alt Hacker NewsExactly. Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor. It’s mostly about combining various information in one place — the exact task that LLM far outperforms human. People traditionally misclassified this class of work as “creative”. It’s not really.
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I agree except: this is creative work. Creativity can be and is being mechanised. True originality is extremely rare. Most novelty is the repurposing of one idea or concept elsewhere in a way we call find surprising, but the choice to apply A to B could have been made for any reason including mechanical: very many inventions are accidents. In-depth knowledge / conceptual understanding of something is built on abstraction, and abstractions are portable.
If you had a list of N concepts and M ways to apply them you could try all N*M combinations, and get some very interesting results. For a real example, see the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ)'s amusing "40 principles of invention" by Soviet inventor Genrich Altshuller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
This is exactly what creativity is.
Maybe all intellectual work is intellectual labor?
> Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor.
That's a great point. It's in line with research being carried on the backs of graduate students, whose work is to hyperfocus on areas.
Isn't that science too?
> Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor.
Not surprisimg, because the two words you used are synonyms. Who did ever classify mathematical work as creative? Kids in third grade math class?
> that LLM far outperforms human.
LLMs only outperform humans in creating loads of bullshit. 6 years in and they remain shiny toys for easily impressionable idiots.
Having a new insight that leads to the combination of two distinct ideas is definitionally creative.
You can say this problem needed a low amount of total creativity, but saying it's void of all creativity seems wrong.