[HN Gopher] Life After Language
___________________________________________________________________
Life After Language
Author : jger15
Score : 130 points
Date : 2023-05-06 05:08 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ribbonfarm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ribbonfarm.com)
| great_tankard wrote:
| >Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings
| one way or another about the economic fates of career writers)
| but in the sense of being incoherent.
|
| It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of
| the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room
| to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is
| not something that ChatGPT can understand.
|
| Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic
| fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-
| efficient economy for?
| voidhorse wrote:
| Yeah, this. As humans and as the inventors of these
| technologies, _we_ get to decide what kind of values we uphold
| and how our politics and policies should reflect them.
|
| These think pieces that subscribe to an unspoken underlying
| technological determinism are so disgusting to me, they have a
| really narrow and pathetic view of what it means to be human
| (it mostly boils down to "economic agent") Half the time I
| wonder if the authors themselves even have requisite humanity,
| and I also wonder if the obsession around digital technology is
| partially driven by our having made machines of ourselves in
| the first place (all we care about is economy, work, etc. We've
| lost the old notion of the "human spirit" at great cost).
|
| More people in power and decision making positions need to
| start broadening their reading lists with Goethe, William
| Blake, Novalis, and other awakened poets and start letting some
| of these imaginative ideas about humanity's potential drive
| their lives more than purely economically motivated crapped out
| thinkpieces.
| vladharbuz wrote:
| > Berduck is already a more interesting companion than 90% of
| humans online
|
| Sounds like the article is predicated on having completely missed
| the point of talking to another human being?
|
| Perhaps part of the problem is that we are so bad at teaching
| communication skills that we find it difficult to connect to
| other people?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Maybe my prompt-fu just sucks, but I have yet to get something
| interesting (ie both novel and good) from
| https://anonchatgpt.com . What is an example of a prompt that
| produces an interesting response?
| erwincoumans wrote:
| (by ChatGPT)
|
| Here are a few example prompts that could lead to interesting
| responses:
|
| "Write a short story about a detective who solves crimes by
| talking to plants."
|
| "Imagine a world where time flows backward. Describe a day in
| the life of someone living in that world."
|
| "Compose a poem about the beauty of the night sky as seen
| from the perspective of an astronaut on the moon."
|
| "Create a fictional conversation between a philosopher from
| ancient Greece and a modern-day scientist about the nature of
| reality."
|
| "Design a magical creature that has never been seen before,
| and describe its unique abilities and habitat."
|
| Remember that "interesting" is subjective, and what one
| person finds interesting, another may not.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Thanks. I guess I have no shortage of purely creative
| material it's possible to consume, but do have a distinct
| shortage of creative material that has enough structure
| corresponding to our world that it's possible to map onto
| other topics, or other readings into it.
|
| From that point of view, the two examples that seemed the
| most promising where 4 (fictional conversation) and 2 (time
| flows backward), but the results I got were anything but
| novel: the fictional conversation hit the usual tropes,
| with nothing particularly related to ancient Greek
| philosophy or to modern science specifically, and for some
| reason the backwards time world still had meals ordered in
| breakfast/lunch/dinner sequence. Nice for essays from an
| elementary schooler (or an AI?), but nothing one would wish
| to pay attention to read.
|
| On the other hand, at least the backwards time response
| reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rVHr6OwjI
| , which did meet my criteria for interesting when I first
| ran into it, so there's that...
|
| (note that "Entropic Time" has multiple possible tangential
| successors, based on the various details in its
| interpretation. that's a sense in which it contrasts to the
| --to my perception-- sterility of the AI responses)
|
| Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I found "Entropic
| Time" to be a strong move in a Hessian _Glass Bead Game_ ,
| but I guess at this point instead of quibbling about the
| weakness of the AI moves, I should be impressed that it
| plays at all.
|
| cf https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b
| 5ab4...
| prox wrote:
| I had the same thoughts. When you think a chatbot is the best
| interaction you had in a week, you might want to look into
| that.
| ukuina wrote:
| This was a fantastic read. I can see us getting here in a few
| decades of constant exposure to LLMs.
|
| Couple this with some form of advanced VR, and human-to-human
| collaboration will make everyone look and sound either: a) the
| way they would LIKE to be presented to the world, or b) an
| overriden version of how the OBSERVER would prefer them to look
| and sound.
|
| Either way, it's terrifylingly isolationist.
| efficax wrote:
| sometimes people can know just enough to make them stupider than
| they'd be if they knew much less
| lionkor wrote:
| I would suggest the author actually talk to some real people.
|
| Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real people.
| Hell, you can even get away with joining a small discord server
| and joining a voice chat there. Anything but the large, hype- and
| drama-driven user generated content ad farms.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I would suggest the author actually talk to some real
| people. Not on Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything - just real
| people. _
|
| Friendly fyi in case you got the impression he was a recluse
| isolated in a basement ...
|
| The author "talks to real people" all the time. Examples:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Venkatesh+Rao
| lionkor wrote:
| I didnt make assumptions about the kind of lifestyle the
| author leads, at least not purposefully.
|
| I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not
| completely detached from real, normal human interactions.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I just cannot imagine thinking like this if youre not
| completely detached from real, normal human interactions._
|
| Your statement makes it seems like you've misunderstood his
| thesis.
|
| He's envisioning a future where humans-to-humans
| conversation is more intimate, more meaningful because it's
| not limited to textual language. Example excerpt from his
| article: _> "We'll all be like children inventing secret
| languages for talking to imaginary friends, except they
| will be real friends."_
|
| His _attachment to real human interactions_ is letting him
| see a future where real interactions can be "post-
| language". The post-language "secret language" could be
| images, or dynamic translations customized for the
| particular person's brain.
| eternalban wrote:
| > more meaningful
|
| How could it possibly be more meaningful. Languages
| mature over time, bits of other langauges are integrated,
| vocabularies expand, new forms of expression in the
| langauge appears, by serious practioners of writing or
| speaking in the language.
|
| > We'll all be like children
|
| Oh great. Goo goo ga ga level civilization then. Curious
| as to how "children" discover the mutual new language and
| start communicating in it.
|
| > His attachment to real human interactions is letting
| him see a future where real interactions can be "post-
| language". The post-language "secret language" could be
| images, or dynamic translations customized for the
| particular person's brain.
|
| Sorry, but this is actually a silly notion of the OP. It
| shows an utter lack of understanding of the role of
| language in human society. _Language is a repository of
| cultural memory broken down to composable bits_.
| kajaktum wrote:
| > Goo goo ga ga level civilization
|
| You're not being open minded here. Our traditional
| languages are so inefficient at actually conveying
| information. Whenever we try to explain very complicated
| concepts, we always dumb it down to very basic
| illustrations like philosopher's diners or ice cream
| stands explain complex actor model. This is necessary for
| intuition because using parsing "adult" language at this
| level is extremely hard.
|
| I think what OP meant is that we will have more of this.
| LLMs have opened up more possibilities in how we convey
| information to one another. Why _should_ we stick to
| English? Why can't we all converse in generated images,
| real-time generated videos and illustrations?
|
| For example, instead of having PDFs, slides, Jupyter
| notebooks or whatever for class material. We will instead
| of 1000 long line of unreadable and undecipherable prompt
| to an LLM that will generate that course content that you
| can talk and interact with?
| eternalban wrote:
| Conjuring a group of philosophers together with the
| intermittent (fork - plate) cycle is a _subtle_
| structural setup. There is _thought_ behind that
| _gestalt_ of simple elements that started off in a
| thicket of complexity. That thought is also the product
| of collaboration over time by experts. Finally, at the
| end of that discourse, someone reduced it to its
| essential complexity and showed applicability to general
| patterns of interaction.
|
| None of that is child talk.
|
| OP started off on a promising note and one hoped that he
| would start playing the song of 'vector languages' for
| machine intelligence -- but alas, he then started singing
| out of tune.
|
| > You're not being open minded here.
|
| Unfair. Rather may I suggest you did not read carefully.
| I did say "civilization". In a civilization, you will
| need both _teachers_ and _students_ ; _thinkers_ , and
| _readers_. What language will the thinkers use?
| "Explaining" is a concern regarding _established_
| results. What about deriving new results? (See above)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Language is a repository of cultural memory broken
| down to composable bits._
|
| So we already have examples of discourse in which we
| alternate natural language with some other, more formal,
| language: english with formulae (math), english with tabs
| [less formal] or staff notation [more formal] (music
| criticism), english with a set of images with formal
| denotations (memes), etc. Even Montaigne's essays (which
| were _attempts_ at deriving results, not just explaining
| established ones) somewhat follow the pattern in that at
| times they alternate french with classical quotations.
|
| I hope --I think along with eternalban and Hermann
| Hesse-- that we may see the introduction of new
| combinators, new forms of composition, that are general
| enough to serve both as explanations of established
| thought and tools of generating new thought. (cf
| Aristotle _Organon_ )
| eternalban wrote:
| ( _Glasperlenspiel_? A favorite of mine.)
|
| > generating new thought
|
| I was beguiled yesterday (reflecting on our chattering
| mechanical friends) with the idea (new for me) that
| production of 'thought' doesn't necessarily require a
| 'thinker'. It's just that we thinkers -- that is the
| _HomoSapiens_ -- have only known of production of thought
| as thinkers, and assumed there is 'thinking' involved.
| (This is what is causing the confusion in some granting
| GPT the coveted 'thinker' and 'thinking' status.)
|
| If that is the case, then we have misnamed 'thought': It
| was always nothing more than a proposition, but we
| assumed it was intimately connected with the experience
| of _thinking_.
| ttpphd wrote:
| I dislike how LLMs are causing lay people to recapitulate
| the debates about private language that have been had in
| the philosophy of language community. At first I was so
| excited that people were talking about one of my favorite
| topics (finally! My niche interest! People care!) but it
| became clear that people were doing way more talking than
| reading and thinking, so the conversations are typically
| not that great.
|
| If you thought that this blog post had provocative ideas,
| you might be interested in reading some of Ludwig
| Wittgenstein's philosophy of language or Roy Harris's
| work on integrationist linguistics. These ideas have been
| debated for a long time.
| jasode wrote:
| _> If you thought that this blog post had provocative
| ideas, you might be interested in reading some of Ludwig
| Wittgenstein's philosophy of language_
|
| Yes, I've mentioned Wittgenstein before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27650343
|
| The older writings about language/linguistics are mostly
| about _observing_ misunderstandings -- or --
| _complaining_ that progress isn 't being made in
| philosophy because people (unknowingly) use different
| definitions of the same word. They weren't talking about
| any _new yet-to-be-invented machines_ to bridge the gap
| of misunderstandings -- and understandably so because
| they lived in a time before computer algorithms like
| Large Language Models existed.
|
| In contrast, because Venkatesh Rao is living right now in
| this LLM world (e.g. him playing with
| ChatGPT/GPT4/Berduck/etc), he's revising his prior
| opinion about evolution of communication. This thread's
| blog post is talking about _new possibilities of
| technology enabling a more direct understanding_. Maybe
| it 's a poorly written blog post and maybe his prediction
| won't happen. In any case, I'm just trying to explain
| what the article's is about since some readers seem to
| misunderstand it. (E.g. some readers may think he's a
| misanthrope detached from real human interaction but his
| article is actually envisioning future scenarios of the
| opposite situation!)
|
| EDIT reply to: _> Like I said there is a whole debate
| about the concept of private language that you are
| missing._
|
| And as I was trying to convey back to you, the previous
| "debates about private language" are not relevant to
| _this_ thread's article about future technology
| scenarios. His article is about predicting a _technology
| trajectory_ , and not about philosophical debates.
|
| To use this very thread we're in as an example of the
| author's point:
|
| This thread's article was written by a high-IQ
| intelligent author. And you, the reader, is presumed to
| also be highly intelligent. And yet -- you seemingly
| misunderstood the core idea of what the author was trying
| to communicate. (E.g. You feel his article is low quality
| because it re-hashes "private language debates" already
| covered by previous philosophy). And to use a mirror
| assessment of the author's writing, he didn't string
| together the perfect sequence of chosen words to make his
| point easier to understand.
|
| So... can new technology (e.b. future improved LLMs) ...
| bridge that gap of misunderstanding ... between what the
| author wrote ... and your misinterpretation of it?
|
| Neither you nor the author are illiterate... and yet
| there's a gap between you and the author. Can a future
| technology help bridge that gap?
| ttpphd wrote:
| >The older writings about language/linguistics are mostly
| about observing misunderstandings -- or -- complaining
| that progress isn't being made in philosophy because
| people (unknowingly) use different definitions of the
| same word.
|
| Uh... No. Like I said there is a whole debate about the
| concept of private language that you are missing.
| dS0rrow wrote:
| > This thread's article was written by a high-IQ
| intelligent author.
|
| Does he also have a Mensa membership?
| bluepizza wrote:
| Nice try, Mr. Rao. Btw, I'm a fan of your texts. The
| world is a bit better for the presence of someone willing
| to think deeply, and express themselves freely. The
| themes are always fascinating.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I think the author is not taking language far enough. The animals
| which cannot speak do have a language, their language is just
| body language -- one of actions. This is why when learning how to
| train dogs or cats, a human must learn how to control themselves
| and their actions.
|
| Yes, there is not reason why AI must "speak" in English or any
| other human language, but any language it speaks in will be lossy
| in the same way. Fundamentally, all of communication is lossy
| including our computer programs. This is why things like
| undefined behavior exist and also why people misunderstand.
| slushh wrote:
| TikTok could be seen as that life. People communicate in dance.
|
| One step further, how are humans going to exist when AI handles
| everything? Why communicate at all if days can be passed in a
| drug induced stupor of bliss?
| blueridge wrote:
| https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1621203955509334016
|
| "There's a new kind of dystopia that's seeming increasingly
| plausible. A post-literate society where the written word has
| been debased by LLMs and where those who can focus and consume
| long form prose will increasingly be unable to effectively
| communicate with those who can't."
| chaxor wrote:
| The joke photo is much closer to reality than many ight believe,
| according to OpenAI at least. OpenAI employees have claimed they
| can search direct strings generated by the system for expanding
| bullet points on their whole database and receive a "mirrored
| pair" of another user putting in the long form text and receiving
| bullet points in a very large percentage of samples. So the real
| joke here is that 1) OpenAI clearly spends an enormous time just
| looking through all text you give to them manually all day, and
| 2) were pushing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in order to
| expand and contract text over and over with tons of compute
| cycles, essentially wasted for what nobody wants.
| prox wrote:
| I don't understand your comment, what is happening? So it
| copies answers?
| dcminter wrote:
| I think the suggestion is that it's acting as a wildly
| inefficient broker between people who want their summaries
| turned into long form text and people who want their long
| form text turned into summaries!
|
| It's an entertaining thought.
| pohl wrote:
| I was struck by how invested the author was in asserting
| that the "joke fails". I thought that cartoon was the
| highlight of the piece.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In a strong sense, syntax and semantics are adjoint.
|
| In a weaker sense, long emails and single bullet points
| may have adjunctions between them. (every single bullet
| point may be expanded to any of a set of long emails, but
| one suspects that many long emails are incapable of being
| summarised by _single_ bullet points)
|
| The cartoon is interesting in ways that
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840240 fails to
| be.
| iamnotsure wrote:
| Can humans emulate chatgpt?
| notmypenguin wrote:
| I'm seeing plenty of that already.
| jaystraw wrote:
| I wake up with songs in my head. And as a professional musician
| in bands of different genres, and fills in for other genres, the
| "languages" are far removed.
|
| My banjo player recently told me our mandolin player describes
| things in flats because he's originally a trumpet player. My best
| friend is classically trained with a masters in vocals and
| couldn't jam with rock musicians because of the way they call out
| keys.
|
| And Western music is an established, though often debated,
| language.
|
| I just don't see the difference between any of this. It's still
| language. Whether, as in the article it's the language a kid
| invent with their imaginary friend, how I think about and
| remember the songs I wake up with...language conveys information.
|
| And I don't understand what the author of this piece is trying to
| convey about language, except perhaps a connotation of the word
| language I don't understand.
| klausnrooster wrote:
| My favorite read in, I think, years. Great seed (prompt?) for a
| novel, lol. Better communication. Improved cognition. No need for
| paper clips!
| notmypenguin wrote:
| That's what they call a "puff piece"
|
| I found myself persuaded into the opposite point of view with the
| passage of each intellectually bankrupt paragraph.
|
| Congratulations, I'm thoroughly dissuaded of any such conceits by
| the end of reading this, I want my 5 minutes back.
|
| Tell me a chatbot wrote this without telling me a chatbot wrote
| this
| newswasboring wrote:
| Would you like to elaborate on what makes you think this is a
| puff piece? Or what you disagree on?
| visarga wrote:
| > Reaction gifs constitute a kind of primitive post-idiomatic
| hyper-language comprising stock phrases and non-verbal whole-body
| communication fragments. Imagine a world a few centuries in the
| future, where humans look back on the era of reaction gifs as the
| beginning of the world after language.
|
| > Now that a future beyond language is imaginable, it suddenly
| seems to me that humanity has been stuck in a linguistically
| constrained phase of its evolution for far too long. I'm not
| quite sure how it will happen, or if I'll live to participate in
| it, but I suspect we're entering a world beyond language where
| we'll begin to realize just how deeply blinding language has been
| for the human consciousness and psyche.
|
| I think the LLM revolution tell us something else - it is
| language that crystallises and captures almost all the human
| intelligence. By training a random initialised transformer on
| language you get chatGPT. Doing the same to a baby leads to a
| modern human. It was not the brain or the transformer that are
| intelligent, it is language running on them that is. Language is
| a self replicator, but it needed humans, now it works on LLMs
| too.
|
| In the long term I expect AI will discover things that are hard
| to express in our language and probably need to develop and teach
| new concepts to us. And of course AI can help create languages,
| it can do that quite well, if that's our thing. We can develop
| private (hyper-)languages and have it translate back and forth.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My personal take is that "inside" much of language (especially
| written language) is a kernel of predicate logic. Most pieces
| of text end up taking a propositional form, eventually. So if
| you train the right kind of learning machine on an absolutely
| huge pile of text, it will eventually "learn" some amount of
| logical constructions, and start producing things that at least
| look like logical reasoning, in response to logical queries.
|
| Same with training it on programming languages, which have a
| similar underlying form.
|
| What I've found though is that this "reasoning" starts to get
| exposed as shallow fairly quickly. It can only "backtrack"
| through logical relationships a couple levels deep. E.g. I give
| GPT4 a Rust program with a borrow checker problem and ask it to
| "fix" it and watch it flail around in circles for 3 or 4 tries
| before just producing complete nonsense because it gets lost.
|
| It _looks_ like human intelligence like you say, but it just
| falls over after a few short steps.
|
| Yes, most humans will do the same thing. Except unlike an LLM,
| humans are able to _sense_ when they get lost and attempt to
| sometimes retrace or correct their steps. But I think there 's
| something intrinsically missing in LLMs that prevents them from
| doing that -- they don't "know" _why_ they arrived at some
| step, and don 't seem to be able to retrace and fix. Ask them
| to fix something they get wrong, and they start to degrade in
| quality quite quickly, I find. Self-awareness/consciousness may
| be the kernel of that missing piece.
|
| I think maybe these systems might be more useful once they're
| tied to an actual rigorous logical deduction system, and
| "taught" how to use them. Let the LLM "read" the prompt,
| recognize that it needs to do some logical constraint solving
| or deduction, etc., create the right terms or horne clauses or
| whatever in that subsystem, query it, and then let the LLM in
| turn produce the textual response.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| What did you have in mind for new features of these created
| languages? (cf Delaney, _Babel 17_ )
| mxkopy wrote:
| > it is language that crystallises and captures almost all the
| human intelligence.
|
| This used to be a common position held by the likes of
| Wittgenstein, but the biological reality is probably different
| [1]. Language is probably like the shadows in the Allegory of
| the Cave, a representation of some thing not to be confused for
| the thing itself.
|
| [1]: https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2019/05/02/ask-the-brain-can-we-
| thi...
| visarga wrote:
| Of course language relates to things, but I am thinking of
| language in the sense of a constantly growing corpus of text.
| It is a self replicator, but like a virus it uses the host
| organism, a human or a LLM to create more of itself. Ideas
| have their own life-cycle, they don't get born or die with
| us, they like to travel and evolve fast.
|
| My point was the capabilities we attribute to LLMs actually
| come from the training data, not the model. Any model would
| do, from 10B parameters to 500B, with cosine embeds, rotary
| or AliBi, even RNNs can do it today. But the data - that is
| precious, the source of all these "emergent" abilities. We
| are wondering at the mysteries of the transformer, but the
| mystery was hiding the training set.
|
| Let's look at the problem from the point of view of language
| as an evolutionary system of ideas. Like scientific papers
| and citations, that kind of stuff, leading to AI and human
| progress. That's where our progress will come from - the
| evolution of ideas.
| oskarkk wrote:
| > Of course language relates to things, but I am thinking
| of language in the sense of a constantly growing corpus of
| text. It is a self replicator, but like a virus it uses the
| host organism, a human or a LLM to create more of itself.
| Ideas have their own life-cycle, they don't get born or die
| with us, they like to travel and evolve fast.
|
| You're talking about "memes", in the original meaning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| cf https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/573/606/d0a...
| frabcus wrote:
| I think it is more that language is a convenient way to capture
| high quality human intellectual capabilities to train an AI
| easily. LLMs have highly curated training text to keep that
| quality high.
|
| In reality we think not just in words but in pictures, sounds,
| abstract unsymbolized concepts. We also just do with our bodies
| and just watch with our hearts.
|
| Image models capture some of that. We don't have a way of
| capturing our unsymbolized thinking or doing yet. Expect lots
| of video data to be used to train AI in human body movements.
|
| Unsymbolized, and worse subconscious, thinking will be harder.
| My assumption is we will have AIs which can learn directly from
| the world rather than via curated human culture by that point,
| so won't need it.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Except highly curated. Not _that_ highly.
| JohnCurran wrote:
| > the longest regular conversations I've had in the last week
| have been with an AI-powered rubber duck
|
| I think, and am basing this off of nothing objective, but it
| feels like the vast majority of content today is written by
| people who spend, frankly, too much time online. I think the fact
| I'm writing a comment about this says that I, too, spend too much
| time online.
|
| The bubble that the tech world and this website in particular
| differs so much so from reality that I don't know what to make of
| the articles that front page here.
|
| All the twitter doomsaying, trump will never be president, all
| entirely wrong. I don't know what to make of it - maybe I should
| log off for a while
| r0l1 wrote:
| Just go out, do some sports and enjoy life :) I stopped
| spending too much time in front of the computer and started
| doing more outdoor activities. Best decision ever.
| nicbou wrote:
| "Go touch grass" is used derisively, but it's something I
| tell myself more and more. We overvalue the online world and
| all its drama. Go outside, meet people, make your own
| organic, locally grown drama.
|
| These days I schedule my work around the weather. Few things
| bring me as much happiness as a day in the sun. I know it has
| been a good day when I have not touched my laptop once.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| I recently made a small webapp to make me "touch grass".
| The idea behind it is that you enter some activities (or
| keep the random defaults), and when you are bored or doom
| scrolling, it call tell you what to do.
|
| It's a bit silly, and still very bare bones, but I just
| like the phrase "touch grass", and this is my effort to
| reclaim it from the depths of derisiveness.
|
| https://makemetouchgrass.com
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Go touch grass" barefeet, if you want even more body
| sensations ...
|
| And actually you can combine both. Sitting with your laptop
| on the grass (in the shade), to get the outside feel, but
| still work done.
| newswasboring wrote:
| As with many things in life, "go touch grass" isn't
| actually about touching grass.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > As with many things in life, "go touch grass" isn't
| actually about touching grass.
|
| As with many things in life, though "go touch grass"
| isn't actually about touching grass, touching grass
| really is a good thing. (Well, except that it makes me
| itch all over the area of contact. Still worth it.)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| For me it is complementary. While I consciously touch
| grass, I ground what I am doing with reality. Is the
| problem I am stuck coding on really that important? Is
| there a simpler solution, or is something else more
| important right now?
|
| At least, that's what works for me, sometimes metaphors
| are to be also taken literal.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I don't like sports, and I live in an endless suburban
| wasteland where there's nothing to do but go to bars,
| restaurants or the mall.
|
| I can't afford to go to restaurants all the time, and I don't
| like bars or the mall.
|
| I'm shy and I don't do well around strangers, and even when I
| do meet new people 99% of the time we don't have much in
| common, so it feels like a waste of time.
|
| I'd much rather surf the web... at least there I'm learning
| stuff, and I can communicate with people who I actually have
| something in common with.
| hackernoteng wrote:
| The curse of the high IQ is that statistically you wont
| find a lot in common with the average Joe. Too bad just
| deal with it. Get married and raise children. Go to church.
| Spend time in your local library. Volunteer at a local CSA
| (community supported agriculture). Take long walks. Go
| hiking. Ride a mountain bike in the woods. Go to the gym
| and lift weights. But dont spend your life online and
| staring at computer screens.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I don't see a problem with spending time in front of a
| screen, and would much rather do that than do pretty much
| anything you mentioned.
|
| Some things, like spending time in nature are nice once
| in a while, but there's no nature near where I live, and
| even if there was I'm often not in the mood to go.
| blablablerg wrote:
| Why not? This is a very dogmatic take on how to spend
| ones time. People enjoy different things, if you enjoy
| spending time behind a screen, go for it.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I don't enjoy my time online, I just dread change more
| than I dread living a dull life
| tony_antny wrote:
| World outside this tech bubble is so different.
|
| I worked in conventional ELV systems related engineering before
| getting into tech. I feel like people outside high-tech life
| are so much behind in many aspects of life - the progress made
| by tech on the lives of high-tech people are yet to reach the
| ordinary person.
|
| There are so many non-tech people out there we look down but in
| fact they are the probably 98% of humanity and their reality
| define how we as humanity evolve.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| On the other hand I feel like non-tech people are underrated
| in their understanding of what what tech is doing, they just
| have a way more relaxed attitude towards it.
|
| Like finding out your 55 year old Aunty has secretly been
| using LLMs to automate part of her job is real.
|
| "High tech" people are like trekkies, they're just more into
| it.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| "Trump will never be president" is an excellent support of
| TFA's thesis: it was said by people who were not so much
| terminally online as terminally reading, and who were therefore
| convinced that no one who is demonstrably illiterate (having a
| command of the oral register but not the written) in his mother
| tongue could become president*. In 2016, some large percentage
| of the US electorate was already post-language (or at least
| post-literacy), as they agreed the lack of literacy(/language)
| was no impediment.
|
| * despite having been indoctrinated for years that the genius
| of the States is that "anyone can become president"?
| chmod600 wrote:
| The genius of the US is that, no matter who becomes
| president, the country still functions pretty well.
| [deleted]
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| After watching the first head-to-head debate it was apparent
| that Trump could win - whereas Trump was clearly a deeply
| flawed human being, Clinton came across as a smiley robot.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Can you tell me what's the biggest flaw you see in Trump as a
| human?
|
| Genuinely curious.
| pohl wrote:
| Find the biggest flaw in the infinite fractal of flaws --
| fun game.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Personally, I never liked his hotels much.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Take your pick between 1) He's nakedly selfish and
| narcissistic and 2) He attempted to subvert the peaceful
| transfer of power, one of the bedrocks of our democracy.
| precompute wrote:
| I think it's a result of how the media relegates different
| sectors of people into different "propaganda" zones. A lot of
| people like to watch TV. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for
| them to spend more time with the TV than with another human
| being. Others probably don't have the time to watch any TV. The
| people online on the internet clearly fall into a niche of
| "wanting", where they're asking for entertainment but none can
| give them any, so they invent some for their own selves. Now
| that there's a proper contender for TV in this space, this will
| become a regular occurrence.
|
| Note: I'm not stating that people online don't watch TV at all
| -- just that they don't derive the same sort of enjoyment from
| it that normal people do.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The online world is often much more interesting to me than the
| offline world... at least around where I live.
|
| It'd be great if I could afford to travel, but I can't... and,
| anyway, traveling itself has many downsides, and you can burn
| out on that after a while.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Ain't that the truth. 99% of what people do socially around
| my area is drink, talk about work, talk about the most recent
| sporting event, and talk about their kids if they have them.
|
| After the first 5 times you have those conversations, you can
| predict the entire night's conversation before they begin.
| I'd love to have offline conversation that was almost
| anything else.
| [deleted]
| boerseth wrote:
| This reminds me of that reddit post from a couple of years ago,
| _" Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane
| People"_[1]. I mean, to utter these kinds of predictions out
| loud really reveals your power level. That said, I think the
| author is right in the premise, that human-to-human
| communication will be affected by whatever it is that is coming
| our way. The predictions they end up at, however, are
| regressions that go a bit too far.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
| tonnydourado wrote:
| I can't tell whether this is an exercise in scifi-ish
| speculation, a la Julio Vernes, in which case is kinda
| interesting, or an attempt at seriously exploring possible near
| future, in which case I hate it.
|
| There's a weak and strong version of what I feel is the core
| idea, "what if human communication becomes largely intermediated
| by machines".
|
| The weak version is already here, as the article points out. We
| (at least we, chronically online people) already talk in memes
| and gifs quite a lot. And how AI will shape it is worth thinking
| about. I saw that happening on real time on TikTok with people
| using alternatives for words they feel get their content
| deprioritized, like suicide, murder, sex, etc. A literal AI model
| changing language.
|
| The strong version, though, is purely star-trek/Asimov level of
| speculation. Let alone the same neighborhood, current technology
| is not even in the same country as that.
|
| The article kinda mixes both things back and forth for a bit, and
| then fully dives into the scify version, which makes me wondering
| if the author genuinely believe they will see anything like this.
| If they do, boy will they be disappointed.
|
| Now, assuming it's all fun scify speculation of a future we'll
| never see, but hey, might happen, I have some problems with the
| ideas, but I'll highlight two.
|
| > Plenty of other species manage fine with simpler languages or
| no language at all.
|
| No they don't. Only species doing well right now are the ones we
| breed or our parasites. We can potentially erase almost all non-
| microscopic life forms by accident, let alone if we really put
| our minds to it. Humans have effects on a geological scale,
| that's a very select group of species.
|
| > And it is not clear to me that intelligence has much to do with
| the linguistic fabric of contemporary society.
|
| Kinda see the above comment? I don't think we even have a concept
| of intelligence that isn't somehow based on language, even if
| that language is not necessarily some form of spoken language. We
| certain can't evaluate intelligence without it. And as far as I
| know, humans don't develop language without socialization.
|
| Sure, you could envision a future where the machines do the
| socialization, but I think that would be a civilization that
| would be too fragile to exist for much long.
| prox wrote:
| Interesting take. I think it also matters how broad or small
| you define language or communication. Personally and in a
| philosophical way spoken and written language is the main
| differentiation between us and and animals. We can quickly and
| specifically make intent and meaning mediated between us. I
| also think we are hilariously bad at it in a modern context,
| the complexity of the current society makes communication (and
| by extend community!) unnecessarily (?) noisy.
|
| Another interesting point is the idea of Logos, Word, Speech as
| the divine attribute par excellence in some religious and
| mythological contexts.
|
| That said I am not sure what the author wants to optimize. I
| mean if AI can mediate meanings and intent, that sounds
| interesting. If it is to AI have their own chats, I doubt that
| is useful from a human context.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| I think we're only bad at language in the sense that we
| created harder problems than the language we have can solve,
| so we feel its limitations. But the kind of stuff out
| language can do is pretty amazing, in a larger scale.
| jamilton wrote:
| I agree re: sci-fi or serious. I could see "intentionally
| intermediate most communication through AI" being a niche
| subculture some years from now, but I wouldn't actually expect
| it to be a panacea to communication.
| [deleted]
| freehorse wrote:
| I half agree with the author, though I see LLMs more like the
| harbingers of the upcoming language apocalypse rather than of the
| post-language age, considering the limits of their world is the
| limits of our language, how much faith and hype we start to be
| putting in it and the degree we depend on language that makes it
| a perfect tool to manipulate us in the deepest level. The LLMs
| are just tools, if we do not see past language ourselves (and
| considering what I read and discuss last months, we generally do
| not) the post-language era will never happen.
|
| Even the fact that the author held the conversations they had
| with a LLM higher than human conversation proves exactly this
| point.
| rizz0 wrote:
| Something in my gut tells me it's not going to play out the way
| this guy thinks it will.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| This applies to so many avenues these days...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I was sincerely admiring vgr until he went off the deep end into
| crypto and now AI.
|
| The basic meta mistake in many similar arguments that I since
| heard from others in the space is exemplified in this:
|
| > That's... not how technology works.
|
| It's... not about technology, tech is not the end goal, human is.
| Tech serves human, and if it hurts human guess who should take
| precedence.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If it hurts _some_ humans while helping others immensely, the
| question becomes murkier.
|
| Some questions are easy to dispense with, though: should we
| hold back the progress of ML because of the job-security
| concerns of some Hollywood writers? Answer: "No."
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI services)
| and hurts some (everyone else). For added irony many from the
| second group is who mostly produced content on which AI is
| trained.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _It helps some humans (those using AI and selling AI
| services) and hurts some (everyone else)._
|
| Gonna throw up a nice big [Citation Needed] flag on that
| one.
|
| A rising tide lifts all boats in the end. All of them. No
| exceptions.
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| I like to think about how we are now faced with changes not seen
| in 10000 (ten thousand years)!
|
| this is a play on a Chinese media quip attributed to Xi Jinping
| that says "changes not seen in the world in 100 years"
| https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/great-changes-...
|
| we have just found (in the 20th century) something that I think
| is as BIG as writing itself.
|
| Writing taken as the underlying technology behind (or under?) the
| concept of LAW itself (hence, a foundation for the notion of
| 'rule of, by, from, LAW" and everything and anything founded on
| this notions has become candidate for revision and re-
| evaluation).
|
| all because we invented a way to write that can change itself;
| this is usually better known as computing. I write some words
| that say how some other words must change.
|
| It really is all substitutions of arbitrary symbols (or sequences
| of symbols) for other symbols (or sequences thereof) all the way
| to the bottom. At the bottom there's a first number and a huge
| debate (and confusion) around whether this first number is one or
| zero (LOL).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _If you and I don't need to share a language to discuss
| Shakespeare (remember, we already don't read Shakespeare's plays
| in the original Elizabethan), do we need to share a language at
| all?_
|
| What does he mean by this? There's no real difference between the
| language in the First Folio and what's published today. A few
| spelling tweaks here and there, pretty much.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I suspect they are referring to modern English translations of
| Shakespear's plays like the ones on this website:
|
| https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...
|
| Or perhaps exactly those. Maybe the article author means that's
| how Shakespear is read by everyone today?
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| The only reading I can come up with, and it's really stretching
| generosity here, is that the works were written smack in the
| middle of the Great Vowel Shift. Some of the rhymes are
| lost/opaque for modern speakers. But that doesn't really change
| the core inanity of the parenthetical.
| vages wrote:
| I was also confused by this parenthesis. My best guess is that
| he refers to the pronunciation (which was markedly different
| before the great vowel shift), but I don't think that's a valid
| or particularly interesting point to make.
| sdfhioknionio wrote:
| Meanwhile, I still feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The prose
| these systems can generate is low-quality and incoherent. They
| are able to regurgitate textbook responses to simple questions
| but cannot display any sort of original reasoning.
|
| Fluent content-free drivel is now essentially free, whatever
| that's worth.
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