Part bicycle
Matt Ballantine
Helping people get more from technology. Always on the lookout for interesting people to have a coffee with.
In Flann o'Brien's amazing surrealist novel The Third Policeman, one of the running jokes is that as a result of "The Atomic Theory", policemen in the village have increasingly become part bicycle, and the bicycles have become part policeman. The potted roads, the result of underinvestment by the local council, have led to increasingly violent interactions between bottoms and bike saddles, and the net result is atomic interchange and the resulting hybrid creatures.
Complete nonsense of course, but I was reminded of the phenomenon when reading a friend's recent LinkedIn post which was so incredibly marketingspeak that I asked if it had been created by an LLM.
"No" was the response. "but on reflection perhaps my style is becoming influenced by the damned things".
And here is the rub. Technologies do not exist independently of people. Human existence has been one of us building and interacting with technologies. They shape us as we shape them. It's not The Atomic Theory, more Socio-Technical systems. Whilst Flann's imaginary police officers could never have been part bicycle, they could have been part Internet if they hadn't been written in the 1940s.
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The plethora of machine-generated content is shaped by the human content on which it is trained. There is rightly concern about what might happen as LLMs start to train on LLM-generated content in a BSE-like nightmare of digital eating itself. But should we be more concerned about the chance that LLM content will change how we speak and write and draw? We'll all get really authoritative in our style, even when we are wrong...
It's seen in other realms too. The use of video calling has changed dramatically in the last five years with the impact of Covid lockdowns. But people find video calling tiring, and distracting. People don't give full attention to others because they are distracted and bored and easily led into doing something else on one of the many screens that surround us. "
I've noticed, though, in in-person meetings that those distractable habits are starting to be demonstrated more and more when you are in the same room as someone else. We are all busy. The fondleslabs sitting in our pockets or hands are constantly craving our attention. Just a quick sneaky look, and before you know it, you're asking, "Sorry, could you say that again?"
Our technologies influence our behaviour. Our behaviours influence our technology. The two are intimately and inescapably connected.
Love it. That notion of the intertwined relationship we have with technology is something Tom Chatfield writes really well about
Occupational Health Physician | OEUK | ENG1 | MRO | HAVS | Travel Medicine | D4 and Taxi Medicals | Photographer | LinkedIn reply guy
4 个月We are already living in a "post Turing test" society, where we can no longer distinguish between what is artificially generated or truly human. Like you pointed out, this is the result of a convergence: not only are LLMs getting better in predicting mimicking human speech, humans are dumbing down and simplifying their speech patterns, as a result of internationalization (most English speakers are non-native speakers) and trying to make it understandable for LLMs!(That hate ambiguity and are blind to context).