The thing that really begets me in all of this is that what you describe, working hard pursuing a skilled passion, requires a foundation of knowledge that up until a year ago was considered a foregone conclusion for becoming someone of note. It doesn't matter whether someone learned it autodidactically or through structured schooling, the point is that the knowledge itself is fundamentally important. We never stopped teaching children basic arithmetic or mental math when slide rules, adding machines, and calculators became widespread. The reason why is pretty obvious.

And yet, the technofeudalists want us to stop teaching our children critical thinking, science, arts, technology, and everything else that encompasses the indomitable human spirit, and why? Because a machine can do those things too? Machines have been capable of or better at a great many things that humans are also capable of for the past hundred years or so and yet we have never stopped teaching humans those very things exactly because we used to recognize that those things had enormous utility in general in a sphere far beyond whatever is necessary for your calling or profession. It is absolute lunacy to me that someone could see LLMs and agentic flows do brute-force proofs and then somehow suggest that the entire field of mathematics is obsolete.

I urge you to read the piece "Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competency Crisis." If we lose all of our institutional knowledge of how the puzzle pieces all fit together there will be no one to save us when (when, not if) the systems we're creating now suffer a catastrophic failure. And they will. Model collapse has not happened yet because of luck. Synthetic data can only get you so far. And whenever we enter our Idiocracy/WALL-E stage of total compliance and deference to machines themselves, one day there will come a time when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it because they no longer understand the underlying principles.

You might say in an optimistic scenario you can just ask the LLM for the tools and resources and prior knowledge needed to fix it. Alas in many cases, this is barely enough, and most on this forum are technically knowledgeable enough to actually make use of that advice. It's hard to see a compliant, totally intellectually decrepit population doing the same. I'd also advise you that although unschooling has its benefits, it's a movement that is filled by those who are often cultists and other fringe hacks who have grievances with the school system for reasons unbeknownst to me and many others. I would not use them as any sort of advice forum or channel for meaning, and the fact that you seem to be taking them as gospel is extremely questionable and makes me uneasy about the future of this forum in general.

This was Air Force. YMMV for other branches.

My long-term hope (and call me another Zitron if you wish) is that the labs' hype dissipates if there's no serious improvements beyond stringing together agents to ram through brick wall Millennium Prize style problems and we all just use on-device AI for 99% of cases where it's useful, researchers, governments, militaries, and universities can pay for the more complex models, and image/video gen dies a slow death (if Congress will actually legislate and/or SCOTUS decides that training those specific models does not qualify as fair use unlike training LLMs) and cost for compute rises over time as public interest in the tech sours.

LLMs are such marvelous and incredible technology squandered by genuinely deranged Silicon Valley cultists who are trying to use them as a Trojan horse to force their antisocial visions of the future upon an unsuspecting populace. We could all have just invested in on-device compute and nobody would have lost their jobs in pointless layoffs, productivity would have increased, and maybe we would have forced a conversation about when and when not to use AI and it wouldn't be so ever-present in use cases where it actually does harm to the consumer and society. But sama, PT, and dario just wouldn't have it that way, would they? Because if that were the case, there's no prospective hope where they can assuage their deep-seated insecurities over being antisocial and off-putting by reassuring themselves that there's an imminent realignment of society where they will hold all the cards when the dust settles.

This is exactly the use case an LLM might (huge emphasis on might, depends on workflow, agentic vs. relying on contextual which can hallucinate) be good at and yet humans are notoriously bad at, because we are swayed by emotional responses and it is easy to have an emotional response to text that is programmed to look good for you and you alone.

> you communicate 1000 bits of information to me, instead of planned 500, and you yourself learn extra 500 bits.

Extremely optimistic. If this were the ideal scenario, you would USE the LLM to garner information ABOUT those 500 bits and then reframe them in a way that you yourself would put it. If there is insight, your "word" in your mental register now expands from the original 1000 bits to 1500 or 2000, and then are "processed" by your human brain that includes subconscious choices that are meaningful to the end result. There are tons of hidden semiotic data in your diction and wording (think resource forks in classic MacOS/HFS, only visible to the filesys) that is lost when you rely on another source to put together words for you; it's as if it is a game of Telephone. These are subtleties which you may intend for your recipient to receive and which are crucially important to your recipient and are irretrievable, it is intrinsically lossy. You have an alphabet soup of words, they cannot be put together by an LLM in exactly the way your brain did. We must rely on the fact that we ourselves put this together, the "aha" moment when an LLM does it for you is illusory and does not itself provide meaningfully important confirmation that you indeed say what you mean to say. Of course, humans say things and put things in way we do not intend to all the time. I still fundamentally believe this is more honest than relying on a third party that is not capable of understanding human emotional nuance to put together language for you, when language is and always has been a manner in which to dictate human emotional nuance.

> (Excuse the strong language, but I spent a lot of effort every day on both dealing with inconsiderate people lobbing LLM output at me, and making sure never to act like one myself, so it's a topic close to my heart.)

Does not negate the fact that LLM output itself, at least when used to convey human emotions or thoughts, is lossy. A very highly compressed JPEG with added interpolation from an upscale algorithm might come up with cool details that were never present in the original, and may look cool to both you and the recipient but are not honest to the source material. You receiving 240p JPEGs on a day-to-day basis is irrelevant to this. For the purposes of communication, it is a massive error which has the potential to compound, regardless of whether or not you or the recipient believe this to be the case.

Regardless, governments do not typically care about public sentiment when making strategic moves for long-term time horizons. It's why we have a strong military and why despite so much whining about its cost, the F-35 exists and is being fielded by as many squadrons as can get their hands on it. If they wanted to build out nuclear power in a civilian capacity, they would. We already do it for subs and ships.

Look around this forum, and all of the rampant fealty and worship towards LLMs and the mythical blood sacrifices made to the vaporware AGI god, or asociable people bragging about how Claude is a better friend, co-worker, and (rare but I've seen it) romantic partner than actual human beings.

Plenty of people out there, more than we're willing to admit, are callous, unfeeling, unempathetic, and uncaring. They may not rise to the level of outright sociopathy or psychopathy, but they generally do not regard emotions highly, negative or positive. This archetype is overrepresented in academia and science, so make of that what you will.

Walter Hartwell White, I suppose.

I think most would agree with that, unfortunately, this is not how LLMs or agentic flows are being marketed, nor how firms are encouraging their users to use them. It's being sold in a manner completely different from its capabilities.

I've maintained this for a long time but if AI was being sold as a way to achieve superhuman levels of productivity and to help you with certain goals or tasks then people would be far less opposed to its adoption. The social havoc it's wreaked as a result of Altman et al.'s bluster about it being a fully ready, human-level replacement for humans has done its reputational damage and it will take years for that to recover, especially given that they don't seem to care (yet).

Perhaps this is also why they're so worshipful and quixotically obsessed with the vaporware, God they call AGI so much, because they cannot understand how competence at tasks is not equivalent to intellect and that intelligence as we understand it is not one-note nor is fundamentally inseparable from certain sensory experiences that computers cannot currently have. The fundamental underpinnings of AGI or LLMs prevent that from occurring in the near-future unless you literally set out to create RoboCop or a T800. We all know how that ends.

And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.

On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.

Because, you know, they know best, so the hoi polloi ought to just shut up and watch as the poorly socialized quiet children exact their revenge upon those not as enlightened as them. Cue Dario adjusting his glasses and baring his teeth, or Sam Altman bulging his eyes at a camera. They can't wait for the rest of the world to be just as deeply mediocre and spiritually empty as they are.

I'd also add that I think the increased self-ID of young people in the LGBTQ community is in and of itself sort of a means to access a sort of alternative lifestyle. Many of these people live somewhat hedonistic, bohemian, artsy lifestyles that disregard traditional notions of success or traditional standards and mores in relationships and love.