| ▲ | alwa 2 hours ago | |
More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention. How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words? I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention. In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me). I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element… | ||