I agree, it makes sense for Microsoft to aim for the search big bucks and if it means making Confidently Incorrect ClippyTayGPT they'll do it. My guess is that we'll look back in a few years and say "remember when they introduced LLMs to the world with Sydney? LOL". But I'd also wager that these short-term affinity hunts won't matter; the cat is out of the bag, Bing/Sydney feels to me like the Napster of tomorrow, and I'm more interested in what the Spotify of LLMs looks like. It might be better to discuss around an extended version of what I wrote earlier: ...as I think that summarizes where we agree. I hadn't thought of these AIs as the erosion of skill yet but that is indeed what it is: you don't need to know the details, here's a mediocre version that can pass, maybe. It draws a line in the sand where on one side of the line you have people enough in the know to see the difference, and on the other hand you have the clueless who gaze upon the MiG weld in astonishment. Given time and text to churn through, LLMs will inevitably improve and push that line a bit further. Or a lot further. Hard to tell now. I'm wondering, though, how many people's work will end up at the wrong side of the line. How much white collar work boils down to 'refactor information'? A cousin of mine attempted a job at an investment firm. She'd spent all her day reading patents and applications, and her job was to summarize that (technical, jargon laded) information for the investors to judge easily. Her PhD was needed to apply, yet that job is already on the chopping block with the current models because ChatGPT is almost as good a UI to academically based patents than a PhD-carrying human is. I'm inclined to draw a parallel that feels trite, so shoot it down if you see the flaw with it: isn't the march of progress almost inevitably towards higher abstractions that can be used by more people? Chris Sawyer famously wrote Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon in Assembly. Today you whip up a generic Game World™ in Unity 5 and plop down assets from a library. It's easier, it's much more accessible, and it almost certainly performs for the worse. My excitement for Felt comes from its fantastic UI for GIS. It makes a set of abilities accessible to a broader audience. At the same time, my old uni has whittled geomatics down from a full department to a small graduate degree years ago because who the fuck needs to know how satellites work when you want to draw five X's on a map? Fast forward a few years. Oh, shoot, nobody knows how it actually works anymore. Everything is mediocre now. There are more people who can create, but there are fewer people who can do so at the highest level of skill. You need subtitles because nobody does proper audio anymore, your online map doesn't quite put the X where you intended it, your Unity game isn't that fun but it's passable, your AI generated text has some weird phrasing but it does summarize 240 pages of technical patent jargon in less time than it takes you to get out your wallet.Any of these tasks can be done by someone who knows what they're doing
LOTS Once upon a time there were typing pools. Executives didn't write anything, they dictated and girls (always girls) typed it up. Those girls didn't make a living wage, not really, they were in it until they found husbands who were often among the executives they typed for. It was a social construct more than anything and reflected that careers were things that women held temporarily or ephemerally based on the employment of their husbands (Elizabeth Warren and her daughter wrote a whole book on this). I'd have a bookkeeper except we have Quickbooks. I'd have two or three medical asisstants except we've got EHRs. I'd have an IT guy except I can roll my own. etc etc etc. I helped a buddy's firm not hire another machinist because a robot allows them to run lights-out over the weekend - they have enough of an assembly line that they can spend an hour loading pallets on Friday and come in Monday morning to 150 parts. The machinist would be prolly $80k salary plus 50% night premium times 50% benefits is $180k a year. The robot is $150k amortized over three years. The VCs want us to call this "disruption" but Schumpeter called it "creative destruction" and Marx & Engels just called it "capitalism:" And I mean, Engels saw capitalism at its worst - Manchester workhouses in Victorian England. He was unimpressed, as any thinking human would be. Automation and mechanization destroyed the middle class wholesale and England did fuckall about it for the better part of 80 years. Reason number whatever as to why Steampunk sucks: it celebrates a truly wretched period of fabrication where everything was of grindingly poor quality. Reason number whatever as to why bullshit cosplay millennials love Steampunk: the aesthetic is "bodge a bunch of bullshit together with utter disregard for design and then weather it as if you don't fucking care about anything in your life." You wanna see where this ends up? Design up to the '90s was intentional. Design in the '90s was My Very First Desktop Publishing Program. At the time? Nobody gave a fuck who came up with that nothingburger of a pattern. Solo has no fucking idea. But Millennials, who grew up in an era of fuck-all-designers, fixated on shitty fucking design and now there's a 6000 word article speculating as to who came up with this dialtone of a pattern. That's Steampunk: Contemporary Edition and it's what happens when expertise gets driven out in favor of mash-the-keys-make-a-riff. A personal anecdote: Once upon a time there were post sound departments. You'd shoot your movie or TV show, you'd edit it, and then the sound department would make it sound good. Then editing became a fast'n'reckless process because everyone shot digital which meant you went from a 5:1 or 3:1 shooting ratio to a 500:1 or 1500:1 (or worse: I boomed three minutes of commercials once for which we rolled on 72 hours of footage) shooting ratio and the edit became more of a winnowing process than a creative one. I paid for my Pro Tools PC (and my crypto!) with proceeds from my resale of my bought-at-foreclosure portion of Todd-Soundelux, 500 people who largely never worked again. About that time Izotope came out with Total Mix, a software package for editors (they hid its very existence from their sound betatesters) that would ostensibly make the garbage editors crank out sound marginally acceptable. It failed miserably, Izotope withdrew it from the market and promptly scrubbed any mention of it from the Internet but us mixers remember. We're the only ones, and there are only a handful of us left because left with the choice between slowing the fuck down and hiring professionals or continuing to pump out garbage and subtitle it so that the audience can understand their shitty work product, production companies went "subtitle the shit out of it we'll convince the world they like it." And here's the thing - there were a few designers in the '90s. There are sound mixers who survive. Not everything in the Victorian era was a shitty bodge, just most of it. All that really happens is everyone gets marginally better access to something and the general quality gets profoundly worse. This isn't a new thing, this isn't a victorian thing, this is "creative destruction" or "capitalism" because lowest price will always win and the overwhelming majority of consumers don't care enough to reward craft so you either pump out mediocre garbage or you hope you can make a living as an "artisan." This, by the way, is the fundamental argument of Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism. Societies have a choice: widespread catastophe for the formerly employed or a vastly-expanded social safety net to stave off unrest. There's a reason the USA rebuilt Europe with vastly more social reforms than we had ourselves - the place was ready to tip into communism or barbarism at the drop of a hat so you'd best make sure that nobody had a reason to riot in the streets. We're there. We're there again. And yes. LLMs are going to surprise a lot of people with how replaceable they are. And if there's a choice between "but I do it great" and "but the robot does it just barely well enough to bother but it does it for nearly free", the robot is taking your job. When quality is expensive and mediocre is cheap, worse-than-mediocre becomes the baseline.I'm wondering, though, how many people's work will end up at the wrong side of the line.
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. ... It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the whole of bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly.
