< Mechanization, Step 1

~ns

I'm a little anxious boy merely growing into his global consciousness and existential anxiety. My mental state had already been somewhat precarious during the whirlwind time when DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT rose to prominence and I subsequently lost many hours of sleep to mental catastrophization.

Now that the dust is starting to settle and I've familiarized myself with the capabilities of the newest technological toys, even going as far to use them daily and integrating them into my workflow, I sleep better. One part is me realizing that they're still a long shot from huge societal disruption. Another part is me realizing that even when things change, we adapt.

I'm probably not going to enter Luddite mode regarding these new-fangled technologies. But mostly I hope to avoid becoming the next evolution of Satanic Panic, worried for the future of a society with sinful pleasures like Dungeons & Dragons.

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~zampano wrote:

You raise a good point in that we frequently conflate "new" and "worse" (or "dangerous"), a tendency that seems to get stronger the older we get. The devil you know and all that.

I don't plan to go full Luddite either, most likely. But (and hopefully this was clear from my post) I do plan to be skeptical about the promised capabilities of these things. I would also include in that any attempt to shoehorn a LLM into something that really doesn't need it. There is also the danger of a monopoly. All of these things are applicable with pretty much any new technology, and as you say we've managed to keep stumbling along despite ourselves.

"Disruption" has certainly become a buzzword these days, but here too it's typically over-hyped. Unfortunately, when there is disruption, it's usually the weakest among us who are most harmed by it.