The biggest impact of #LLM has not been due to the technology's capabilities, but rather its flaws. Because the #AI revolution must succeed at any cost, but the actual tech is flawed, orgs demanding more AI outputs MUST lower their bar for quality.
This creates space for #UX malpractice to take root.
Designers who think they are fighting back against evil PMs who hate users and want to make bad products, are in reality committing an equally egregious sin.
What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that.
What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast.
Significant paper.
Having said that, I wish those efficiency and quality gains would be leveraged to advance a semi-automated/augmented, cyborgian-centaurian four-day workweek instead of the workload rebound effect to which they will probably be deployed.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
Are generative AI systems to the noosphere as genetically-modified organisms are to the biosphere?
This thought was sparked by this section in the Ezra Klein podcast with Alondra Nelson. For a few reasons climate change and nuclear proliferation don’t seem good analogies to me. Gen AI as the GMO of the noosphere seems to me a better way to capture the wickedness of the problem/opportunity.
Full interview here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alondra-nelson.html
Richest people in UK ‘use more energy flying’ than poorest do overall.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/richest-people-in-uk-use-more-energy-flying-than-poorest-do-overall/
On degrowth: “Now, after the pandemic gave people in some parts of the world a chance to rethink what makes them happy, and as the scale of change necessary to address the climate crisis becomes clearer, its ideas are gaining more mainstream recognition — even as anxiety builds over what could be a painful global recession.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/economy/degrowth-climate-cop27/index.html
Pavel A. Samsonov
Jason Gorman
