I don't consider that anything good. Design is just about making new products faster, which is a bad thing as it accelerates consumerism. And medical scans? That might help maybe a thousand extra people at the cost of gigagwatts of energy used that is polluting the entire planet.
To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.
You can't be serious. This is a highly specialized field in a topic that a few dozen people have interest in. Rather useless and basically a mental stimulating game for some professors. I have a math PhD and know very well that math went well past its point of diminishing returns in solving real-world problems a long time ago.
Unproductive for the person perhaps, but not for the development of technology. But I do agree in general that using AI is not a great strategy for human beings. Read a book indeed.
> Maybe on break but while deep-working I just want the information necessary to do the job, the communication being there to communicate the information, efficiently.
The problem is that we are slowly be pushed to become cogs who only really think this way. We shouldn't just want to be the most efficient possible. Technology already reduces the ability for us to connect, which is why connections at work seem weird or shallow in the first place. We simply don't need each other as much, so it makes sense that AI seems like the next logical step.
Your sentiments are just your instinctual desire to move to the next local maximum in a sequence of descending maxima that lead to the bottom.
> My argument is that using a machine to replace your thinking, your voice, or your relationships is a very bad thing. Humans have intrinsic worth—machines do not.
I agree with that, and the only logical path if we are to preserve this principle is to eradicate AI, and not try and control it. There is no way to control it (think prisoner's dilemma, greedy individuals, etc.)
That is true. What will happen in with the world is that consumerism and capitalism will be pushed aside for direct technological construction. In this world, AI, rather than the market, optimizes.
> I am not saying that LLMs are worthless—they are marvels of engineering and can solve some particularly thorny problems that have confounded us for decades.
Disagree with that, because firstly, they have not really solved any problems that outweight the negatives that they have unleashed and will unleash on society.
So they make programmers more effective: is that actually a good thing, though? Fact is, most software is designed to make consumerism and corporations more effective, and that's not really a good thing for the long-term health of the planet.
Your article also indicates a sort of independence between keeping intellectual tasks primarily human and allowing AI/LLMs to work in specific domains. However, those with the power don't care about principles. They just want to replace as much as they can and use the human instinct to get ahead quickly to do so. And no amount of priniciple will stop them. AI is just too powerful to be used in a way that is consistent with human beings keeping their intellectual environment healthy.
Absolutely right. However, it's not good to replace too much manual labor, either. There is also a balance between too much and too little (i.e. not learning enough manual skills to take care of yourself).
There is a balance in both the mental and physical domains. Those who have a high intellectual capacity will probably think otherwise because intellectual activities is what THEY like to do. But the truth is, some people enjoy manual labor and it's not good to completely replace them either because there is art in manual work as well.
On the other hand, looking things up yourself allows you to become quite familiar with the way things work in a more detailed way than just getting the answer through an LLM.
Negative trade-offs are not directly related to individual products, but to the technology they depend on and the technology that can follow from them, plus our tendency in capitalistic society to invent whatever can be invented for incremental advantages. For example, AI note taking (benign) requires AI (overall bad) and can imply future technologies (greater surveillance). The bad parts cannot be separated from the good in modern global capitalism because we have no oversight mechanism to do so.
A common rebuttal, but I don't think the tradeoff (on average) is worth it when the technology becomes sufficiently advanced. (Of course, it's worth it for some people, but the resulting technology makes society worse on average.)
And you are forgetting all the destructive technology required to get to the "benign" ones.
I understand exactly what everyone else does here. And nothing intrinsically wrong with that -- technology is unquestionably fun and interesting. I like programming myself. BUT, and this is a huge BUT, I think we as people who are well versed in technology should take a little more responsibility for what we create.
It's an efficient way, but I vehemently disagree with "just". No technology is "just" anything. All of these little "improvements" constitute a very advanced modification of human beings to become more mechanical and less empathetic towards life.
As knowledge becomes more powerful in the sense of enabling us to do more things, it becomes more tempting to use it to gain short-term advantages that typically have long-term detrimental consequences. Such as AI for example, which is too quick at disrupting employment or cheap energy to generate bitcoin but is problematic for local energy grids. The more powerful the knowledge, the easier it is for people to ignore the downsides at the expense of fellow human beings.
That is especially true because we have an economic system that rewards short-term improvements in the efficiency of the system, regardless of the long-term costs. Fossil fuel use, cutting down local forests (has relatively litle short-term impact, but adds up).
And, as we pursue knowledge and technology more vigorously, we slowly lose other forms of gaining knowledge such as a relationship with nature.
Human society is advanced with regard to its knowledge capability, but exceptionally primitive with regard to basic wisdom about community, love, nature, and friendship. We continually donwgrade these things to make way for new technology, and the prisoner's dilemma (tech gives some people advantages, so everyone is pressured to use it), makes it hard to make decisions for the long-run like the Amish do.
To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.