I think there is some validity to the nature of generational knowledge loss through differing information systems. At one end of the scale, you’ve got 80,000 year old stories, still being told - at the other end of the scale, you’ve got App Of The Day™ style social media, and kids who can’t write an email, use a dictionary, or read a book.

This is no hyperbole - humans have to constantly fight the degeneracy of our knowledge systems, which is to say that knowledge has to be generated and communicated - it can’t just “exist” and be useful, it has to be applied to be useful. Technology of knowledge which doesn’t get applied, does not persist, or if it does (COBOL), what once was common becomes arcane.

So, if there is hope, it lays with the proles: the way every-day people use ML, is probably the key to all of this. It’s one thing to know how to prompt an LLM to give you a buildable source tree; its another thing entirely to use it somehow to figure out what to make out of the leftover ingredients in the fridge.

Those recipes and indeed the applications of the ingredients, are based on human input and mores.

So the question for me, still really unanswered, is: How long will it take until those fridge-ingredient recipes become bland, tasteless and grey?

I think this belies the imperative that AL and ML must never become so pervasive that we don’t, also, write things down for ourselves. Oh, and read a lot, of course.

It seems, we need to stop throwing books away. Oh, and encourage kids to cook, and create their own recipes... hopefully they’ll have time and resources for that kind of lifestyle…