, since the context of my criticism here on Hacker News would be high-cost criticism (I'm an East Asian man, not the mainstream white Western male here), I find it difficult to comment there. I'm basically filtering myself to some degree, even if others don't see it that way. In other words, when I write, I only do so at points where I think I can sufficiently withstand the criticism at low cost from my perspective.
What I wanted to say in this post was essentially that I only do deep 'thinking' in a very narrow set of domains. For the rest, I outsource my thinking to the identity of the community I belong to.
Thank you for your kind comment, Redwood. However, commenting on that post would require deep engagement with others, and I'm a bit hesitant to do that.
That's fine. Kind of proves the point of the article tho, that the overwhelming mass room of everything is a scary place to be ourselves since what dominates in that room are base negative concepts that win precisely because base negatives are ubiquitous unlike niche community or personal positives. Anyway it resonated with me and makes me hold on to my pseudo anonymity
It's because we see things from different perspectives. Redwood, you seem to find your current reality quite satisfactory, and I imagine you have a career strong enough that you don't need to expose yourself to negative concepts. I've observed your previous comments, and you strike me as highly logical and composed in tone. In my experience, people like that tend to be socially successful men.
But I'm in a position that nobody wants as a programmer. Porting code from failed companies to run on different equipment, or building datasets for professors' papers. These things are necessary, but nobody wants to do them.
So even if it means putting myself out there in negative spaces, for me, the exposure itself is beneficial.
That's why this is always a difficult issue. It's a problem where the boundary keeps shifting depending on the situation. You, being a rational person, would understand that problems are always fluid and dynamic.
We tend to simplify problems to conserve cognitive resources, and that's what we call bias. The reason I assume you're a successful man is because of the ease and gentleness in your tone. That's a kind of bias. But in reality, you probably have your own struggles, and there are certainly points where your perspective differs from mine. In some situations, what's right in one context may not be in another. What was correct in the past may no longer be, and vice versa. Yet we always anchor ourselves to a fixed point when we 'think.' That's what makes it so difficult.
I've read your previous comments too, and I find our conversations quite enjoyable. Have a good day.
It’s bad enough for rational reasoned discourse that we anthropomorphise LLMs, let’s please not then feed those words back into human discourse, further diluting their meaning. No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.
> AI is simply an extension of
It may be an extension, but not “simply” as it also creates the problem where it didn’t exist. I’ve seen several reports (both on and offline) of people who used to engage in deep thinking (I’m talking scientists, postgrads, PhDs working at the edge of what we know) now worrying they are losing their ability to properly think due to their LLM use.
> It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
I hope we can agree that’s bad and that we should try to stop and even reverse it, not simply shrug our shoulders and go “ah well, we were already going to shit anyway, might as well fuck everything up faster”.
> No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.
I don’t know how to put it well, but… Have you ever had a moment where you realized your perception of something was off and things weren’t as you thought they were?
Have you seen people dead sure of something you were positive as nonsense?
I have, ranging from simple small isolated situations to whole worldviews. I have personally held mental models that were broken, but felt consistent and true. I still sure do, just don’t know (hopefully, yet) how they’re mismatching the reality this time.
Call it “delusion” or “hallucination” or “misunderstanding” or something else - it’s still a thing and it happens in language-capable humans and machines alike.
I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation.
You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale.
Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.