I'd like to share the most prophetical quote I've read about generative AI:
> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next!
-- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
- Dune
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger."
- God Emperor of Dune
That's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.
Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.
Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.
It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
“There are many other little refinements too, Mr Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”
“Where?”
“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.
Because the horror of dahl’s adult stories are as pervasive even if knowing the ending. I reread many times and still get the same sense of impending doom barbarically twisting fates in the mind - what if it was true?
They didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.
I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.
Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.
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> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next!
-- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune
“Where?”
“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.
https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...
> and a steady stream of pacifying media
Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.