I'm becoming increasingly concerned by this trend
I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend where we’re letting these AI companies convince us that we can use these systems to streamline our lives by flattening the complexity out of them, as if our problems are a standard dataset we can summarize our way out of instead of this massive nightmare jumble of causes and effects we don’t always see and that we definitely do not understand.
And I find it paradoxical how the word “context” has become so associated with the use of LLMs when context is precisely the thing that they are stripping out of our lives. Knowledge isn’t supposed to exist in a vacuum; it’s supposed to be developed through being in conversation with other people and their needs and with the real world and with other knowledge, and it is through the specificity gained through that kind of conversation that information becomes more meaningful. We act as if this act of seeking and internalizing context is grunt work that should be offloaded toa machine in order to make room for the real work, when it is, in fact, the real work.
AI shills keep claiming that the future differentiator is going to be “taste” and not skills, as if taste isn’t something you develop in the process of becoming skilled. To me, a marker of improvement at a new skill has always been the development of opinions about how it should be done. Taste that isn’t founded on a bedrock of actual skill is shallow and incomplete. And what I suspect, and am concerned about, is that some version of the flip side of this is also true, that as skills atrophy the judgment developed through acquiring those skills atrophies as well. I just don’t see a world where deskilling due to LLM use doesn’t result in an erosion of taste as a side effect.
And I feel like if we thought more about these things we would realize that a lot of what is being sold to us a lie, except that maybe it isn’t a lie. Maybe it is totally fine to destroy the environment and ruin the lives of thousands of people through psychologically distressing slave labour to sell CEOs a vision of a world where people pressing buttons and thinking less will be so much more productive that they can afford to fire half of the company. And maybe it is totally fine that the current CEO of the country seems to think that we’re not productive enough and that adopting this technology will solve our lack of innovations and dubious international competitiveness. Who knows?