Pylimitics

Another idea from Jaron Lanier: large language model software systems are not artificial intelligence. A large language model is one enormous document comprised of contributions from countless people. It’s “something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics.”

It “can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.“

Lanier suggests that these systems are not the silicon brains that all the tech bros grew up with in the science fiction stories and movies they love, but instead “an innovative form of social collaboration.”

This makes a lot of sense when you think about one of the most widespread uses of LLM technology: an enhanced and often more useful form of internet search. When all the content has already been amassed into one single document and preprocessed with very fancy statistics, you can do a lot more with it than you can with a list of “hits” from a search system that’s more or less a form of the “find” command in a word processor.

The concept also restores the idea of humanity (or humanism) to the cutting edge of technology. “The humanities” in an educational sense have been taking a beating in recent years as so many people seem to have decided that what we really need are trade schools that prepare students for work. I mean “trade schools” in a very broad sense, including science and math subjects as well as more traditional trades. They are all skills; some less physical (but all similarly cerebral; just ask an experienced plumber about some of the tacit understanding they developed over their career).

A trade education prepares you for a job. I would argue, though, that a humanities education prepares you for full participation in a civilization. Every time an arts, music, literature, philosophy, or history program is reduced or eliminated, we’re making a mistake, in my view.

An adjacent idea is hovering around the “tech bros” that have become the modern titans of industry and robber barons. It’s not at all unusual to find that while they were raised in privilege and were admitted into elite institutions like Harvard, they dropped out before completing their studies. It suggests that they were there for entirely selfish reasons, accumulating tools to facilitate their control and greed without ever learning the nature and value of other people — lessons that the humanities consist of. It’s not that you start learning empathy in college, of course; I wonder if, for example, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg arrived there for their abbreviated stays already lacking values like that. But it does suggest that there may be a price society itself is paying for failing people like that by not providing them with a fully rounded, human education.