It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.
This post is kind of sad. It feels like he's advocating for human depopulation since the trajectory aligns with horse populations declining by 93% also.
Indeed. I do wonder if the inventors of the "transformer architecture" knew all the potential Pandora's boxes they were opening when they invented it. Probably not.
No one wants to say the scary potential logical conclusion of replacing the last value that humans have a competitive advantage in; that being intelligence and cognition. For example there is one future scenario of humanity where only the capital and resource holders survive; the middle and lower classes become surplus to requirements and lose any power. Its already happening slowly via inflation and higher asset prices after all - it is a very real possibility. I don't think a revolution will be possible in this scenario; with AI and robotics the rich could outnumber pretty much everyone.
Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
It has always surprised me that this is the lesson so many people see in that photo.
The lesson I see is that absolutely nothing humans do (including “wasteful fighting” and “over-consumption”) matters at all. We could colonize the solar system, or we could die out, and the Pale Blue Dot would remain the same either way.
It seems to me that people are desperately trying to squeeze a distorted message of hope from an image that fundamentally signifies the exact opposite of hope, namely indifference.
Yes, we fully realized the lessons and have stopped wasteful fighting and overconsumption and have embraced a cohesive, sustainable lifestyle to protect the only life we know of in the universe. It is wonderful.
In the USA at least. On my flight from Japan to Taiwan I arrived at Haneda about an hour before my flight, spent 10 minutes total at security including screening time, walked through an automated immigration gate with no wait, had a soba, then boarded.
I timed my time from plane door to train in Taiwan: 24 minutes. To be fair I was hustling and had no checked bag. Automated immigration gate, walk through customs without being stopped, straight to the train. The train comes every 10-15 minutes so I also got lucky boarding right before the doors closed. My time from plane to home was about an hour and a half.
Energy went into mining, extracting, refining, transporting all the raw materials needed to make these chips.
This is typical tech industry green washing as the industry fails to accept its destructive influence on the planet.
We need practical solutions that help reduce consumption and waste and actually address the issues. We don’t always need more we need to find a way to use less.
The people selling these tools are doing so with a powerful narrative: Generative AI supposedly supercharges all that it touches, democratizing creativity, eliminating friction, increasing productivity, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Its disruption of the online economy, the boosters argue, is a reason for great optimism. But at the moment, so many of these benefits are theoretical. Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.
This is tragic. The loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. It is the process through which we enact agency. It is how we make meaning and move through the world. To lose that, I fear, is to capitulate on our very humanity.
Anthropogenic climate change is the most pressing issue humanity faces. Yet the best minds of our generation our focused on creating AI models to plagiarize human expression.
The world deserves better then the onslaught of ad powered content that technology has enabled the proliferation of.
You gotta start thinking about the energy used to mine and refine the raw materials used to make the chips and GPUs. Then take into account the infrastructure and data centers.
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