At this point models are advancing way faster than we can figure out how to use them effectively. So having a generational advantage is not nearly as important as knowing how to use that advantage.
…and that probably requires involvement of the broader academic world (for now), IMHO. I don’t think governments or even the US military can really compete staff wise with the combined force of researchers and the tech industry worldwide right now. No matter how much money you can pour into it, there are a lot more bright minds out there that are not working for the military than otherwise.
Resilience isn't prevention. Resilience is the systems to clean up after those events. To be able to build new housing for the people who survive, to route around problems.
I find it interesting that we are still talking in terms of modifying our behaviour to accommodate the tools. Surely the point of LLMs is not to "learn how to use it" but as an extension of our own unique capabilities - the most personalised tool in all of history.
The point of any tool is to learn how to use it best. That's the difference between slicing off your arm, or building a chair.
LLMs don't read minds. There's always a chasm between you (your ideas) and them becoming reality. Exactly how people cross that chasm is all the rage right now, and there are a million ways to do it - but just expecting the LLM to pull details out of a few words isn't going to produce anything decent.
You're gonna need both to be able to work with it effectively though, just like working with your hands and wood isn't the same as working with abstract architectures via characters and words on a screen, like we've done since the beginning of programming with English language rather than just numbers and formulations, like how it was in the beginning.
Going further, even programming languages "asks" that you change the way you work to make the most use of them. A Clojure developer has a very different development process than a Rust developer, and they're both efficient, right and correct in their ecosystem, but the experience differs vastly and Clojure for example would change you to fit itself, rather than the opposite.
I think I would actually characterize it as a mutual change - obviously the model doesn't change as far as I can tell, but changing the harness and context changes its behavior so wildly that it might as well. Bit of a pas de deux - I learn, I change the context to teach it, it teaches me in turn, rinse and repeat.
Academia is not a waste of time just because it doesn't translate into "productivity" and wealth. Some people enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, and find great meaning in it.
Increasingly the arts are being defunded based on a similar argument, and humanity as a whole is worse off because of it.
There is a real conflict here. People are getting loans for their education. A loan is an investment, and should only be taken if it will pay off.
If you are getting education because you are interested in the topic but won't get a job in it: I fully support this. However you should not take a loan out to get this education: there are too many other things to do in life that you also will want to do. Worse the loan means you cannot change your mind later if you are wrong (or you can, but you will still have to pay for the mistake instead of whatever you are interested in today).
There is one other reason for education: to become a better citizen (don't fall for bad politics). However that should be to everybody and I haven't seen much evidence that higher education really helps much.
In some countries they do, in some they don't, in others every PhD student even gets a scholarship. Every person I know who did the PhD did it because they loved the topics they were studying.
The author of the blogpost is from Russia, I bet he didn't have to pay for his PhD.
While it would be insane to get a PhD if you had to pay for it, at least in the US you are paid a stipend (if not a good one) so you can generally avoid any debt. There is definitely an opportunity cost though.
While I agree with you, I also have to acknowledge the absurdity of some schools having kids define their own crazy undergrad majors, while plunging them into large amounts of debt. They should at least have to sign a waiver that says, "I acknowledge that this degree will likely not be a good investment".
Yeeees, but .. now is very much a time when you're going to have to justify that investment to the funding system and the broader public. I generally agree with the "pursuit of knowledge" framing, but there's a big advocacy gap.
The shared reality in that example includes only facts: OP and mum went to a movie. The movie was called X. The actors were Y and Z.
The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.
Then, we're just back to OP's conundrum: "Everything is opinion." I'll say grass is green and you'll say grass is red, and there can be no fact because they differ.
Not really no. Some things can be proven while some cannot.
The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.
My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).
And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.
And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.
Broadcasters absolutely have a responsibility to ensure they communicate truthful statements in exactly the same way that any other profession has a responsibility to ensure their output is correct.
Fundamentally impossible. Communication is completely made up. It cannot be measured scientifically. Consider the statement: "Cows live on the moon". It is 100% true, although you may not see it that way if you misinterpret what is said. It's only a lie to the extent that your opinion says it is even though in actuality it is the truth.
That’s some serious mental gymnastics you’re applying there but that’s not really how society works.
We, as a society, fully understand the concept of truthful and untruthful statements. We learn it as a child and get scalded when we lie. We depend on this understanding in law, courts, contracts, and commerce. We understand it when educators teach and when requesting services of others.
If you want to claim that communication cannot be truthful nor verifiable at any level, then society would fail to function because the literal point of communication is to share an information.
Now if you wanted to make a philosophical point about proving an intent to lie, or our perceptions of reality, rather than communication as a medium, then that’s a different topic (and one I discussed elsewhere in this thread). But for your exact argument presented, we already have millennia of past precedence to prove that communication is expected to have truthful statements.
Right, society functions on opinion, but there is no scientific basis for it. Its just making shit up and running with it. You aren't charging someone for lying. Detecting the utterance of a lie is fundamentally impossible as there is no objective way to measure language. Language itself is just opinion. You'd, instead, be charging them for them for going against your opinion. No mental gymnastics needed. Its just the simple reality.
> Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate
I don't know, there is pretty strong evidence in this discussion that we are unable to communicate. Your apparent opinion of I am saying continues to show to be incorrect over and over — and I'm sure that goes both ways.
In fact, it seems evident that, deep down, you already realize this as you have stopped even trying to add anything of your own to the discussion, outsourcing to the words of others. Poor form to not be able to speak to something yourself, but I can appreciate that your emotions are starting to run wild on realizing that the world isn't as simple as you originally imagined.
But, as before, I likely have the wrong opinion about what you are trying to say. There is no objective way to measure language. QED.
That would depend on your opinion of what those words mean, but in my opinion neither has any applicability to our discussion. Not sure why you would want to take the discussion off topic now unless that is the only way you can find to try and sooth hot-running emotions?
Let's face it, there is no technical reason for us to disagree. The universe is what it is and that is an incontrovertible fact. We can measure the state of universe scientifically. There is fundamentally nothing we can disagree about except our opinion of the language. And, indeed, it is apparent that we are failing to discuss the state of the universe because our opinion about what the words mean is ostensibly not shared.
But, I mean, that's what we've been talking about the whole time: that there is no objective way to measure language. If you are trying to repeat what I said from the start, what value do you believe is added? Simple acknowledgement?
Not necessarily. A shared reality is one where people are discussing the same thing (within a reasonable margin) even if filtered by their individual perceptions, and drawing different conclusions.
I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality (maybe private individualized realities), but it results in a scenario where you have nothing in common with other people other than "I saw some thing" and therefore it becomes very difficult to discuss anything with them.
I think different cultures can share the same reality, though filtered through different lenses.
If two people from different cultures watch the same movie, one finds it ok and the other offensive and disrespectful, that's a shared reality filtered through different cultural backgrounds. Even if either version of the movie is dubbed, censored, or altered in any way, there's still enough common or shared material that a discussion can be held.
If two people had completely different experiences and watched completely different, tailor-made movies, then there's very little for them to discuss or even disagree with. "I haven't watched your movie", "I haven't watched yours either", "Mine was better", "I guess... I wouldn't know, I thought mine was cool", etc. No shared reality.
My point, which admittedly my last message didn't make at all, is that "different shared realities" is not a new thing. The concept is what would have been referred to as "different cultures" throughout most of human history.
Different art, politics, passions, fears, identities, and myths is what cultural variety is about.
If you and I watch the same movies and listen to the same music and follow the same politics and share the same dreams and worries, I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are from different cultures.
What is being described as a "shared reality" in this thread feels more like globalism and less like something obviously positive or worth protecting.
I'm all for more cultural variety as an expression of individual differences.
Everything is perceived, and our perception gets filtered based on our prior experience. Just because we're not directly perceiving objective reality, that does not mean _everything_ is opinion.
JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.
Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.
You don’t actually know JFK was shot from your own personal experience. You just choose to believe what credible source claim. And even if you were there, who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect?
To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.
There is an pink elephant behind you. In practice, I believe that at least after the dust have settled, events of the type of "Count Ferdinand was shoot dead infront of 100 witnesses", like maybe 1/50 are fake? Dunno what share.
The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.
"Who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect" - you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.
I'm saying that not everything is opinion, that there does exist a category called 'fact'. And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
> you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.
Do you have access to their head? How do you know that someone didn’t swap that head for someone else who had been shot?
Like I said, this is purely a philosophic argument. I’m not actually trying to suggest that there isn’t such thing as “facts”.
> And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
No, I’m making a psychological point that our perceptions are what we use to construct our reality, and that our perceptions are malleable. If they weren’t, then drugs would have no effect, psychosis wouldn’t be a thing, and people’s opinions wouldn’t differ about even the most straightforward things like god, globe vs flat earth, and so on and so forth.
> This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
I agree. As I said in the previous comment:
“To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.”
> [..] developers that simultaneously care deeply about the craft of software development and really empathize with the customer. I do believe they might want to see a professional about a split personality disorder [..]
But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.
Business incentives is to maximize money, which requires some quality. But these days, not a lot.
Customers ideally maximize value, which lies on some spectrum of cost and quality. Part of the reasons businesses act with disregard for quality is that the consumer ultaimtely doesn't punish them for it. Whether that's due to true consumer preference or a market lock-in is a discussion left to the reader.
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