starbugs

1. Anything that can be easily done with an LLM can be done by anyone easily. Given that, the value of those things therefore drops to near zero.

2. All remaining things are at least as hard to do as before, but you may have removed some load from people that previously were more busy doing things from the (1) category manually. So these might drop in value a bit as there are more hours available with the existing people to do those.

3. Then, there are things that become harder because somebody used an LLM to do them. Imagine you have a project lead who didn't do one bit themselves, generated a bunch of specs and tickets using AI and handed them to you. You are the first one looking at them manually and you find out that they are garbage. Now, in all likelihood you have lost efficiency. This in my experience applies to all types of work that yield results which are hard to verify.

Which of those cancels out the other and what kind of feedback effect arises and what overall effect on productivity/efficiency this has, nobody knows.

Count the number of Os in October correctly

> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.

Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?

> Life on earth today has objectively never been better in the history of our entire species. Try to retain some perspective.

The typical relative privation argument trap

> I would say that it is more likely than not that a graphics card exhibits some form of consciousness. But I am a panpsychist, I believe an individual atom has some form of consciousness.

Fair enough point. But then I guess you'd also say that a piece of silicon or sand exhibits some form of consciousness. I don't think that's what people mean when they talk about the potential of LLMs (the algorithm) being conscious or somehow developing consciousness?

It's a pointless debate in a scientific, left brain sense. Who can prove that you aren't the only consciousness in the universe and you are basically dreaming your experimental results up? Experimental verifications exist only in a limited scope.

If your argument is that matter brings about consciousness somehow and therefore LLMs can in principle be conscious, that's as good as claiming the opposite. There's no experiment that can falsify either.

As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.

> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious.

That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.

A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as long as I can reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine as a human being. Attributing that to a graphics card computing the next token deserves to be scrutinized.

> blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.

Not necessary. If you just bet against them being punctual always, you'll have a 80% plus success rate.

And centralization is ineffective long term

> The problem is, even as you ignore the internet, it goes on without you, and yet your ignoring it doesn't make you immune to it.

I recently moved and had a lot on my list in real life generally for about six to nine months. I stopped using the internet as I did before because I simply didn't have time. I primarily used it to order stuff for the new house and to do my professional work. No podcasts, no YT videos, no news articles, no social media. I even stopped watching the news completely.

Guess what? Nothing happened other than me feeling a lot better. I didn't miss out on anything as far as I know. Instead, I forgot about all the bullsh*t that's not even real. Let's be honest. Most of the stuff on social media is completely made up or has a core of truth but is completely blown out of proportion to get attention.

A couple of times a coworker told me about how scary the news were and that they are afraid something bad will happen soon. I just said: "Ah, it's probably not going to be that bad." And guess what? It wasn't that bad. I never heard of it again afterwards.

The internet will move on without you and you don't have to be immune to it. You can just move on without it. Use it for what you need and try to make it as hard as possible for it to use you.