alt Hacker NewsI can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings
Replies
If religion and human technology are any guide, there will be a lot of this but it will never be the entire sum of human activity. Some of us are just too damn curious. We go straight for the curtain. I refuse to believe that very human pattern won’t continue.
I've been writing code since my teens, I've studied assembly... yet the fact that _things_ start happening when I press the power button on my computer are pure magic to me and I like it this way.
I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".
Honestly, don't think so. That's certainly the path one might extrapolate if the next generation grows up exactly the same way as the current generation, but that's not how it works.
They will be exposed to this technology throughout childhood as their brains develop and they will develop unique ways to work with it we don't entirely understand just like GenY with cell phones and GenX with home computers. I think you deeply underestimate how adaptable we are as a species, but if you consider that we've been running the same OS and Bios as a species for the past ~40K years, perhaps you might be more optimistic?
I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").
I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intelligent enough to figure out (a) what the kid was asking for and (2) give the correct answer.
Give it six more months and you'll have a second "oh shit" moment when you peek behind the curtain of LLMs shitting the bed.
I guess tech unsavvy people who are easily amused by LLM tricks will always exist, but they'll be an increasingly smaller minority as time goes on.
I think you're overestimating how much the average person knows about how technology operates today, or 30 years ago, or 1000. In some sense, we have been living with magic and tech priests since the Romans built the aqueducts. I wouldn't be surprised if widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.