I’m just re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a novel that is amazingly prescient in — amongst other things — its predictions of this coming economic upheaval.
Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal without ever actually understanding what the LLM is saying.
This is a book from 2006 accurately using the salient features of LLMs popularised in the 2020s! That’s proper science fiction, right there.
Back to the economic aspect:
Several characters in the book had to “butcher themselves” with implants and enhancements to remain economically relevant in the age of AIs. It’s that… or you’re packed away in storage. Useless.
PS: Imagine training an LLM on cetacean recordings and then fine-tuning on “orca attack imminent”. You could use this to scare whales away from ships without understanding what specifically the LLM was singing to them!
Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal without ever actually understanding what the LLM is saying.
This is a book from 2006 accurately using the salient features of LLMs popularised in the 2020s! That’s proper science fiction, right there.
Back to the economic aspect: Several characters in the book had to “butcher themselves” with implants and enhancements to remain economically relevant in the age of AIs. It’s that… or you’re packed away in storage. Useless.
PS: Imagine training an LLM on cetacean recordings and then fine-tuning on “orca attack imminent”. You could use this to scare whales away from ships without understanding what specifically the LLM was singing to them!