Is basic arithmetic something that can be forgotten? Studies have suggested that even infants have an understanding of basic arithmetic. There is a reasonable likelihood that it is something innate.

As we're only imagining anyway, let's ignore the genie for a moment. If we did lose our sense of basic arithmetic all of a sudden what would life at its core even be like? If there were two apples on a table you wouldn't be able to comprehend what happens if you took one. Would we even be able to function like that?

Just to be clear are you suggesting one might find oneself without a clanker?

Where're you doing your debugging? The tundra??

Of all the comments on this post, this landed the most.

I feel there is a potential to "distill" the frontier models into useful tools that can run on smaller hardware. Or distill that knowledge to produce hardware, compute or otherwise. Iff one day the frontier model become inaccessible, the tools that were carved with them may remain valuable.

They will remain most valuable if they are designed in a way that is maintainable even without LLMs. If not, they can be studied as artifacts, or reference designs and then recreated using human intelligence.

The analog I'm playing with:

You can rent time at a high end machine shop and use the best CNC machines to produce extremely valuable tools. Once you leave, you don't have access to those tools, so it is advantageous to produce durable artifacts that are valuable on their own — on a different frontier.

Imagine you're going beyond the frontier physically, exploring new parts of the earth or space. You can't bring the giant machine shop, let alone the machinery of society, the entire economy etc. What do you bring? What do you build now while you have access to the best machines to take with you?

I recently won the red ribbon, second place, at the Lambtown fiber festival, for my lovely skein of undyed handspun yarn. Weaving it is next. However, I am probably an outlier, and should not be counted.

(It was a full 250g of this fantastical kempy Herdwick, absolutely unlike anything you can get commercially, and I'm honestly more proud of it than of anything I built in six years working at NVIDIA.)

If a team can't bring the site back up in an emergency situation that's poor planning, not poor debugging.

Planning for mitigation before resolution lets a team address production issues at leisure (because the customer impact is mitigated)

All this knowledge is in your agent - ask it for ideas!

Computing tapped out on sources of leverage for solving deterministic problems a while ago. Computers got fast and our algorithms got really good.

We're on to the next frontier, and it's a bit weird. Jagged frontier and all. But it's opening up new worlds.

Luckily loads of problems are amenable to a non-deterministic approach - even better, many have lots of solutions. SRE is in that bucket. There are as many ways to SRE as there are SREs

(source: one of the first SREs at Uber, co-invented Chaos Engineering as a sub-branch of SRE, hosted first chaos eng conf at Uber, played a key role in Uber's global SRE and incident response "Ring0" initiative, managed many SRE teams over a period of roughly 7 years before a career pivot. You could say I know a thing or two about SRE.)

To SRE well you look at the situation and pull from a huge range of tools. With such a broad range of solves, you're better to focus on the outcome: did we achieve our SLOs? Are they aligned with customer expectations? Focus on defining that and providing the right support for it to be achieved and you'll be fine - you might even get a surprise.