"As a friend who works in AI told me, AI heightens the contradictions. It is a boon to those with the motivation and background to cultivate knowledge but it spells total destruction for the system of universal education and credentialing. My worry is that we may run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do. In the future, Gen X and millennial knowledge workers will be the human capital equivalent to pre-war steel. Just as particle detectors need steel forged before atmospheric nuclear testing gave all newly forged steel unacceptable background radiation, we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you."
Wide-spread use of LLMs may exacerbate this problem, but it's already been one for a while now. The toxic combination of smartphones and attention-economy short-form video content are already robbing the young of focused effort and the benefits of an attention span longer than a few seconds. It's sad to see things may be about to get far, far worse though.
"As a friend who works in AI told me, AI heightens the contradictions. It is a boon to those with the motivation and background to cultivate knowledge but it spells total destruction for the system of universal education and credentialing. My worry is that we may run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do. In the future, Gen X and millennial knowledge workers will be the human capital equivalent to pre-war steel. Just as particle detectors need steel forged before atmospheric nuclear testing gave all newly forged steel unacceptable background radiation, we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you."
Wide-spread use of LLMs may exacerbate this problem, but it's already been one for a while now. The toxic combination of smartphones and attention-economy short-form video content are already robbing the young of focused effort and the benefits of an attention span longer than a few seconds. It's sad to see things may be about to get far, far worse though.
The age of AI is a ‘great oxygenation event for the intellect.’ We are outsourcing our intellectual labor to machines, like we did for physical labor.
What remains? Consciousness? Feelings? Love?