This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)

This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria.

So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process.

I could write a long essay on this.

But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing.

Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.

>Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)

When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are.

Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.

Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?

In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?

Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted.

A subjective answer is, if you have been there and know this to be real from personal experience.

A more general answer would be, as long as we humans sufficiently interact with reality, we will have a respository of life experience to benchmark against.

Once we cease to do that, and are the product of a life in front of the screen, then we won’t know anymore.

Edit: This place is relatively close to where I live.

"Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted."

The very same question like it is, could be literally repeated under any article and is definitely offtopic as it is a general debate how to spot AI and what are the limits of knowledge. Interesting offtopic, so tolerated here if the debate that follows is interesting, but offtopic nevertheless. More ontopic would have been to state why these concrete pictures seem fake.

Give it a couple of years and no one will be able to fully answer the question. I’m quite sure humanity as a whole will in the near future uncover several articles that are like this in quality and citations but find out they are entirely generated and from then on out we won’t know.

We only know now because generated things still have artifacts. That is slowly changing. If the article was written by an AI right now absolutely cannot be fully known.

Thats why this move is good news for the rest of the world. Our competitive advantage will increase, year after year, albeit from a low level compared to the US.

To add to this, it is even funnier how travel agents undergo training in order to be able to interface with and operate the “machine readable“ APIs for booking flight tickets.

What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking websites) available to us.

This is exactly the conversation I had with a colleague of mine. They were excited about how LLMs can help people interact with data and visualize it nicely, but I just had to ask - with as little snark as possible - if this wasn't what a monitor and a UI were already doing? It seems like these LLMs are being used as the cliche "hammer that solves all the problems" where problems didn't even exist. Just because we are excited about how an LLM can chew through formatted API data (which is hard for humans to read) doesn't mean that we didn't already solve this with UIs displaying this data.

I don't know why people want to turn the internet into a turn-based text game. The UI is usually great.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, in terms of signal/noise. LLMs can extract signal from noise (“summarize this fluff-filled 2 page corporate email”) but they can also create a lot of noise around signal (“write me a 2 page email that announces our RTO policy”).

If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.

If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.

Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.

I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.

A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.

That's a nice way of explaining it. I also feel like some sort of LLM purist by being critical of features that serve only to pollute emails and comms with robotic text not written by an actual person. We will as societies have to come up with a new metric for TL;DR or "this was a perfectly cohesive and concise text", since LLMs have obscured the line.

The world is full of very shitty, manipulative people.

These can be predatory men, or scheming women.

For me, the dichotomy is between people that try to act in good faith, and those that don’t.

Please elaborate?

I would believe so. But someone that better understands the PFAS molecules should confirm.

This should be the top comment.

No one's angry. This just gives a bigger impetus to de-Americanizing the tech stack. I've recently taken part in a decision at our university to use a non-US based cloud storage provider for some relatively sensitive health data. The risk is just too high, and justifies paying a slight premium elsewhere. Sadly we're not likely to migrate away from Office 365 over here, but for any new vendor decisions, US now definitely equals premium for risk of fuckery.

I can perfectly well blame my home country of America for this. This is terrible business policy that destroys America's business advantages with unjustifiable federal overreach.

That's an issue with America. For all American businesses.

What should we be getting angry at Europe for in this context?

Not seeing this coming, I guess. IT experts where warning of this for years but where essentially ridiculed instead. I still blame the US for backstabbing their allies though.

It's funny seeing Americans start to repeat Russian line of thought.

"Who allowed you to live like that"...

The Trade Balance between the US and Europe was very balanced if you included services. So the US wasn't getting ripped off in Trade.

The dumb actions by the current US Administrations give the EU a big incentive now to buy their services elsewhere in the future, so Trumps fever dream about the disbalance might come true thanks to his own actions

Most important question on this entire topic.

Fast forward 30 years and modern civilisation is entirely dependent on our AI’s.

Will deep insight and innovation from a human perspective perhaps come to a stop?

Did musical creativity end with synths and sequencers?

Tools will only amplify human skills. Sure, not everyone will choose to use tools for anything meaningful, but those people are driving human insight and innovation today anyway.

No. Even with power tools, construction and joinery are physical work and require strength and skill.

What is new is that you'll need the wisdom to figure out when the tool can do the whole job, and where you need to intervene and supervise it closely.

So humans won't be doing any less thinking, rather they'll be putting their thinking to work in better ways.

to use your own example though, many of these core skills are declining, mechanized or viewed through a historical lens vs. application. I don't know if this is net good or bad, but it is very different. Maybe humans will think as you say, but it feels like there will be significantly less diverse areas of thought. If you look at the front page of HN as a snapshot of "where's tech these days" it is very homgenous compared to the past. Same goes for the general internet and the AI-content continues to grow. IMO published works are a precursor to future human discovery, forming the basis of knowledge, community and growth.

No, but it'll become a hobby or artistic pursuit, just like running, playing chess, or blacksmithing. But I personally think it's going to take longer than 30 years.