I'm not sure we are built for this on a societal scale. I understand the reasoning rationally. Sure, nobody pitied the horseshoe-maker blacksmith who was proud of his craft when the car was invented. Or the tailors when clothing became cheaply mass-produced. Or even the miners after many mines closed. Yeah I get it. "You learned a craft and it's no longer needed. Sucks to suck. Try to be useful in some other way or get bent."
Having to reinvent your career when you are 30+/40+/50+ is not so simple. You studied something, amassed experience and tacit knowledge, taste and work habits.
It used to be the case that you learned as an apprentice (or simply grew up on a farm and saw the work) and then continued it the rest of your life.
We will be more and more efficient at pumping more wealth to the owner classes, but people will be spiritually ground down.
The loss of self that comes with being effectively severed from society through labor exclusion is…a radical process.
I read in a book titled The Technology Trap about how in the past, rulers withheld technological advancements and gave strategic deference to the people whose labor would be most affected by them, so as it not put their own necks at risk.
The AI debacle is unusual as it's alive in disinformation at a scale that penetrates every status class.
Of course AI is a failure of imagination. But so were symbols, which cannot reference, they can only represent, if at all.
The real function of AI appears to be the transition away from symbols, metaphors, folk science cause and effect ideation.
We're only barely sensing this, but if you listen to Gary Marcus, Rich Sutton and those willing to see the larger scales, they are bellwethers that are actually sinking their own approaches as well as LLMs.
In effect, labor is about to reap the benefits of the AI debacle. I see this in the AI at the major teaching hospital my sister is a department head of. In lead developers in gaming, in media. AI does not function well, it's essentially wax fruit, it's not even mimicry. That's going to lead to an analog rebirth.
I found it a bit pretentious and name-dropping more than having a cogent point. AI is not simply going to take jobs where you just have to blabber stochastically. It can execute commands, call tools, write code etc. I think the author got caught up too much in the fact that the "Word" in the Gospel of John seems to align with the fact that LLMs process words. But it's really not a very deep connection.
Thanks for sending, I read it all. I think it keeps its feet in two incompatible realms. Ultimately LLMs turn us into wax fruit, not stochastic parrots.
The word is an arbitrary form, as myth is, (as symbols, money, news, states/politics) both are ultimately evolutionarily suspect in terms of animal signals, and we haven't found a specific workaround to that arbitrariness. That's extinction. The world is only specific, as is survival.
I suggest the only function of arbitrary signals is to refute themselves into replacement. The good thing about the AI debacle is that it's about speeding that up.
Having to reinvent your career when you are 30+/40+/50+ is not so simple. You studied something, amassed experience and tacit knowledge, taste and work habits.
It used to be the case that you learned as an apprentice (or simply grew up on a farm and saw the work) and then continued it the rest of your life.
We will be more and more efficient at pumping more wealth to the owner classes, but people will be spiritually ground down.