Sentience
In Dennis E. Taylor’s book Heaven’s River, there is a race that is gradually losing their sentience. If your life is simple, so simple and easy that the sheer amount of calories spent thinking is just a waste, then what becomes of you?
A lot of nerds and geeks (like me) would agree that science fiction is philosophy. After all, Star Trek explored what it could mean to exist in a spacefaring civilization. Brave New World explored what it could mean to live in chemical bliss.
So, in a world where you can outsource your thinking, then, well…
What becomes of you?
I’ve long held that LLMs are essentially “reasoning engines”; whereas internet search allowed for us to outsource accumulated knowledge, LLMs allow us to also outsource our reasoning, let alone that they can search the internet as well. I have to wonder what it means to start to have something else think for me.
There are a few things I wonder:
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Part of why we are able to create, is it because of our constraints? Because constraints can produce more creative results, it seems like it could be.
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Part of how we learn, is it because we struggle to do so? If one had the entire repository of knowledge at their fingertips at any level of understanding, would they ever learn to understand?
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Part of what we’ve created in LLMs, is it going to help us? Or are we going to finally outsource our reasoning?
I’ve found myself reaching to use the so-called “classical” internet more. AI overviews - like those found in Google - are incredibly helpful for getting an overview of a topic, I can’t disagree. But where are the conflicting viewpoints? Where are the few articles you had to look through to find your answer? Where are the pages you have to flip through to find something useful? Where did it go?
Wikipedia, random tech blogs, some forum post; all of these are helpful in that they force us to see other viewpoints. There rarely if ever has been one correct way to do things, and with our modern internet, it seems increasingly homogenizing. The AI overview that provides a similar answer to each similar search cannot disagree with itself unless it tries.
And so, I wonder, as we grow to a homogenized internet,
What becomes of us?
Dryophoenix (Neph Hillis)