This is basically a contemporary reframing of the core purpose of Renaissance magic. I suppose aspiring to be a 21st century John Dee from talking to some powerful chatbot of the future, rather than angels or elemental beings, does sound a bit exciting, but it is ultimately mysticism all the same.
To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation".
When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context.
If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).
Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years.
One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board.
But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone. The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything anymore.
It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important than the anccuracy and speed.
Do all of you replying to me also weep for expensive hand woven fabrics? You're all wearing the fruits of automatic looms. It's the same thing.
You own cars, do you weep for the horse industry? Stables, farriers, blacksmiths, leatherworkers/saddlers, ostlers, grooms, etc.
What is an art now becomes a functional ubiquity later. Everything took "insight and effort" because everything was handmade, it's an innate feature. And now those things are mass manufactured and it's what the people want. Humanity will move on to calling whatever current thing we're manually doing an art.
Horses weren’t art. They were a way to get somewhere.
The whole problem with AI is it’s trying to automate the things people LIKE to do and take their life meaning from instead of the things that no one likes doing - like pulling a carriage or a plough.
Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating.
When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.
It's not pedantic, it's true, and it actually is deeply important because misunderstanding this can lead to very different beliefs about the world, science, and technology.
This is not kindergarten so let's no go down this path. Asking for a politically neutral (see my explanation elsewhere in this thread if you don't understand what that means) source of information is not 'bad politics' but intended to avoid bad politics. I suspect that you 'identify' as either 'liberal' or 'progressive' so I assume you'd be less than thrilled if Wikipedia had a conservative bias. The same goes for conservatives and (traditional) capital-L Liberals who are less than thrilled to see Wikipedia having a 'left-wing' or 'progressive' bias. It just makes WP end up being lumped together with the legacy media, known to be untrustworthy where it counts and that is a shame for a site which in many ways still is a valuable resource as long as you avoid any and all subjects which have been pulled into the polarised political discourse.
Biologists, mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers are already the experts who produce the text in their domain that the LLMs might have been trained on...
It is fantasy (or more specifically, science fiction). And it's astonishing how uncritically it gets taken at face value through so much of the industry.
The Dutch and Swiss are very powerful, relative to their size. You can say fantasy things like "if they were invaded tomorrow", but that's not reality.
The US has atomic weapons, but has lost almost every war it has started since having nukes. Having weapons doesn't mean you will be faced with contexts to actually use them. "Genome-targeted bioweapons" is just made up nonsense. Just making up "if" statements of fantastical capabilities that do not have grounding in reality is just that: fantasy. Living in fantasy land is how the richest nation the world has ever seen could lose a war to teenagers in Afghanistan.
The idea of an "atomic bomb" would have seemed fantastical before it was developed. Bioweaponry is underfunded, far more dangerous than you think, and is a hot topic for the PRC [0].
And let's be clear — the US did not "lose a war" in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, we had failed pseudo-occupations. That is not the same as losing a war. No country, save perhaps Iraq during the Gulf War, has experienced the force of a modern American army. And if you want know what happened during the Gulf War, look at the "Casualties and losses" section on the Wikipedia page [1]. Spoiler: America won, Saddam lost.
You, and I, and the entire world, have been living under a Pax Americana for the past 70-something years. As that world order fractures, you will see that no country without hard assets and military power, the Netherlands and Switzerland included, are as powerful as they may seem.
Friedrich Merz, the incoming German Prime Minister, spoke very eloquently about this in his first televised conversation. Germany will lead the re-militarization of Europe (disclaimer: I am also a German citizen) [2].
> And let's be clear — the US did not "lose a war" in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, we had failed pseudo-occupations. That is not the same as losing a war.
You do not wage war for the sake of war, war is a tool for achieving political goals. What you're saying is that the U.S. won battles in these wars, but ultimately lost because they failed to achieve their political objectives — which were the very reasons the wars were started in the first place. They lost in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They lost all of these wars.
What were America's political objectives in those wars? There are stated and unstated objectives. We don't really know if they were achieved or not. Maybe Iraq was a Haliburton enrichment play... That's still going on [0]!
But you're not really right here. In both cases, American forces dismantled the initial enemy: the Taliban regime fell in 2001, and Saddam Hussein’s government collapsed in 2003. Combat superiority wasn’t the issue.
We "lost" because all of those wars were occupations. Locals just didn't care enough to keep us there, or vehemently opposed American presence. It's really, really hard to occupy a country that doesn't want you there, even if your military capacity is vastly superior.
Defending a nation like Taiwan or Japan is a totally different story. If you are defending a country from an external threat, they want you to stay.
I was responding to the above commenter, who wrote:
> Living in fantasy land is how the richest nation the world has ever seen could lose a war to teenagers in Afghanistan.
What I'm pointing out is that the US has extreme combat superiority that no country has ever had to reckon with. And we have never waged "total war".
Extreme combat superiority does not mean you are fighting a combat where that achieves your objectives. The reason the Taliban did not have to reckon with the full potential of the US military is because the US unleashing it's full power on them would be stupid. Your power is actually limited by the boundaries of rationality. The US (and to a lesser degree Russia) could in theory vaporize every city in any country, and kill everyone there. That's not actually a coherent goal (unless you like fantasizing about how powerful you are), and so it doesn't actually happen.
The development of nukes greatly reduced the possibilities of war between major nation states, and in the conflicts with minor states, nukes are not under consideration for use. Russia has never actually done any move with their nuclear weapon regiments to indicate using them, even though they are actively locked in a dumb war they underestimating that is costing hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. America kicked the Taliban out of power but could not keep the Taliban out of power, whether you left immediately or after 20 years. Your combat superiority doesn't mean you can defeat foreign militancies. Time and time again you have not defeated them. That is the reality. Fantasizing about unleashing the full combat superiority of the US military (nuking the entire landscape petulantly) to show that you are powerful is not a credible or coherent outcome... and lo it does not happen.
Finally, the US has waged total war since the end of WW2. Almost every substantial building in North Korea was destroyed in the Korean War. All of the dams and civilian infrastructure were entirely destroyed by US bombs. US bombers couldn't even find targets to indiscriminately bomb toward the end. And yet the US did not defeat the North Koreans.
(As a final note, DPRK started that war, not the US or its allies, so the primary objectives were inherently different and more defensive. Nonetheless, the use of total war did not achieve ultimate the victory it was aimed at.)
Right. You’ll notice I never mentioned WW2. I said this:
> You, and I, and the entire world, have been living under a Pax Americana for the past 70-something years. As that world order fractures, you will see that no country without hard assets and military power, the Netherlands and Switzerland included, are as powerful as they may seem.
And that is true! The Korean War was more than 70 years ago.
Since then, US military-industrial capacity has absolutely ballooned. Our modern military is orders of magnitude more capable, armed, and well-equipped than the one which fought the Korean War.
I don’t get what point you’re trying to make. Your arguments are redundant and make no sense.
With regards to military engagements, I’m explicitly talking about non-nuclear engagements, and I’m pointing out that states without true military capability will not be “live players” in the new world order.
You can see this with Ukraine and Russia! Military mobilization and aid has boosted the Ukrainian military to the second largest in Europe. If they didn’t have that aid and that military power, you can be sure Kyiv would be Russified tomorrow.
America didn't lose the Iraq War to Saddam, it lost to disparate groups of Islamic jihadis who read some Mao.
Losing a war is not body counts, it's a military withdrawal after a failure to achieve objectives. It doesn't mean there are winners.
America went into Afghanistan to destroy Al-qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. At the end of the war, the Taliban were back in power and global jihadism is even stronger and more pervasive than before. That is losing a war.
Pax Americana shows that big militarized states like the US and Russia (before that USSR) do not wield the operational war power they imagine. They lose every war they start (which, again, is not to say there is a triumphant winner).
So you're just doing Delphic oracle prophecy. Mysticism is not actually that helpful or useful in most discussions, even if some mystical prediction accidently ends up correct.
Observations and expectations are not prophecy, but thanks for replying to dismiss my thoughts. I've been working on a ML project outside of the LLM domain, and I am blown away by the power of the tooling compared to a few years ago.
