Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires.

• Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I talked about the way in which Plato’s concerns were valid and expressed similar fears about misuse. The linked article is about how to approach the specific technology.

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  • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You didn’t say his concerns were valid. You said you thought he was not “wholly wrong”. Regardless, Plato being a crank about writing proves only that cranks existed before writing. It does nothing to help you interrogate, nor help set you down the path to interrogate the questions asked.

    Your referenced article is basically a long-form version of your post, which has a perceivable bias toward the viewpoint that every newly-introduced technology can or will inevitably result in “progress” for humanity as a whole regardless of the methods of implementation or the incentives in the technology itself.

    Far from being an instance of skub (pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/) as this perspective indirectly implies that it is (i.e. an agnostic technology / inanimate object that “two sides” are getting emotionally charged about), LLMs (and their “agentic” offspring) are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased. There are real concerns to be discussed about this technology that posting a quote from an ancient tome do not cover.

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    • Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      LLMs are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased.

      I mean, it sounds like you’re mirroring the paper’s sentiments too. A big part of Clark’s point is that interactions between humans and generative AI need to take into account the biases of the human and the AI.

      The lesson is that it is the detailed shape of each specific human-AI coalition or interaction that matters. The social and technological factors that determine better or worse outcomes in this regard are not yet fully understood, and should be a major focus of new work in the field of human-AI interaction. […] We now need to become experts at estimating the likely reliability of a response given both the subject matter and our level of skill at orchestrating a series of prompts. We must also learn to adjust our levels of trust

      And as I am not, Clark is not really calling Plato a crank. That’s not the point of using the quote.

      And yet, perhaps there was an element of truth even in the worries raised in the Phaedrus. […] Empirical studies have shown that the use of online search can lead people to judge that they know more ‘in the biological brain’ than they actually do, and can make people over-estimate how well they would perform under technologically unaided quiz conditions.

      I don’t think anyone is claiming that new technology necessarily leads to progress that is good for humanity.

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      • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The paper waffles around a bit as to whether or not the result will be overall “good”, and tries to be as adept at fence sitting as Dwight Shrute from the Office (getyarn.io/…/6b3c335d-fd65-4db0-aa70-01c70f312b5a) but the position was made very apparent even from a short skim of the article as well as the way you’re continually referencing it here.

        Since you seem to have an affinity for Greek philosophers:

        “It is the mark of an educated mind not to believe everything you read on the Internet.” - Aristotle

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