Rhaedas comments on AI earrings

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 points 4 weeks ago (8 children)

Good one. What is the gray area? When does an enhancement or improvement become actually worse than being without? Not to give the OP subject any credit, but the ones in your link both damage and help the individual at the same time, allowing them to do things they may not have been able to do themselves. Is the cost worth it? The instinct is to say of course not, but maybe, depending on what's gained?

As we move closer (seemingly) to computer assistance being the norm in various ways, this is yet something else we should probably address and discuss long before it's already around us causing issues. And I know this is a meme community, but often the best discussions come from the simplest of starts.

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[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works [S] 4 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

I think the problem comes from offloading your thinking onto a machine. Machines should do stuff that's mentally taxing because it's tedious, not because it makes you think too hard. The earring in that parable is Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur taken to the furthest extreme.

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Right, so if it instead was a tool for say translation, that's more narrow tool use. But it still stunts your ability because you'll lean into it vs. trying to learn the words yourself. Or say an augmentation to do instant math, hard problems, but then you start using it for stuff you could have done before in your head.

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[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works [S] 1 point 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Right, so if it instead was a tool for say translation, that’s more narrow tool use. But it still stunts your ability because you’ll lean into it vs. trying to learn the words yourself.

It depends upon how you use it. I use Google Translate to aid me in learning Esperanto, but I'm using it as adjunct to my dictionaries, textbooks, and other sources. It isn't my teacher, and it isn't my single source of truth. More often than not, it's the last resort when everything else has failed, and I'm wary of the results it gives me. Also, crucially, I'm learning the language so I don't have to rely upon it for translations. LLMs are tools, not teachers.

Or say an augmentation to do instant math, hard problems, but then you start using it for stuff you could have done before in your head.

LLMs are terrible at math. I don't think they've been able to fix that? It might even be one of those things that they can't fix, simply due to how LLMs operate. In any case, we've had calculators for a long time, yet children are still taught math in school because society recognizes that understanding as crucial.

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 points 4 weeks ago

I was more inferring a ML for math tied to your brain, not LLM.

I'm old enough to remember when calculators were a new thing and not allowed in the math classes until you learned enough to understand if what you got from them was probably right. Again, timely with the LLMs we have now, people are just copy and paste and not actually looking at the output.

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[–] 5318008@lemmy.ml 1 point 4 weeks ago

LLMs are terrible at math.

Mathematician chiming in: they're not nearly as bad as they used to be. Straight up to differential equations and linear algebra, they're pretty accurate. The writing is on the wall for some serious problems in the very near future, because basically every student in college right now is just offloading their math abilities to the machines.

Some of the seniors are good. Most of the rest of them are not.

It might even be one of those things that they can't fix, simply due to how LLMs operate.

For high-level math, there are some flaws, yes. They often come up with wrong answers if you ask questions about problems that there aren't very many sources on. There are hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of differential equations papers... but there are only tens of thousands of Algebraic Topology papers. It's simply a smaller training set.

However, they're still giving right answers most of the time. I've only had one situation where someone in a group said "bUt cHatGPT sAiD..." and I had to give them the bad news that it was wrong.

In any case, we've had calculators for a long time, yet children are still taught math in school because society recognizes that understanding as crucial.

I think that the fundamental difference is that the tools replace different things. A calculator makes it so that you don't need to algorithmically process 5 sig-fig numbers without error, several times per problem, in order to have your answer be "correct". You still have to understand that you do, in fact, need to multiple the length of the field by the width to find the area of a rectangular field.

LLMs are replacing the need to actually understand anything about how a rectangle works.

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[–] sunsofold@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I read it as less about the value of the result from some measure of success and more of a question of 'what are you if you simply do what someone/something else tells you to do?' If all you do is enact the orders of the earring, are you still you? Are you even human? If your brain deforms to the point it loses the ability to make decisions or enact your own will, do you even still exist, regardless of whether the rest of your body still moves?

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 1 point 4 weeks ago (1 child)

That seems to be the direction, and yet the story also says that its never wrong, nor does the person have to take that choice. Its an aid, but the problem is people turn the aid into a crutch. Which we are seeing with AI in ways, people claiming to do stuff but not really having a clue what they're doing, nor able to fix or change it. But what if you always weighed the earring's advice along with all the other choices and then made the choice that made sense to you? Knowing that the earring isn't wrong in a certain context, but maybe taking other paths that are worse now will lead to better choices later.

I know the warning is that people tend to take the easier route, and at some point it becomes an addiction to just follow the suggestion "just once more".

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[–] sunsofold@lemmy.zip 1 point 4 weeks ago

Part of the point is what 'better' now or later means, and what the point would be in making a decision in the face of the given optimum.

The earring is always telling you to do 'what will make you happiest.' How do you make a decision between 'happiest' and literally anything else? You will 'always regret it' if you do something other than what the earring recommends. Do you think there is anyone in the world, living or dead, who, when faced with the reinforcement conditioning of pleasure and satisfaction when doing one thing and dissatisfaction when doing something else, could maintain, long term, a sense of even the possibility the choice that makes them happy could be the wrong choice?

It ultimately ends up in the same place as many other questions like this. Blissful ignorance or painful freedom? Shall one live in pursuit of pleasure or can there be something of greater value in identity and autonomy?

Personally, I also wonder about its limits. The earring simply tells you what will make you happiest, but there are often situations where your options are extremely limited. If you were stripped of all possessions and left in a foreign land with nothing but the earring, could it tell you to do anything but lay back and go to your happy place while you wait to die? If you are any of the people in our world with less fortunate starting points, could it do anything that wouldn't be actually still worse than the average level of enjoyment for an average person? It doesn't make you happy, just the happiest you can be for now.

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