alt Hacker NewsHave you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1]
You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah".
That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy.
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Wow what a read! Thanks for sharing. Really helped me unpack why I’m so bothered by people who c/p AI answers verbatim.
This has a nice, Borgesian, charm to it but I feel like it's premise is confused. If it's just about the here near-empty signifier of "happiness," what does the magic tech of the earring actually contribute to the parable that some hypothetically perfect narcotic wouldn't?
Thank you for the surprising read
Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring.
You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness.
Bleak.
It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.