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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

They are against Natural Science & the enlightenment of humanity.

Existence is wonderfully observable & learnable. It took human kind to create this particularly infernal information void, to have manufactured such a degrading & omnipresent local system of black holes.

These are woefully against all spirit & should be torn down. More positively, there's so many positive pro-human pro-Augment-Intellect things tech could be doing; we need new powerful positive symbols that establish visible legible expansion of understandability.

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I agree. It's one thing to delegate labor to a machine, but I find myself very uncomfortable when the machine takes the role of creative expression. Art is a form of communication which transmits feeling, experience and emotion, but there's nothing a machine puts into this, there's nothing being transmitted, it's just a rendering, it's just pushing your buttons that make you go 'neato.'

I fear people will start taking the beautiful and profound for granted, it'll just be content.

I dont particularly mind there being some places where tech is in the lead, where it can claim the initiative.

But it just feels like humanity secedes more and more ground & understanding to humanity each month, and there's so few visible notable frontiers where humanity is staking down real wins. Rather than have advances in general purpose computing, we keep getting more and more apps, more and more far-off cloud systems.

*to tech

> but there's nothing a machine puts into this, there's nothing being transmitted

That depends on your prompt. You can make it longer if you have more to say. It's a conditional language model, you can select the place it starts from and how to go. But you can't blame it for bad prompts.

Instead of seeing LLM as "nothing there, just token probabilities", I'd rather see it as a distillation of human culture. It's like a mirror house with infinite reflexions and complexities. A place to contemplate, a microscope where you can study something in detail, a simulator where you can deploy experiments.

On the other side, I'm astounded that I can ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey and get something out that makes me feel something.

> but there's nothing a machine puts into this

What makes you so sure?

> ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey

What makes you think a machine has any wants and desires?

I'm a squishy machine and I have them, for as far as those terms have any meaning. What measure or process do you have of determining if I have them?

Are you ok man?

they're just microdosing it's ok

> there's so many positive pro-human pro-Augment-Intellect things tech could be doing

But can it do it without baby steps?

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