1,681 karma · joined August 30, 2019
Were houses crafted better before dimensional lumber and power tools? Maybe - they were also more expensive. So the same with programs and website via AI.
Hey @turzmo I found your 21 year old and I agree with you!
I am pointing out a pattern of technological hubris stretching thousands of years.
>An entire generation of students seems to have atrophied their critical thinking skills this way. Talk to 21-year-olds today and you'll see what I mean.
Ah, yes, the old "kids these days" routine... quite fond of it myself sometimes. But I find myself benefitted when I take care to learn from the young.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.“
-Socrates, on writing. From Phaedrus
Secondary source: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
Wealth has lots of flavors but usually we mean material wealth.
Material wealth is the items and properties that people covet. And people figured out they can store wealth with money and everyone agreed that money is a fair way to store wealth and use it to transfer ownership of the items and properties people covet. (In hindsight maybe not wisest of all decisions but open for debate).
Material wealth is not permanent. It is consumed. By typing on my iPhone, using it daily, it’s degrading, eventually it’ll not be functional and it’ll be harder to get money in exchange for it. Real estate appreciates in monetary value but that’s an effect of the money system not a natural state of things, real estate actually degrades without real work put in to keep it up, consuming value. Food and fuel are easy to see as consumables, one-time use only.
Calvinists are historically frugal, their theology emphasizes thrift and industry, basically the backbone of capital accumulation - create wealth, but don’t consume it, invest the wealth to create more wealth. This is the bedrock of “capitalism” (capitalism in modern and postmodern age has taken a new meaning, but originally it meant ~using capital to create wealth).
China famously imposed (and still does) very strict discipline on consumption, and they used their excess capital to reinvest for industrialization.
Western economies imposed consumption limits in the continental wars, which enabled a huge surplus of wealth in USA following WW2 because the population was used to the discipline.
Churches (Vatican) accumulate treasures by disciplining their flocks to tithe. Churches in the east were looted by the Bolsheviks to finance their revolution, the eastern church had huge reserves of wealth that was consumed by the revolution. Eventually they had trouble balancing their economy and the holodomor took hold in the wheat belt - the wealth was exhausted.
The soviets eventually established absolute control, disciplined their populations and went on a long run of impressive industrialization and growth - but it eventually toppled due to imbalances in production and consumption, people don’t thrive under strictest disciplines, they grew tired and the economy got sick.
Today, the highly developed nations in the west are wrestling with questions of discipline. Wealth inequality its called. There’s an upwelling of popular sentiment that people want to consume more, and it’s hard not to sympathize with that, Id love to live like the elites do. But from my perspective there’s not much consideration to how much consumption is sustainable or desirable.
The key question from my view is what end does material consumption serve?
Is it for pleasure’s sake alone? Or is it to unlock more human talent? Is it converted to unleash other flavors of wealth such as spiritual fulfillment, thriving families, arts, wisdom? How can a material value be placed on these things in balance with real material constraints? More questions than answers, and that’s sort of the crux of the eternal argument.
Obviously things have gone well in the west, most people live lives of extreme wealth compared to their great-grandparents. Some of that has to do with warfare, some with luck, some with thrift and industry. Maybe that’s about to change, or maybe not. I for one am happy to work harder than most to create wealth, I find work fulfilling, but I am also well compensated for my labor and so I consume more than most people too… the balance happens at the micro-level and the macro.
But you hit on an important point that wealth cannot accumulate unless consumption is disciplined. Sometimes discipline is self-imposed (e.g. calvinists), other times by the organizing authority (e.g. state, church).
In the 2nd type, authority as the source of discipline, there’s debate on the right balance of disciplining the elite classes vs the under classes. This debate will never cease, as long as there are human beings consuming wealth.
I’m telling you, in industries dealing with high energy, they DO NOT trust people just because it’s their job. THEY CHECK. Just like people should CHECK the LLM. I think we agree that LLM cannot be trusted. But where we don’t agree is “trust the experts because they’re humans” - that’s not an argument it’s a troll.
> gas engineers and electricians do safety critical work every day without supervision
This simply isn’t true. Electricians work is inspected before being placed into service. Engineers work is reviewed internally and permitted externally before going to construction.
Nah, you way off on that, coastlines have remained relatively same last million years, def not subducted into an ocean trench
Morale. It’s important that the remaining employees are psychologically secure. They’re trying to make sure they know the company isn’t in jeopardy and that management has them in mind.
Some research supports this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors...
In my /opinion/ a personal address, one on one assurances from a trusted manager, this might be more effective, but HR also needs to be careful that the messaging is consistent so this kind of post is probably seen as the best alternative
> If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc
You're using this as an example of how normal people behave, but that CS/SWE's would advise against? I am having a hard time understanding how you connect this to LLM / chatbot to drive the argument that general purpose LLM's are over valued.
Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed.
Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for normal people - suddenly the internet could be accessed with plain language, simple phrases, no networking knowledge or domain expertise required.
LLM is doing the same thing - reducing friction. Tradesmen and small businesses are building company landing pages and doing SEO by themselves. Businesses in every industry are programming applications in-house to unshackle themselves from SaaS systems. Entrepreneurs can build automated systems to handle mundane processes and get back to pulling the levers that actually move the needle. An LLM can level up your employees on the software they're already using.
The economic potential is only beginning to be realized.