The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
That’s what I’ve been arguing with a fellow programmer recently. Right now you have to tell these programmer LLMs what to do on a function-by-function basis, because it doesn’t have enough capacity to think on a project level. However, that’s exactly what can be improved by scaling the neural network up. Right now the LLMs are limited by hardware, but they’re still using off-the-shelf GPUs that were designed for a completely different use case. The accelerators designed for AI are currently in the preproduction phase, very close to getting used in the AI data centers.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of weird takes on AI. It all seems to come down to ego guarding: But it can’t take my job, it just regurgitates combinations of what it was taught unlike me, only humans can be creative, who wants coffee made by a machine, well you still need a person to do things in the physical world, etc… Really highlights how difficult it is for people to think about change. Especially a change that might not end with a place for them.
The creativity argument I don’t get at all. Being creative these days means taking a bunch of known ideas and mashing them up, and that’s exactly what an LLM does. Very few people can really think outside the box.
I’ve had a few things where it was actually the other way around. I’m running a lot of TTRPGs, and my storylines are always pretty bland because I’m not that creative. I’ve started to use ChatGPT4 to give me a few ideas for stories, and it helps me break out of that box by suggesting completely different things than what I’d have thought of.
I’ll argue it’s always been that way. It’s Just that the pool of data that people are pulling from these days is more homogeneous. It used to be that people had a lot more unique and personal experiences that weren’t known to the world. But today everything is shared and given a label by our culture. So if you come up with an idea it’s much more likely that someone that has had similar experiences to you, thought of it already. People say there’s no more new ideas. Maybe that’s true in a sense, but I’d argue nothing’s changed except that people know about all the ideas.