It’s hard to find anything on the Web that doesn’t somehow involve AI. We here at the Irreal bunker are a bit skeptical. We view LLM AI as little more than a magic trick not all that different from Eliza or Rob Pike’s Mark V. Staney.
If you look at what’s being said, it appears to be based either on cynicism and greed on the part of the new AI companies along with naivety on the part of those who believe the singularity is, at last, here or its complete dismissal as a fever dream. It’s hard to find any commentary in between although Watts Martin describes an intermediate position that acknowledges the problems but accepts that LLM AI is here to stay.
Regardless of whether you believe there’s anything substantial behind the current AI craze, there’s no doubt that it’s changing how we go about everyday activities that we’ve been doing the same way for centuries. A good example is school essays. It used to be the worst a teacher had to deal with was some second rate plagiarism. Now students are using AI to write whole essays complete with references (that may or may not exist).
Concerns like that raise the question of whether AI is destroying our ability to think and reason. Even the tech community isn’t immune. There are several articles lamenting the loss of reasoning and thinking abilities on the part of developers who have embraced AI for their coding. Of course, not everyone agrees.
Even accounting for the usual “kids today!” reaction from those of us in the, ahem, older cohort, I have to say that the idea resonates. Senior people are seeing an acceleration of the decline of abilities on the part of new developers. It does seem that the new AI is bringing us harmful effects along with its benefits.
On the other hand, Irreal has often and loudly ridiculed almost the same claims when they were made about, say, calculators or the end of cursive handwriting. People at the time predicted all sorts of dire consequences, none of which, of course, came to pass. Still, I think there could be a difference.
Calculators, for instance, basically replaced a mechanical process—paper and pencil arithmetical calculations—with a more efficient mechanical process. The current AI is being used not to replace something mechanical but thought itself. Paul Graham has a disturbing essay that predicts the current AI will shortly divide the population into the few who can write and the many who can’t. That really, really matters because, as Graham says, writing is thinking so the conclusion actually means that most people won’t be able to think very well.
It is, of course, possible that a future essayist will hold Irreal up to ridicule for screaming about falling skies. I hope that happens because the alternative is truly frightening.