I think this is true with many tools but pronounced here with how ubiquitous language is. For most of human history most people could not read and write. Given llm interaction is almost exclusively written we may take a small step back where a mass of people are lazy using shortcuts and others are not.

I don't believe in digital gods.

But also the machine stops[1] and idiocracy both address this.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72890/pg72890-images.ht...

What is life without struggle, though? Reading through a long tech manual, overcoming failure dozens of times, telling myself "just one more try, you're so close" and the ecstatic feeling of success that follows as I see my project come to fruition. Without it, how do we reaffirm ourselves...?

People will still keep up the class stratification, because power feels good, and a myriad of other human properties, or failings if you will. So, the problems will also never end.

Paying your bills and finding something worthwhile to do with your life may be problems enough.

We can spend more time on art, music, camaraderie, love, play, and the pursuit of grace.

We will always have a problem to solve. Isn't it the point of Asimov's story, "The Last Question"?

Disease? Mortality? Finding a good partner?

How do you imagine a robot solving those?

Bold of you to assume the machine gods would allocate resources for our survival.

The basilisk consumes the minds of those who worship it.

It's mostly in the tech industry though that you find people who have such a tenuous grasp on the natural order that they honestly believe serving the basilisk is what's best

other comments mention things like the "geat filter" and how (further) abandonment of the written word could become a class definition, these are not trivial speculations......many of us here will have experienced predjudice and bullying for bieng "overly" literate in school so the notion of literacy becoming a liability is reasonable, especialyconsidering that the president just finnished his first book, and it didn't go so well, so he might just save everyone from having to suffer as he has, and ban crayons.

Invoking the cliched comparison of AI to past inventions in a discussion about parroting is brilliant satire.

No different than a book. Maybe the places where the experiences were had were real and maybe they weren’t. Maybe we recall the emotion or it is projected from the story (or resonates in frequency with our own experiences).

I liken LLMs to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

It's a functional subunit of the brain responsible for language interpretation and production.

"What kind of parrot?"

It's about 49 characters, which is maybe a little small but much closer to the size I normally read my ebooks at then most website these days. Most recommendations I see online for digital prose line length recommend around 55 characters at the lowest, so I think it's doing okay.

Reader mode for the win

It's funny that I had the exact opposite reaction. I was happy to get more information with less eye movement. Large text is everywhere these days and causes me some eye strain after a while.

[dead]

> yet insists that humans are not stochastic parrots

It seems trivially obvious to me that you cannot stochastic parrot yourself from apes with sticks and rocks to space flight and internet

You are a hydraulic system. You are composed of interlinked pipes within which the pressure rises and lowers in order to produce all your thoughts and actions.

You are a chemical soup. Your body is a closed system of proteins and amino acids reacting with each other, driving behavior in order to sustain the reactions.

You are an electric grid. A system of interconnected wires where electric impulses respond to one another in a synchronized manner, from which your life force is derived.

A state machine is a very specific thing in Comp Sci, and I’m not clear you have a strong grasp on it.

You’re not a state machine. A state machine does one serial task, which is why the input+state can create a consistent and deterministic output+state. There are no secondary input streams or exogenous factors to consider for calculating a state machine transition.

Humans create output from many streams of input, arriving at across many different time horizons. Because of this, you cannot create a deterministic model of a human’s state transition for a given input - a requirement of state machines.

This isn’t philosophical or semantics. Mathematically, you’re not a state machine.

> You are a state machine.

Humans are analog, state machines are not. And the analogue I will use here is that a model of anything is not the thing itself by definition.

> We are perhaps different stochastic parrots than the models we create, but likely stochastic parrots none the less.

To parrot is to "to repeat by rote"[0]. Algorithms, such as LLM's, do so as that is all they can do.

I choose to not limit myself to being a parrot. Which is why I am not one.

As Descartes proffers:

  The only thing we have power over in the universe is our 
  own thoughts.[1]

1 - https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1521522

Probably better to say that we contain multitudes of probabilistic graphs that resemble state machines, but those graphs do not make up our entire system. Further, those graphs interact constantly with stochastic systems (the environment, other graphs, etc) through couplings of varying degree.

> You have finite internal state

As Terry Pratchett might have said - what about quantum?

I believe that the different topologies of the kind of "idea graph" in the human mind is becoming less diverse. That, as media consolidates and becomes more accessible in all parts of the globe, the diversity of modes of thought decreases as people become, more or less, Americanized