Pylimitics

Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds.

Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale Review that LLMs are delivering our fourth great humiliation. He doesn’t name it, and says he’s “waiting for philosophers to give me something really helpful to deal with this.”

As are we all. As Geoffrey Hinton has pointed out, LLMs get criticized as just “guessing the next word,” but we don’t really know whether that might be just what we’re doing too.

The more I use LLMs, the more often I get surprised by something. If it’s really just “word guessing” that’s going on, then that process must be more complex and layered than the phrase implies. That’s a personal perspective, on the order of finding that working with LLMs is changing my relationship with language. The language I write is changing, in ways I’m not sure I can yet describe. The language I read is changing as well. As Meghan O’Rourke mentioned in the linked article, “…when I go online now, I am surrounded by manufactured language, which is deadening. It threatens something I find important.”

Then there’s the wider perspective, maybe the perspective of humanity itself: the question of whether Nietzsche was right about morality and ethics being nothing more than a way for the weak to manipulate the strong, or whether Kant was right about morality being the outcome of rationality.

Maybe an unexpected outcome of LLMs will be an employment boom — in philosophy. But it may also change our perspective from focusing on outcomes — products, for example — to caring more about process. How an artifact was created, and by whom. And why. There has always been a ring of truth around the line that Steve Jobs used: the journey is the reward. The idea predated him by ages, but he might have come up with that particular coinage. It gives lie to the idea of reader-response literary criticism, that the author doesn’t matter as much (or at all) in a reader’s experience of a text. Maybe the reader is of lesser importance, and the experience, the process, is what we should treasure the most.