My personal crusade in this matter: stop calling it AI and start calling them LLMs or image generators or whatever. Get rid of the sci-fi terms and we’ll cut through the sci-fi mythos.
Thank you for the article. The key is that we humans can turn anything into a god, especially dazzling technologies with their aura of (cultivated) mystique. So I'm all for desacralising technology. However, humans are notoriously in deep need to believe in some 'god', to believe in something greater than themselves. And having desacralised Nature, Mother Earth, technology conveniently fills the gap; AI being the latest 'face' of the techno-god. And yes, in its time steam-engines played that role. And D.H Lawrence and others had a few things to say about that.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. As Mr Koroly said in his comment we should call them by more precise terms like large language models or large reasoning models and get into component parts (chain of thought etc).
Most people don’t rebuild engines but for those of us who do or aspire to (I’m importing a 25 year old Hilux w no computer parts for our homestead) I appreciate learning from people like you.
To revere the machine is to open oneself up to dependence and worse slavery. Our society reorganized around the car. We are unspooling some of that now. Letting artificial intelligence do the same will lead to trouble. Tools made by man must be articulated by man to the communities in which we are embedded lest we loose each other to the machine.
Great article Brandon, I am skeptical of AI and I agree that to understand it sufficiently to use it requires a technological understanding beyond the ken of most people. As you say about cars, most people, me included, just want to have the thing start and run, we don't really care about how the fuel injection works. The same is true for most users of technology all they want to do is do something with it or have it do something to or for them. In sales there used to be a old line to the effect the Sear Roebuck sold 9 million 1/4 inch drill bits a year but not one person who purchased them wanted a 1/4 inch bit- they wanted a 1/4 inch hole in something. The tech industry realized the truth of the that old saw long ago and they created pretty machines that require no actual knowledge of the workings only how to turn it on.
I fear that AI is aiming to do the same with the cognitive processes of humankind. To reduce thinking to asking a question and even that will become a thing of the past as we will lose the ability to even know enough to ask intelligent question, we will not ask for how to cure disease we will ask to be shown videos of cats jumping in and out of water or some such foolishness.
DO went a long way to demystifying AI for me. I still worry that even a banal future will be one o in which authoritarians can use AI in new, terrifying ways.
The sentiment expressed in the following two excerpts seems quite misguided.
"Stokes emphasized that once you understand what’s happening under the hood, the mystique of AI vanishes. It becomes a process you can learn, manipulate, and harness for useful ends."
and
"But in practice, AI’s workings are closed off to most people. Its usefulness requires a level of technical fluency that’s out of reach for the average user."
Many people working in this field have repeatedly conceded they they do not entirely understand "what's happening under the hood." Never mind the average user, the experts themselves cannot fully grasp the functioning of this creation. This is categorically different from mechanical innovations of earlier periods, such as the internal combustion engine.
My personal crusade in this matter: stop calling it AI and start calling them LLMs or image generators or whatever. Get rid of the sci-fi terms and we’ll cut through the sci-fi mythos.
Thank you for the article. The key is that we humans can turn anything into a god, especially dazzling technologies with their aura of (cultivated) mystique. So I'm all for desacralising technology. However, humans are notoriously in deep need to believe in some 'god', to believe in something greater than themselves. And having desacralised Nature, Mother Earth, technology conveniently fills the gap; AI being the latest 'face' of the techno-god. And yes, in its time steam-engines played that role. And D.H Lawrence and others had a few things to say about that.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. As Mr Koroly said in his comment we should call them by more precise terms like large language models or large reasoning models and get into component parts (chain of thought etc).
Most people don’t rebuild engines but for those of us who do or aspire to (I’m importing a 25 year old Hilux w no computer parts for our homestead) I appreciate learning from people like you.
To revere the machine is to open oneself up to dependence and worse slavery. Our society reorganized around the car. We are unspooling some of that now. Letting artificial intelligence do the same will lead to trouble. Tools made by man must be articulated by man to the communities in which we are embedded lest we loose each other to the machine.
Now severely disappointed that we didn’t get to talk about your Toyota Hilux
Great article Brandon, I am skeptical of AI and I agree that to understand it sufficiently to use it requires a technological understanding beyond the ken of most people. As you say about cars, most people, me included, just want to have the thing start and run, we don't really care about how the fuel injection works. The same is true for most users of technology all they want to do is do something with it or have it do something to or for them. In sales there used to be a old line to the effect the Sear Roebuck sold 9 million 1/4 inch drill bits a year but not one person who purchased them wanted a 1/4 inch bit- they wanted a 1/4 inch hole in something. The tech industry realized the truth of the that old saw long ago and they created pretty machines that require no actual knowledge of the workings only how to turn it on.
I fear that AI is aiming to do the same with the cognitive processes of humankind. To reduce thinking to asking a question and even that will become a thing of the past as we will lose the ability to even know enough to ask intelligent question, we will not ask for how to cure disease we will ask to be shown videos of cats jumping in and out of water or some such foolishness.
Yeah I totally agree. Love the drill bit bit.
Thanks for reading!
DO went a long way to demystifying AI for me. I still worry that even a banal future will be one o in which authoritarians can use AI in new, terrifying ways.
The sentiment expressed in the following two excerpts seems quite misguided.
"Stokes emphasized that once you understand what’s happening under the hood, the mystique of AI vanishes. It becomes a process you can learn, manipulate, and harness for useful ends."
and
"But in practice, AI’s workings are closed off to most people. Its usefulness requires a level of technical fluency that’s out of reach for the average user."
Many people working in this field have repeatedly conceded they they do not entirely understand "what's happening under the hood." Never mind the average user, the experts themselves cannot fully grasp the functioning of this creation. This is categorically different from mechanical innovations of earlier periods, such as the internal combustion engine.