Theodora Wardin comparisons with the cognitive offloading of LLMs, people often cite google search as an okay-to-good example of internet-based cognitive offloading. like, i don't think search engines are bad lol -- but even bracketing the fact that being beholden to google means that you're beholden to EvilCorp and the inevitable enshittification, i started pausing to try to remember stuff instead of googling it immediately, and i really think it has made a positive impact on my shitty memory. i think that
there are a lot of really facile ways to throw back to the critique of the technology of writing as a memory-supplanter in plato's "phaedrus," but i do feel myself inhabiting a space where, like -- on the one hand, i love technology up to and definitely including the modern computer; but on the other, i think that most significant critiques of technology are in some sense correct. it's a similar duality to the framing i take w/r/t "technology" as a category, which is that (a) it is useful
and illuminating to take the widest possible angle -- the smartphone is the same kind of thing as language itself -- and (b) the modern computer is itself a really useful illustration of how "technology" is a fundamentally incoherent category to generalize about.
but idk. to take an example i think about a lot: on the one hand it's unproductive if not literally meaningless to say "the invention of photography was bad." but i also feel like the invention of photography was kind of bad. i love
photography and film as art forms and i think it's really beautiful as a means of documenting and creating experience, there's a parallel world where i'm a camera nerd or whatever. but the psychological and practical damage photography has done is also just incalculable. i genuinely don't really think we're equipped to conceive of ourselves in the way photography forces us to
i guess what i might really be saying is that if it's incoherent to say "photography is bad," not only is it incoherent
also to say that "photography is good" -- i am also a bit more affectively invested in the pessimistic reading. i try not to let this skew my judgement and it might be a manifestation of a fundamentally depressive temperament, but idk.
ultimately i think all i'm saying is that technology, for me, is a really clear instance of how difficult i find it to think about the imbrication of Good Things and Bad Things, and also the question of whether or not things have essences, or something? like,
idk maybe it's part of the general approach i try to cultivate of really inhabiting contradictory positions vis-a-vis a lot of Big Questions or whatever. but i feel like every time someone compares LLMs to a previous technology in order to show that things change and it's fine, a loud part of me wants to be like "dude look around obviously it wasn't fine!" which is an impulse in tension with my belief that any situation or technology or whatever has immanent to it some positive possibility
(that said i really really really struggle to find any immanent liberatory whatever-the-fuck in generative AI as it's currently instantiated. i think sycophantic first-person chatbots are like. a really tough thing to do to the human animal on a cognitive level. but for me the technology is so intertwined with the material conditions of its creation and propagation, as well as my experience teaching writing in a financially-gutted southern-US public university...idk man Theres A Lot Going On)
all of which is to say: the garden of eden story isn't about how we are Intrinsically Fucked Up or whatever, it's about how brutal it was to transition from nomadic and/or smaller-scale ways of organizing society into structured agricultural and urbanized life. That said, i want to live in a big city and play switch 2. also, i have depression. I should eat something.
ikesau@theodoraward good post!(s?) i'm ~affectively~ on the other side (broadly techno-optimist) and have a general frustration that most people don't think through the counterfactual very clearly when they criticize technology. (that's not the case with you!) i've been thinking quite a lot about your recent posts on this subject... i don't really have anything specific to say (it's hard to respond to a long post in a way that's focused and tractable but also doesn't feel like potshots) other than that i'm a) grateful you're sharing this stuff so i can understand where you're at better b) unsurprised that it's sensitive and nuanced
@ikesau <3 these are truly some of the most inchoate spleen ventings i've ever slapped on the internet lol so i can imagine theyd be hard to respond to...basically for context ive been doing some organizing stuff around AI ed-tech in NC public universities and it's just a fucking mess out here right now for like 1000 different reasons. it's gratifying work but it entails closely following a bunch of stuff that drives me completely crazy. idk where ur at with it now but i remember u being more
@ikesau bullish/positive about LLMs back on ******** and really appreciating your thoughts on that as on everything. it's a thing where my opinions are pretty firm in a lot of ways and do tend towards the normative/general, but they're also rooted in this very specific context and i know better than to believe i can transcend that. and there's just so much noise and confusion...and as that's been going on though ive spent the last few years getting very excited about computers and
@ikesau little projects and shit so it's just kind of a wacky bundle of stuff to be thinking through. and after wading through a bunch of really frustrating news and meetings with freaked-out professors and shit it's like. i dont even know what im saying on here for the most part im just throwing ramblings that don't belong anywhere else but i want out of my system in some capacity lol
@ikesau but to your point about the counterfactuals -- this is also all coming out of some long ongoing conversations with people who are very very very blanket Anti Technology -- brilliant and wonderful people that i think the world of! but also, like, i personally find that route a really depressing dead-end. i like The Computer more than like 99% of the people i know. so i am also coming at it from that angle, where i'm often kind of going "no but like this can be cool! it really can"