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.
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.
> 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.
yupitsme123|8 months ago
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.
suthakamal|8 months ago
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.
unknown|8 months ago
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mm263|8 months ago
giraffe_lady|8 months ago
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.
shadowgovt|8 months ago
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.
suthakamal|8 months ago
mouse_|8 months ago
mouse_|8 months ago
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.
danielbln|8 months ago