Of course, the garbage in/garbage out dynamic never goes away. If someone trains an LLM on Marcion, Servetus, Marx, Rosseau, and Dugin, they will get vain babble. But if they train it on Augustine, Calvin, Lewis, etc. it will provide helpful distillations.
There is always surprising grace in these dynamics. If AI results in increasing the noise to signal ratio of human knowledge, it really doesn't matter, because the human mind is finite and can only intake a measurable amount of information, good or bad. Humans have already stuffed their minds as full as possible of what they crave and seek. If someone has wasted days of their life reading Alexander Dugin, they can't waste 100% + 76% more of their life reading warmed-over AI regurgitations of Dugin.
A friend has a theory that the rise of sexbots can only help us win. The bestial man will waste his productive time and money developing and enervating himself with these devices, which removes him from productive competition with wisdom-loving people. People with low time preference will always win in the end.
This is part of what is going on it the Deuteronomic curse of foreigners rising higher and lending to natives, while natives go lower and become indebted to foreigners. Debt is a disciplinary form of bondage which those who become at ease in their affluence will undergo at the hands of those who are hard working and use their affluence for productivity rather than indulgent leisure.
And, let's say that Kingsnorth is right, and there is some kind of actual demon in AI. Well, wonder if it's a match for the Holy Spirit?
Thanks for the response. I don't want to place much weight on an argument for AI as demons. The vast majority of my concerns about the technology have to do with the ways that we relate to and employ it. Perhaps one place we might part ways is that I believe that use of AI is rather more formative of things like high time preference and low discipline.
Spoken like the scholar you are. The vocation of scholarship places high value on originality as a marker of quality; thus the furor over how students might use AI to avoid having to study, and the arms race on the part of teachers to sniff out AI use.
Other vocations don't need originality in order to be effective. My wife, for example, has learned how to use AI to write ad copy for our business and has found it greatly reduces labor, freeing her up to do higher value activities and obtaining more than acceptable results for its purpose. She can deliver a much better service to her customers this way.
So, AI use is only formative of what's in a man to begin with. He who is slack in his work is a brother to he who destroys. I learned that proverb by heart before AI came along, but if I had been born later, and was using AI as a student, and AI had spat out that proverb to me in the course of some study I was doing, it would have struck me with the same force.
It's difficult for me to see AI as fundamentally different than any of the other historical tech monsters of the Id, none of which has done us in.
AI has demonstrated surprising results in helping students make progress, compared with human tutors:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bs3yj8vLDKNnoa95m/five-recent-ai-tutoring-studies
Of course, the garbage in/garbage out dynamic never goes away. If someone trains an LLM on Marcion, Servetus, Marx, Rosseau, and Dugin, they will get vain babble. But if they train it on Augustine, Calvin, Lewis, etc. it will provide helpful distillations.
There is always surprising grace in these dynamics. If AI results in increasing the noise to signal ratio of human knowledge, it really doesn't matter, because the human mind is finite and can only intake a measurable amount of information, good or bad. Humans have already stuffed their minds as full as possible of what they crave and seek. If someone has wasted days of their life reading Alexander Dugin, they can't waste 100% + 76% more of their life reading warmed-over AI regurgitations of Dugin.
A friend has a theory that the rise of sexbots can only help us win. The bestial man will waste his productive time and money developing and enervating himself with these devices, which removes him from productive competition with wisdom-loving people. People with low time preference will always win in the end.
This is part of what is going on it the Deuteronomic curse of foreigners rising higher and lending to natives, while natives go lower and become indebted to foreigners. Debt is a disciplinary form of bondage which those who become at ease in their affluence will undergo at the hands of those who are hard working and use their affluence for productivity rather than indulgent leisure.
And, let's say that Kingsnorth is right, and there is some kind of actual demon in AI. Well, wonder if it's a match for the Holy Spirit?
Thanks for the response. I don't want to place much weight on an argument for AI as demons. The vast majority of my concerns about the technology have to do with the ways that we relate to and employ it. Perhaps one place we might part ways is that I believe that use of AI is rather more formative of things like high time preference and low discipline.
Spoken like the scholar you are. The vocation of scholarship places high value on originality as a marker of quality; thus the furor over how students might use AI to avoid having to study, and the arms race on the part of teachers to sniff out AI use.
Other vocations don't need originality in order to be effective. My wife, for example, has learned how to use AI to write ad copy for our business and has found it greatly reduces labor, freeing her up to do higher value activities and obtaining more than acceptable results for its purpose. She can deliver a much better service to her customers this way.
So, AI use is only formative of what's in a man to begin with. He who is slack in his work is a brother to he who destroys. I learned that proverb by heart before AI came along, but if I had been born later, and was using AI as a student, and AI had spat out that proverb to me in the course of some study I was doing, it would have struck me with the same force.