Ask HN: Is there anything good in the existence of LLMs?

5 points by sirnicolaz 56 days ago | 4 comments

I keep asking myself. What I see is: cognitive atrophy, cultural halt, information slop, energy and water depletion (and cost surge), anxiety (yes because you need to be faster now that you can), job loss, copyright infringement... I personally can only find it genuinely good for summarising huge bureaucratic documents, but the rest is really something that I think will bring humanity to a collapse, not forward. Am I hallucinating?

I also don't buy the "productivity" tale. Being able to create more stuff is not what brings innovation and progress. It just brings "more stuff".

PS: I indeed use it for coding too, but I cannot say this is gonna make me a better human. Banging my head on problems until I solved them was what made me a good professional and a satisfied individual, not "this".

fabrice8 56 days ago |

My response on this is Yes and No.

Yes because the same way you find it useful for summarizing huge bureaucratic documents, someone find it useful for something different as well. It's a general tool.

No because it a new technology we're still trying to learn and adjust to, but it going so fast that most of us can't keep up. It's a scary turbulence yeah, we hope to get to stable postures with better regulations and adequate usage guidelines.

We are in the most disruptive moments of it and every impactful technology does that. It mostly how we as human, collectively act toward the growth of those new opportunities that create issues and bubbles.

For reference, the grid was as much dangerous at a time it was invented and expending; we find it normal nowadays.

The point is: We need to level up our adjustment abilities and regulate the human's doing towards the technology. At the end, it's not the tech, it's human greed the source of most issue we worry about.

gus_massa 56 days ago |

I'm using the free version of:

* A much better orthography and grammar correction in Google Docs. It also detects some bad idioms and other silly mistakes.

* A much better search for two lines of code in Google Search. (Gemini replaces like 2 or 3 trips to Stack Overflow and the Docs)

In both cases I just use it for very local fixes. I still write the main part of the text/code.

onion2k 56 days ago |

All that sweet, sweet shareholder value.

ben_w 56 days ago |

> Am I hallucinating?

Nah, those risks are mostly correct (the only exception is the water, though even here this danger is only over-stated in aggregate, hydrology is complicated and local depletion can happen).

Plus a whole bunch more of other risks on top of that.

But we've been through what you list before, those specifics you list are close to a repeat of the industrial revolution.

The cognitive requirements changed radically: though this manifested as mandatory schooling, I'd expect our modern ignorance of farm work, coopering, blacksmithing, etc. would seem like atrophy to someone from 1750.

Culture always looks like it's ending: just because I (genuinely) think that LLMs are a memetic monoculture where apathy and price are likely to enforce its use as effectively as censorship ever did for dictatorships, doesn't mean people weren't upset about movies switching from live bands to pre-recorded "robot" musicians. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...

Likewise, compare information slop to yellow journalism. Compare energy use to the initial introduction of electricity. Job losses as old crafts were lost to machines which automated the labour. Copyright laws needing to be created in the first place because of the price and availability of printing presses.

And what we got from the industrial revolution was the power to create a lot more stuff. Somehow this didn't lead to a 15 hour work-week, but to us wanting even more stuff, so innovation and progress didn't halt.

Was this a net positive, or net negative? We're obese and unfit, hoarding so many things that one big industry is self-storage where stuff you don't use and can't (or won't) sell can sit ignored and free up more room for buying more things just like them.

> Banging my head on problems until I solved them was what made me a good professional and a satisfied individual, not "this".

Pick harder problems. LLMs can speed up the foundations, but can't (yet) reliably break down huge projects into chunks that would take a human an hour to a day, and can't well handle tasks more complex than that.