Quiet damage
Most of the work can be easily automated with LLMs.
The argument that the abstraction just moved a layer higher is fine. You do you.
The impact of this coddling & infantilization through Multimodal AI needs to studied. Especially with regard to fundamental capabilities of an individual. Offloading the heavy work to some intangible entity never ends up functionally well. If you are cognitively lesser to a trained model(even if only for a subset of interactions) there will be a direction problem.
The pragmatic step at this point would be to move away from skill building just for the employment sake. But that seems too idealistic; People develop skills to be ready for the job market, why advocate against it? Fair enough, stay afloat. What about taking some time off for getting a rudimentary control? On the topics you delegated to a model; Come back stronger. Come back to what again? Hmm, smirk inside then.
Personally, navigating a broken system and the abundance afforded to me (simply because of the era I am living through), without intellectual ownership is extremely unappealing.
Some problems that need attention -
Amplification of psychological anomalies
Existential disorientation, Imposter syndrome, Cognitive dissonance, Confirmation bias, FOMO etc... comes to mind. Would be nice to have new ones pop up courtesy to recent developments. Then I could insert a cool table here (truly exciting!)
Lack of learning
If the one guy shipping multiple items in a single day gets incentivized why would anyone sit down with one piece of markdown documentation written in 2020? Maybe I need an overhaul of what it means to learn. Universities and ed institutions have done a terrible job imo. But am I patient enough to sit and learn about learning?
Retention
What about the impact on memory? You are bombarded with a barrage of text as information. It seems like nothing registers and you just want the agent to run and finish the task. End of story. Talk about brain dead. Nootropics are enticing now.
Communication degradation
If every email starts and ends with – “I hope this email finds you well” and “Thank you for your time and consideration”, why even add new words to dictionary every year. What happened to nuance in communications? Maybe with the expected outsourcing we can do just fine I guess. Or maybe this is a wakeup call, why get fixated on what to address someone, strip down and say “Hi” or “Wadup dog”. If people take it the wrong way then consider good riddance and move on!
Increased dishonesty & Lack of trust
Aren't we all ashamed to say we used ai, WE WOULD BE since on the other end people proudly signal virtue that they never used ai for the thing at consideration. Cool beans if so, but how sustainable is this going to be when people are desperate?
Building on the above point, the first thing any one would suspect when encountered with good&exceptional things would be the “AI” nature of the item. Puritan way of dismissing, only by taking a cursory look is not fair to the parties involved. Should I switch to some esoteric language now? I am not even gonna speak about deepfakes produced during war and international conflicts. Who's to trust whom damn! I quite enjoy the sinister side of things, but I only care about the soaring high part, please save me from the crash. Wish I was my parents age and have that restrained reassurance that much of the bullshit will be reset by time.
Group thinking
You use direct/augmented tools for brainstorming, for venting, for deciphering a confusing email, for TLDRing a manual, for summarizing a paper, for chunking all the info into a podcast episode and finally create a memory.md at 4.45 pm to revisit never. Counter argumnet – People use differently ie different permutations OK, but most ppl would be using a frontier model at the end and those are just a handful. Classic sheep and shepherd situation. A large scale of people will use. How to discern abuse? We're not so different after all and might get averaged to the smartness level of the model. Some kind of convergence. What if we pickup artifacts from them too. Catastrophic! People used to talk about human droned. Now that would be the real case in the near future. (But it already is right, looking at the regurgitated right wing-left wing talking points). Lord hear me, save me.
Perfectionism
All the tools to be flawless, but I still end up with alpha stage items. Comparison and deliberately evil judgement –> unrecoverable fall. No need to be perfect. God created every human being to be blessed and cherished, said someone at my school assembly once, while I chuckled. I need that reaffirmation. CAP, I still care, but with some terms.
Safe space
The zeitgeist already chose paternalistic policies and emotional cushioning. Now add in an ever accessible tool reachable from your phone which comes for more comforting. Sometimes you need to hear you're shit and receive sharp critique. Current iteration is indeed very detrimental to self actualization. I held some xenophobic views sometime ago until someone called me out. Yes-men are replaced by chatbots. I have to be careful. Can't have my own beliefs crumbling under its logic, damn too shameful.
Retirement woes
Say I got to retire finally with peace, and I am reminiscing; How content would I be? I am quite critical of things I do and think most of them don't age well. Could I have fared just as well if I were thrown into a timeline better/worse? How good am I really?
Throughline
Uuh AI bad. Tough times.
Generation is cooked, no doubt. Someone posted the other day that it actually is the best time to follow your dreams given the sad state of things. That said, as in a bad meditation session, bring attention to certain overlooked things.
Doom & despair are the go to these days. Not time to invoke it yet tho!
All are easily fixable; the so called innovation will stay (although think about the subsidized pricing and habit forming);Plus it has upsides too. Hope the small self hostable quantizable models get capable enuf and crush the greed.
- 𝒶