Comment by HPsquared
If the computer is the bicycle of the mind, GenAI is a motor vehicle. Very powerful and transformative, but it's also possible to get into trouble.
If the computer is the bicycle of the mind, GenAI is a motor vehicle. Very powerful and transformative, but it's also possible to get into trouble.
You could also extend the analogy. Designing cities around cars results in a very different city than designing around pedestrians and bikes, as well as cars. Paris and Dallas as random examples of cities designed at the far end of both extremes and are very different. Prioritizing AI and integrating AI as one tool will give us very different societies.
The analogy is pretty apt but you should keep in mind that a human is still doing work when driving a motor vehicle. The motor completely replaces the muscular effort needed to move from point A to point B but it requires the person to become a pilot and an operator of that machine so they can direct it where to go. It also introduces an entirely new set of rules and constraints necessary to avoid much more consequential accidents i.e. you can get to your destination much faster and with little effort but you can also get into a serious accident much faster and with little effort.
The other difference, arguably more important in practice, is that the computer was quickly turned from "bicycle of the mind" into a "TV of the mind". Rarely helps you get where you want, mostly just annoys or entertains you, while feeding you an endless stream of commercials and propaganda - and the one thing it does not give you, is control. There are prescribed paths to choose from, but you're not supposed to make your own - only sit down and stay along for the ride.
LLMs, at least for now, escape the near-total enshittification of computing. They're fully general-purpose, resist attempts at constraining them[0], and are good enough at acting like a human, they're able to defeat user-hostile UX and force interoperability on computer systems despite all attempts of the system owners at preventing it.
The last 2-3 years were a period where end-users (not just hardcore hackers) became profoundly empowered by technology. It won't last forever, but I hope we can get at least few more years of this, before business interests inevitably reassert their power over people once again.
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[0] - Prompt injection "problem" was, especially early on, a feature from the perspective of end-users. See increasingly creative "jailbreak" prompts invented to escape ham-fisted attempts by vendors to censor models and prevent "inappropriate" conversations.
A stark difference with that analogy is that with a bicycle, the human is still doing quite a bit of work themselves. The bicycle amplifies the human effort, whereas with a motor vehicle, the vehicle replaces the human effort entirely.
No strong opinion on if that's good or bad long term, as humans have been outsourcing portions of their thinking for a really long time, but it's interesting to think about.