First we created communities that we used to share information and ideas. This allowed people to grow in their skills and in turn teach others what they learnt. This cycle kept the communities going, providing an important service for everyone involved.
Then capitalism turned those communities into walled gardens, often using predatory patterns to increase engagement to the detriment of the quality. Being walled off made it harder to share the knowledge, leaving people with only a few larger holdouts of what once had been.
Then we created machines to do the learning for us, finally killing off the concept of information sharing communities. These machines learnt from every knowledge sharing community that existed previously and became the place to access that knowledge. Without people coming into the communities, even the last holdouts could no longer sustain themselves. The ability to share and gain new knowledge was removed, causing stagnation for everyone involved. The ability to actually learn anything was also greatly reduced, having the machines apply the knowledge directly. The new machines can’t learn, can’t think, can’t reason or be creative, all they can do is remix already existing information and regress to the mean while doing so.
But for a while there, a lot of value was created for the shareholders.
LLM are useless for niche stuff. They are ok-ish, if you do something another 100s of people already did (like, overengineering a webpage). Which is contra the idea of open source, btw.
First we created communities that we used to share information and ideas. This allowed people to grow in their skills and in turn teach others what they learnt. This cycle kept the communities going, providing an important service for everyone involved.
Then capitalism turned those communities into walled gardens, often using predatory patterns to increase engagement to the detriment of the quality. Being walled off made it harder to share the knowledge, leaving people with only a few larger holdouts of what once had been.
Then we created machines to do the learning for us, finally killing off the concept of information sharing communities. These machines learnt from every knowledge sharing community that existed previously and became the place to access that knowledge. Without people coming into the communities, even the last holdouts could no longer sustain themselves. The ability to share and gain new knowledge was removed, causing stagnation for everyone involved. The ability to actually learn anything was also greatly reduced, having the machines apply the knowledge directly. The new machines can’t learn, can’t think, can’t reason or be creative, all they can do is remix already existing information and regress to the mean while doing so.
But for a while there, a lot of value was created for the shareholders.
This is just the human experience in a shellnut.
First came the nomads and isolated communities, who formed the first towns and societies.
Then, the towns became cities and the societies became stratified for order and efficiency.
Then, the elders become kings and lords, and they become disconnected from the earth and reality.
In time, the ambition of the high ones grow too big for their own good, whilst those below lose their sense of self-reasoning and communing.
Eventually, the house of cards falls like all Babylons before it.
All is lost, people scatter, and people gather elsewhere.
This has got vaguely Douglas Adams vibes.
More than vaguely. The man was prescient.
This text is great, you have amazing writing :)
Thank you so much!
I am saving this.
I’ve had this in my head for a bit, but you expressed it much more eloquently then I ever could have, going to save this for later!
LLM are useless for niche stuff. They are ok-ish, if you do something another 100s of people already did (like, overengineering a webpage). Which is contra the idea of open source, btw.