alt Hacker NewsThis dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals.
Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.
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If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?
It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.
Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.
What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.
But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.
I think this could be applied to most fields where LLMs move in. Let's take the field we are probably most familiar with.
Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.
In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.
In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.
If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.
This is a criticism of the author's backgrounds rather than the content of the article.
It is funny watching people debate at length with your LLM word-vomit. I'm not sure whether you yourself are convinced that the soup you've copypasted across multiple replies means anything, but apparently some people are convinced enough to argue with it, so this is pretty great satire in one way or another.
The printing press was also used to print witch hunting books and caused 200 years of mass hysteria around witches and witch trials.
Before the printing press, only the clergy could "identity" witches but the printing press "democratized knowledge" of witch identification at larger scale.
The algorithmic version of "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so" is going to cause huge trouble in the short and medium term.
Isn't that just an ad-hominem against the writers? A threat to the status quo is still a threat to people and could have negative consequences.
An institution is worth nothing without the spirit, humanity and exchange of knowledge among the humanity behind it. The fostering of real expertise is difficult, but without this expertise you are doomed to believe whatever your Corporate AI is telling you.
So is the AI better?
No. It's quicker, easier, more seductive.
this is much much closer to going in reverse back to when the church were the deciders rather than liberating knowledge the way the printing press did.
the church did the thinking for the peasants. the church decided what the peasants heard, etc… this is moving absolutely in that direction.
the models now do the thinking for us, the ai companies decide what we get to see, these companies decide how much we pay to access it. this is the future.
It's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality is this is a massive consolidation of the information economy of the internet in the hands of a few corporate interests.
This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).
Is that what happened? In Nexus, Harari looks at this exact same situation: the invention of the printing press, and shows how clergy used it to stoke witch hunts (ahem, misinformation) for decades--if not centuries. It was not for hundreds of years until after the invention of the printing press that we had The Enlightenment. What gave rise to The Enlightenment? Harari argues it is modern institutions.
It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."
> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge
More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.