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Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

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170 points bookofjoe | 4 comments | 10 Apr 25 14:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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slibhb ◴[10 Apr 25 15:26 UTC] No.43644865[source]▶
LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined.

The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.

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1. BeetleB ◴[10 Apr 25 19:44 UTC] No.43647395[source]▶
Reminds me of an old math professor I had. Before word processors, he'd write up the exam on paper, and the department secretary would type it up.

Then when word processors came around, it was expected that faculty members will type it up themselves.

I don't know if there were fewer secretaries as a result, but professors' lives got much worse.

He misses the old days.

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2. zusammen ◴[10 Apr 25 19:50 UTC] No.43647446[source]▶
To be truthful, though, that’s only like 0.01 percent of the “academia was stolen from us and being a professor (if you ever get there at all) is worse” problem.
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3. ◴[11 Apr 25 03:11 UTC] No.43650143[source]▶
4. jhbadger ◴[11 Apr 25 10:06 UTC] No.43652256[source]▶
This wasn't just a "academia" thing, though. All business executives (even low level ones) had secretaries in the 1980s and earlier too. Typing wasn't something most people could do and it was seen as a waste of time for them to learn. So people dictated letters to secretaries who typed them. After the popularity of personal computers, it just became part of everyone's job to type their correspondence themselves and secretaries (greatly reduced in number and rebranded as "assistants" who deal more with planning meetings and things) became limited only to upper management.