Gonna put out a blanket assertion about my preferences, to get a read on whether these are shared or not:
As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.
History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).
But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)
So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?
I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.
Thank you for your new substack, very illuminating (and scary) reading.
It's as if someone was watching the show "Person of Interest" as a guidebook for how to build (and weaponize) the all-seeing eye of sauron that we have today.
therapy will generally recommend removing the need to optimize entirely, in order to achieve an emotional homeostasis (particularly given that the need to optimize often leads to obsessive/compulsive behavior).
OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic.
Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work.
Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.
As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.
History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).
But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)
So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?
I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.