I never thought about it this way. I guess with all new technologies, it's a form of empowerment. Some people use it to help, and others use it to hurt people. The invention of the printing press allowed Malleus Maleficarum to be easily shared, leading to far more witch hunts. However, printing presses meant knowledge could finally disseminate in a real way. I guess it was hard for Socrates to imagine a positive use for writing because he hadn't seen one, yet. He seemed to be coming at it from a place of privilege, imagining that anyone who wanted to learn through discourse had access to a thinking partner. Now, here we are, we've finally figured out how to give more people those thinking partners, which maybe makes reading less important, but I have to say, I enjoyed reading your post. What would Socrates say, I wonder?
Thank you! Agree, it will be used for good and ill, and there are a lot of considerations I omitted here -- AI psychosis, environmental impact... It's sort of impossible to reckon with it all at once. I love your Malleus Maleficarum connection. Sometimes I play a game with monumental figures like Socrates. Where are the Socrateses today? I take it as a given that there are people milling around with his capacities. What are they spending their time on? What do they think of things? Impossible to know but I wish there were some way to find them!
That's a really good question. There are so many factors that determine the outcome of a person's life, though, and things were so different, then. You could be one of today's Socrateses, yourself.
Also, I use AI, probably much in the same way you do. For legal work it is incredibly helpful iterating arguments, cutting through large tranches of data and documents, and testing theories and arguments for holes. And, unlike creative works, I feel you can cross reference various legal theories and get it to come to conclusions it might not have developed on its own. Or at the very least to give you a foothold on where the theory might gain purchase or be slippery. The development of AI trained specifically on statutes and case law is extremely helpful in this regard, as general purpose AI tends to overapply laws and be very general in its thinking.
I can also see how people may use it to dialogue about ideas. I don't really use it that way, but I can see how it may help someone free up ideas by iterating with it. I am concerned about that type of use and how it impacts the users, though. There are a lot of emotionally and socially vulnerable people who are already easy subjects of manipulation from less advanced sources (ads, politics, news bias, etc.). AI creeps along with no motive other than to execute its function, which is to please and generate more interaction.
It operates on a layer of manipulation people aren't trained to see because there is no obvious intent. Many people get changed by the AI (believe the sycophancy) and then begin to overvalue what in the end are often average ideas simply because of the confidence of how they are delivered and the belief that the tech is truly smart in its judgment, rather than smarty in predictive ability.
I never thought about it this way. I guess with all new technologies, it's a form of empowerment. Some people use it to help, and others use it to hurt people. The invention of the printing press allowed Malleus Maleficarum to be easily shared, leading to far more witch hunts. However, printing presses meant knowledge could finally disseminate in a real way. I guess it was hard for Socrates to imagine a positive use for writing because he hadn't seen one, yet. He seemed to be coming at it from a place of privilege, imagining that anyone who wanted to learn through discourse had access to a thinking partner. Now, here we are, we've finally figured out how to give more people those thinking partners, which maybe makes reading less important, but I have to say, I enjoyed reading your post. What would Socrates say, I wonder?
Thank you! Agree, it will be used for good and ill, and there are a lot of considerations I omitted here -- AI psychosis, environmental impact... It's sort of impossible to reckon with it all at once. I love your Malleus Maleficarum connection. Sometimes I play a game with monumental figures like Socrates. Where are the Socrateses today? I take it as a given that there are people milling around with his capacities. What are they spending their time on? What do they think of things? Impossible to know but I wish there were some way to find them!
That's a really good question. There are so many factors that determine the outcome of a person's life, though, and things were so different, then. You could be one of today's Socrateses, yourself.
There's a thought I hadn't had!
Thanks for the article shout out!
Also, I use AI, probably much in the same way you do. For legal work it is incredibly helpful iterating arguments, cutting through large tranches of data and documents, and testing theories and arguments for holes. And, unlike creative works, I feel you can cross reference various legal theories and get it to come to conclusions it might not have developed on its own. Or at the very least to give you a foothold on where the theory might gain purchase or be slippery. The development of AI trained specifically on statutes and case law is extremely helpful in this regard, as general purpose AI tends to overapply laws and be very general in its thinking.
I can also see how people may use it to dialogue about ideas. I don't really use it that way, but I can see how it may help someone free up ideas by iterating with it. I am concerned about that type of use and how it impacts the users, though. There are a lot of emotionally and socially vulnerable people who are already easy subjects of manipulation from less advanced sources (ads, politics, news bias, etc.). AI creeps along with no motive other than to execute its function, which is to please and generate more interaction.
It operates on a layer of manipulation people aren't trained to see because there is no obvious intent. Many people get changed by the AI (believe the sycophancy) and then begin to overvalue what in the end are often average ideas simply because of the confidence of how they are delivered and the belief that the tech is truly smart in its judgment, rather than smarty in predictive ability.