For the last ~15 years, technology has played a role in the steady degradation of human interaction. Social media reduces us to hot takes and memes. We are rewarded by burns and take downs. We're encouraged to focus on building an audience, rather than meaningful interaction. An entire generation now has grown up on this tech. Jon Haidt and others have shown the impact.
While the "humanity" of LLMs is of course an illusion, the illusion could have a positive impact on social development. As you point out, all of our actions influence us. If someone is cruel to an animal, they'll be cruel to humans – they're practicing cruelty. If we're cruel online, we're practicing cruelty, and that will extend to our offline world.
But LLMs are relentlessly polite. They're certainly not constrained to 140 characters! With OpenAI's "advanced voice mode", the AI demonstrates a degree of attention and emotional care which is often lacking from humans, who are absorbed in their own worries.
Of course, a world in which we find more humanity in our interactions with an LLM than actual humans is... problematic. But an optimistic take is that LLMs can counteract the free-fall induced by social networks, and that they can restore the practice of courteous, attentive behavior.
Thanks for the interesting provocation, Justin. It's worth thinking about whether the sort of interactions you're thinking about here might help to form us in more positive ways than much of the deformation that we've seen over the last decade.
For whatever it's worth, I think that the ability to connect with computation outside of a screen has the potential to open up interesting opportunities here. But the road toward a flourishing future feels very narrow to me, in much the same way that we've seen with our current devices.
A critical element here seems this: we must think of the AI as a medium and not as a tool. Here's the distinction: the tool works on a material (say, a typewriter presses keys onto paper into words). The medium is the flexible matter (as, say, a chemical) whose elements allow expression (paint, words, sound). The cello is the tool. The sound is the medium. As an active teacher and a fan of your feed, I would like to engage more on that topic. Any reading recommendations before I do, something that might suit equally students at Harvey Mudd and my college-bound boarding-school students?
Well said. We would all do well to think about technology through this lens. Postman, McLuhan, and the like are required reading for making sense of our world today.
As far as a concrete starting place, I'd recommend Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and McLuhan's "Understanding Media."
I'm going to play devil's advocate here.
For the last ~15 years, technology has played a role in the steady degradation of human interaction. Social media reduces us to hot takes and memes. We are rewarded by burns and take downs. We're encouraged to focus on building an audience, rather than meaningful interaction. An entire generation now has grown up on this tech. Jon Haidt and others have shown the impact.
While the "humanity" of LLMs is of course an illusion, the illusion could have a positive impact on social development. As you point out, all of our actions influence us. If someone is cruel to an animal, they'll be cruel to humans – they're practicing cruelty. If we're cruel online, we're practicing cruelty, and that will extend to our offline world.
But LLMs are relentlessly polite. They're certainly not constrained to 140 characters! With OpenAI's "advanced voice mode", the AI demonstrates a degree of attention and emotional care which is often lacking from humans, who are absorbed in their own worries.
Of course, a world in which we find more humanity in our interactions with an LLM than actual humans is... problematic. But an optimistic take is that LLMs can counteract the free-fall induced by social networks, and that they can restore the practice of courteous, attentive behavior.
(Probably a pipe dream. But one can hope!)
Thanks for the interesting provocation, Justin. It's worth thinking about whether the sort of interactions you're thinking about here might help to form us in more positive ways than much of the deformation that we've seen over the last decade.
For whatever it's worth, I think that the ability to connect with computation outside of a screen has the potential to open up interesting opportunities here. But the road toward a flourishing future feels very narrow to me, in much the same way that we've seen with our current devices.
"But the road toward a flourishing future feels very narrow to me, in much the same way that we've seen with our current devices."
I agree on the "narrowness" of the path. But I'm a persistent optimist! 🙂
Thank you for the thoughtful post and follow up.
Let's find and stick to the narrow path together! Thanks for the thread.
A critical element here seems this: we must think of the AI as a medium and not as a tool. Here's the distinction: the tool works on a material (say, a typewriter presses keys onto paper into words). The medium is the flexible matter (as, say, a chemical) whose elements allow expression (paint, words, sound). The cello is the tool. The sound is the medium. As an active teacher and a fan of your feed, I would like to engage more on that topic. Any reading recommendations before I do, something that might suit equally students at Harvey Mudd and my college-bound boarding-school students?
Well said. We would all do well to think about technology through this lens. Postman, McLuhan, and the like are required reading for making sense of our world today.
As far as a concrete starting place, I'd recommend Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and McLuhan's "Understanding Media."