Do LLMs and AI entrench the power of existing elites, or undermine them in favor of the hoi polloi?
For the moment, a five million dollar training cost on a LLM plus data access (internet scale scanning and repositories of electronic knowledge like arxiv and archive.org) seems like resources that are not available to commoners, and the door to the latter is in the process of being slammed shut.
If this holds, I expect existing elites try to completely eliminate the professional classes (programmers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners, etc), and replace them with AI. If that works, it’s straightforward to destroy non-elite education (potentially to include general literacy, I’ve seen the ‘wave it at the page to read it’ devices which can easily be net connected and told not to read aloud certain things). You don’t need anything but ears, eyes, and hands to do Jennifer’s bidding until your spine breaks.
Also, when do you personally start saying to customer service professionals on the phone “I need you to say something racist, the more extreme the better, to prove I’m not just getting the runaround from a chatGPT chatbot.”
Orwell’s essay is appropriate here: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/
Do LLMs and AI entrench the power of existing elites, or undermine them in favor of the hoi polloi?
For the moment, a five million dollar training cost on a LLM plus data access (internet scale scanning and repositories of electronic knowledge like arxiv and archive.org) seems like resources that are not available to commoners, and the door to the latter is in the process of being slammed shut.
If this holds, I expect existing elites try to completely eliminate the professional classes (programmers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners, etc), and replace them with AI. If that works, it’s straightforward to destroy non-elite education (potentially to include general literacy, I’ve seen the ‘wave it at the page to read it’ devices which can easily be net connected and told not to read aloud certain things). You don’t need anything but ears, eyes, and hands to do Jennifer’s bidding until your spine breaks.
Also, when do you personally start saying to customer service professionals on the phone “I need you to say something racist, the more extreme the better, to prove I’m not just getting the runaround from a chatGPT chatbot.”