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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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keiferski ◴[15 Jul 25 06:08 UTC] No.44568304[source]▶
One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.)

And so a result of this is that they fail to notice the same recurring psychological patterns that underly thoughts about how the world is, and how it will be in the future - and then adjust their positions because of this awareness.

For example - this AI inevitabilism stuff is not dissimilar to many ideas originally from the Reformation, like predestination. The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. On a psychological level it’s the same thing: an offloading of freedom and responsibility to a powerful, vaguely defined force that may or may not exist outside the collective minds of human society.

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SwoopsFromAbove ◴[15 Jul 25 06:45 UTC] No.44568532[source]▶
100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments.

My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.

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1. ikr678 ◴[15 Jul 25 07:23 UTC] No.44568787[source]▶
It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'.

I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change.

AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.

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2. mountainb ◴[15 Jul 25 14:09 UTC] No.44571340[source]▶
To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people.

When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else.

This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.