The Rise of Whatever

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline.

Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value.

Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.

At any point of progress in history you can look backwards and forwards and the world is different.

Before tractors a man with an ox could plough x field in y time. After tractors he can plough much larger areas. The nature of farming changes. (Fewer people needed to farm more land. )

The car arrives, horses leave. Computers arrive, the typing pool goes away. Typing was a skill, now everyone does it and spell checkers hide imperfections.

So yeah LLMs make "drawing easier". Which means just that. Is that good or bad? Well I can't draw the old fashioned way so for me, good.

Cooking used to be hard. Today cooking is easy, and very accessible. More importantly good food (cooked at home or elsewhere) is accessible to a much higher % of the population. Preparing the evening meal no longer starts with "pluck 2 chickens" and grinding a kilo of dried corn.

So yeah, LLMs are here. And yes things will change. Some old jobs will become obsolete. Some new ones will appear. This is normal, it's been happening forever.