alt Hacker NewsThere is a failure to understand that the process is the result. You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind. The output of an LLM is useless without a human mind to comprehend it. We can have Super Intelligence, but if humans are incapable of comprehending it, it is just another useless dead artifact. Practice, applied over a lifetime, is what creates the capability for comprehension. Asking an LLM to give you an answer creates an artifact. Humans being humans, most of their requests boil down to "make me rich without having to work for it," so the request itself is paradoxical and impossible to satisfy. Philosophers have only been saying this for all of human history, so don't hold your breath for any breakthroughs.
Replies
> You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind.
Normatively, this ought to be true. Descriptively, this is of course false. Our entire society is organized around producing commodities, typically by consuming people as inputs.
> The output of an LLM is useless without a human mind to comprehend it.
I don’t understand mRNA vaccines, but they are useful to me. The output of an LLM could at least in theory be the design to a major technological advancement, and its implementation with automatic tooling. We don’t have to understand that for it to be useful.
>The output of an LLM is useless without a human mind to comprehend it
This is like saying software is useless if the user doesn't read the source code of it. This what happens >99.99999% a person uses software. People want to be entertained or have their problems solved.
> You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind.
That's nonsense. Of course you study them to meet demand.
Precisely. I don’t really care whether LLM’s can produce code more and better than me. I learn languages, program and study computation to understand better the world we live in. Being a human being means increasingly being technologically augmented. To have any deep understanding of that world requires deep understanding of maths, physics, programming etc. that you can only gather by doing those things and solving problems with your meat brain.
There’s a Twitch-streamer Tsoding who programs on C for fun calling it “recreational coding”. Maybe human programming will be a form of art in the future, virtually useless for big corporations to make money. I don’t care, I love it anyway.