Stop LLM research? Part -2/2
In the 1st part of the article I discussed the cost aspect and how quickly this technology has become prevalent at such low costs. This has caused good (mostly) and bad (it exists) actors to come up with disruptions which we could not have imagined.
In this post I will cover the 2nd aspect - ego blow to mankind. There were 3 blows to humanity's ego. To quote directly from Sigmund Feud
“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.”
―?Sigmund Freud,?Introduction à la psychanalyse
Now, we have a bigger blow. AI is getting better than us in most tasks and it is improving performance exponentially.
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Now, it has become practical to deploy AI solutions to many human tasks, impacting a marid set of industries. Now most of us (including those doing AI research) are not willing to concede this point.
It will always start out with specific tasks for AI, but we tend to extrapolate its ability and then many tasks which need to be deterministic will be done by AI which is by nature stochastic.
To summarize - Copernican heliocentrism broke the myth that everything revolves around the earth. Earth was just another planet going around the sun. Then Darwin's theory of evolution proved that we (humans) evolved from monkeys. Then Freud said that human behavior is influenced by unconscious memories, thoughts, and urges - we are not complete master of our mind. Now LLMs are showing signs that is can out perform us on multiple benchmarks.
How are we going to react this sudden development? Obviously one line of argument is that - the AI is not really "intelligent" - its a clever Hans or stochastic parrot and we don't need to worry. But, its deployment and popularity hints at something more significant. We do need to worry.