>It's not just the loss of the craft and the problem-solving challenge and whatever else. It's the loss of making.
It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation.
>After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing?
This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber.
I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools".
Tested against their examples:
>I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor]
As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship.
> any more than using a hammer to drive nails does.
If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements.
> What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it.
This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer.
The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made.
I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.
I'd wager this methodology is going to become very prevalent in enterprises going forward. Encoding all of the context necessary to recreate your entire application in "plans" or "rules" allows for much more rapid refactoring to address new business needs.
It also makes for much more fungible developers. Instead of having a few key engineers that know the system inside and out, that knowledge is encoded in markdown throughout the project, allowing new devs to ramp up by asking questions against the codebase and tracing the history of reasonings that led to the shape/implementation that exists today. It's like having near exhaustive design docs & documentation with change tracking included.
While it seems likely that developers will become more fungible (replaceable) going forward, I think being able to operate at this layer of abstraction & still having the capacity to drop down to the nitty gritty implementation details will make strong devs more valuable, rather than less.
Core argument seems to be that psychology/behavioral-science are not hard sciences (duh). Kind of insane how they're able to spin that into a 10 page hit piece about Microsoft. I think literally every argument they make could be applied to any arbitrary aspirational cultural values for any other large corporation. Author sounds like they have quite the chip on their shoulder.
> it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male.
Part of the issue is that you're presupposing a uniform definition of success. Different cultures have different priorities, and not everyone wants to spend 80 hrs a week in the office to climb the ladder and become a millionaire. Some cultures prioritize family/social relationships, sports, or a connection with nature. Unsurprisingly, these different cultures can often be racially affinitized. Sure, most people wouldn't mind being rich, but many do mind the hustle often accompanying that form of success.
I think part of what you describe around momentum holds merit, but I don't think affirmative action goes about the remedy in a constructive manner. It's fighting racism with more (albeit different) racism. You turn it into a zero sum game where your political posturing can be more valuable than your work contributions. That incentive structure is degenerative for all parties.
> If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this.
Genuinely curious, would you support an initiative to shuffle all babies between families at birth? Your argument seems to be "who you're raised by gives an unfair advantage in life, and we should correct for this societally". It seems to me that a random shuffle would equally distribute any inherent bias relative to generational momentum.
I think the bit about "social fabric at risk of collapse" is, to some degree, always true/possible. A community is only as strong as its constituents, and if everyone thinks the end is near that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I agree with your general sentiment that quality of life has arguably never been better (for everyone, no just techies from developed nations), but it sounds like OP is coming to terms with the inherent tension of pluralism rather than despairing their day to day comfort. I suspect they may have grown up in a relatively homogeneous cultural environment and are now realizing that different folks have vastly different priorities in life; often irreconcilably different.
The best advice I can muster is "be the change you wish to see in the world". Giving up hope is just passing the buck. You'll never have the whole world on your side, but you also don't need it to be.
At the end of a day, if you ask for a nurse, should the model output a male or female by default? If the input text lacks context/nuance, then the model must have some bias to infer the user's intent. This holds true for any image it generates; not just the politically sensitive ones. For example, if I ask for a picture of a person, and don't get one with pink hair, is that a shortcoming of the model?
I'd say that bias is only an issue if it's unable to respond to additional nuance in the input text. For example, if I ask for a "male nurse" it should be able to generate the less likely combination. Same with other races, hair colors, etc... Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.
for long-term birth control a copper (non-hormonal) IUD might be a better option. You don't have to remember to take pills, and it's less chemically disruptive to the body. Or better yet a vasectomy if you never want kids.
The problem with male birth control pills is that it's the women who bear the bulk of the risk/responsibility when it comes to pregnancy. If a woman says "trust me, i'm on the pill" and lies -- they're the ones that get pregnant and likely get stuck raising the kid. Sure the father might be on the hook financially, but if the woman lied about their birth control and went forward with the pregnancy anyway it's not absurd to imagine the father bailing on the situation.
Flipped around the other way, if a man says "trust me, i'm on the pill", now a woman has to trust this man even though they're the one's at risk of getting pregnant. What's worse is that the woman can't easily verify if they did in fact take a pill. At least with a condom you can be check that it's being used properly..
This asymmetric risk profile makes me think think that male birth control pills won't work outside of trusting long-term relationships, and then there's better options than a chemical pill for those situations already.
That seems way too low. If you rob a bank and give the money back later with 4% interest, you still go to jail. This should just not be legal. Or make it 100%/mo interest or something stupendous to discourage it in all but the most extreme cases.
Careful, I think your biases are showing. To assert that nobody wants to live in Ohio is an incredibly myopic worldview. I can think of loads of people that would love to work in tech without the big city living, or the high prices that come with it.
If it makes you feel better, we're ahead of schedule on population decline, especially due to covid baby bust. It's quite plausible humanity will find balance with nature with a much smaller population in the long term.
I definitely don't have a formulaic answer to that question, but here are some heuristics that I'll posit drive us in the right general direction:
- Freedom of information
So that leaves can error correct when corruption is detected
- Freedom to re-associate
So that leaves can re-organize when the existing power structure becomes destructive to the leave's objectives. This may be a contextual or cultural shift rather than a direct form of corruption. (Eg: climate change may change many individual's priorities going forward). Imo pursuing this heuristic should preclude most forms of identity politics; I'd rather the leaves associate on philosophical priorities rather than on innate physical characteristics
- No special rules for leaves vs nodes higher in the hierarchy
Or perhaps only more restrictive rules for nodes higher in the hierarchy
Your examples seem to have went back to a peer-to-peer model of decentralization; which I was agreed is inherently inefficient and untenable at scale. You need some hierarchical distribution of power, it's just that it needs to stay beholden to the leaves in the hierarchy. The person who decides what's on the ballot is the individual(s) elected/appointed to have that job. That person(s) is likely beholden to some pre-agreed upon rules for how to phrase questions, and any individual in the society can cry afoul if they abuse their position or if we need to update the rules with new considerations. All other leaves can choose to listen if they want, and choose to respond if they want, at whatever level of the hierarchy they believe is best suited to respond to the corruption. The hierarchy is not rigid, it's dynamic, evolves, and must be allowed to error correct as each individual sees fit. The only way that's possible is if it's driven bottom up rather than top down.
The objective should be to distribute and localize power as much as possible, because the more power is centralized, the more prone to corruption, less efficient, and less responsive to nuance it becomes. The exact laws and regulations that achieve that objective? Society is still working that out, but I'd argue separate judicial, legislative, and executive branches was a good move in the right direction. I'd also argue trial by a jury of your peers was also a solid move in the grand scheme of things.
I'd argue that same objective holds true for technological networks as well.
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes".
I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's legal system.
Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo, your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a new representative at will.
Sorry that I don't know how to present this more constructively, but you sound pretty tin-foil-hat-y. You argument seems to be just "I don't understand this thing, so doesn't that mean someone could have introduced it out of malice". As the replies from your previous comment stated, try reading about the block chain protocol. It's definitely easier to understand than the whole of our fiat currency system.
In my opinion, crypto is largely a ponzi scheme, so rest assured I'm not saying this out of love for bitcoin. But I also don't believe there's some master-mind illuminati behind the scenes orchestrating this intentionally. This is a 100% open and transparent protocol that people are supporting out of fear of existing societal power structure. If you have a good reason to suspect someone of manipulating crypto for some greater purpose, present your evidence and let us evaluate it. But vague paranoia about some puppet master's scheme sounds a bit like crying wolf to me.
We as a society just haven't gotten good at pricing in externalities (eg: carbon emissions) to consumer goods yet. If crypto miners were providing enough societal value to afford the excessive consumption of energy, then I think everyone would be praising crypto as the next industrial revolution -- improving quality of life for everyone! But instead, I think most people recognize it as siphoning value from many for the benefit of a fortunate few.
That still doesn't rectify the conflict. The living being is reducing local entropy -- meaning it's less conscious than if it maximized local entropy per gp comment. Or put in real terms, lighting yourself on fire likely does not make you more alive/conscious even though it definitely increases your entropy.
If anything, it seems like the reversal of entropy would be a better description of life. To make paper and oxygen from fire would have higher consciousness than a fire itself
If the the insulation breaks the tool short circuits and the welding tips don't work. Electricity follows the path of least resistance, so given how close the welding tips are together I doubt it would ever choose to go through you; especially any of the sensitive parts of you. You'd have to be bizarrely well grounded for it to discharge current through your body.
It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation.
>After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing?
This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber.
I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools".
Tested against their examples:
>I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor]
As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship.
> any more than using a hammer to drive nails does.
If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements.
> What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it.
This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer.
The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made.
I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.