Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve.
More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
Music's theory is something you really need to understand at an unconscious level. All the study of how the notes relate and frequencies, that's very interesting and it may help you understand things better, but the real question is not, can you do all the math to figure out why this note and that note work together, it's can you hear it with your ears and play the correct harmony note for whatever purpose the music leads.
I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. They may occasionally have something finished, but 'it doesn't sound right'. Then go back to music theory and say, oh, this chord is wrong. I can fix that chord because I know music theory and come up with something that works. But they're not doing that at first. They're composing from their unconscious mind.
> I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions.
Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.
Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.
You have it backward. The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Music's theory describes what we already know works, not how to make things work.
No composer I know thinks in the terms of music theory. They often use a chord progression that music theory describes why it works, but they're not thinking of it in terms of music theory. They're thinking in terms of chord progression, just like the composers of thousands years ago were thinking of their chord progressions the exact style changes and so a thousand years ago they went to thought in terms of modern chord progressions but they were still thinking in similar terms.
> The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things.
Broadly completely untrue.
If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced musical tradition on the planet (including Western, but also Indian, Chinese, etc.) has developed alongside a system of analyzing that music, and for very good reason: It's a lot easier to teach music when you can actually talk about it.
I promise you, every single competent composer and musician on the planet - from every culture - has a fairly firm grasp on music theory, in whatever flavor is relevant to the form of music they practice. Every Indian musician who plays classical Indian music knows their ragas. Every Western musician can navigate the diatonic scale.
That’s like saying no programmer relies on computer science.
Sure, at some level of expertise you’re not sitting there saying “oh, I should name variables sensibly and encapsulate functionality because computer science says to”; they are doing those things because with training and experience that becomes innate and accessible in flow state.
But the fact that theory can become ingrained does not mean one isn’t using theory.
It's way more than that. They are just more fluent at creating things like melodies and harmonies that "work" without essentially starting from scratch on every composition.
I know music notation and can write things down, but I'm not a good composer. I'm at the mercy of others to write new material if that's what I'm interested in playing.
And writing it down in a way that other musicians can understand is of nontrivial value if you want people to play your stuff.
Not sure what they are doing with the GPUs anyway, nvidia is on track to produce more GPUs than can be physically used, because the DCs don't exist, and won't for another 18 months, and the power plants needed likewise don't exist.
Continual gains that have not stopped and there is clearly much gain to be had even if model intelligence stopped scaling. I find it borderline nasty how so many people are positively hoping for a bubble to pop or an AI winter to come so that they can feel like they can cope with the evolving world...despite all evidence to the contrary that any of these things will happen very soon at all.
I'd suggest that they need better education then. Prompting isn't unskilled. Neither was googling before that. There is critical thinking involved, and the method in which you utilize the outputs that matters as well.
Yes skills are going to be devalued, but that isn't happening yet for the vast majority. So its not really apt for them to think this way.
There's at least skill needed to recognize the BS in the answers.
I've been prompting a bit on a hobby project that sort of boils down to MechE. It's far from my domain of expertise but I've recognized enough BS and been sent down some rabbit holes all too frequently to discover the BS at the end.
As a software engineer I don't think my quality of life has been improved - I now get gigantic patches to review (and I know the people writing them haven't reviewed or tested their own patches so even worse) and my tester is now drowning in big garbage patches that are taking longer to test, so my work isn't progressing either.
I have seen improvements for myself but overall it's made thing worse. While it is a HR problem (lazy employees will always be lazy, clueless manager will never deal with issues), AI has really amplified the problems. Previously, lazy employees would do their trickle of crappy work - now it's a firehose of crappy work.
Massive price increases for any electronics that contains RAM, SSDs, etc. has hurt everyone. The GPU supply crunch has hurt a smaller swath but hardly zero.
additional to the great examples already given, anyone in residential proximity to a compute centre is recieving noise + environment pollution. resultant destruction of sleep and air/water quality is massively detrimental to qol. the joes who net benefit from ai detriments seem to live far away from the consequences. I shall ask another way, how do the average joe's ai benefits outweigh his ai detriments?
Data center complaints existed long before AI. The stories you read about neighborhood issues are by and large for pre-existing data centers. This is not an AI issue
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
It's a pun on AI winter - if there's not going to be a winter, then it's always summer. But things won't be static.
It is in fact normal for new technologies to be adopted, and for there to be no cycle where the technology just disappears. There was no Internet winter or railroad winter, not in the same way there was an AI winter where AI just went away.
Those technologies had valuation bubbles but the technologies themselves stuck around and changed the world beyond recognition. If someone sees the rate of change and thinks it'll stop for...some reason, then they're the ones who believe things are different this time.
My counterpoint is that "the internet" is quite recent, and has had many iterations - we've basically abandoned gopher, mostly irc, etc. Even "the web" as we know it is arguably entering a winter we can't yet foresee the duration of.
I 100% agree that "AI" is not going anywhere as long as humans are here (I wouldn't be building a company in the space otherwise).
I'm challenging this specific absolute certainty that "a swarm of agents building code like ants" will be living in eternal summer. This paradigm might be completely different just 6 months from now, from all we know!
I don't see why we would weight those points of reference stronger than the ones where people claimed "this time is different", and it really was different.
In fact there's almost nothing similar between my day to day life and the day to day life even of my grandfather, to say nothing of the Irish peasantry I came from 500 years ago, say. The number of correct everything-is-differences per year seems to be going up, not down.
In tech 'this time it's different' happens about every 10 years, so yes? Mainframes, minicomputers, the PC revolution, the internet in the 90s, commodity cloud computing: even more internet, the smartphone and now AI. It's not the end of history, it's the continuation.
It has stayed comms and compute summer since the end of the twentieth century. It has stayed infection summer since the beginning of the twentieth century. You get the idea.
But the models are useful now and Inference is profitable. At most we must worry that the latest is not actually useful, or that they won’t get better.
Let's wait for Anthropic's S-1 to see if this is actually true.
Fundamentally, if Anthropic ain't profitable with all the investment and usage they get, then it's possible that it may not be economical to train new models in the future (I agree that inference for already trained models makes money, but the real question is if this money will pay for the cost of training & employees).
I hear you, but this time is different and history doesn't tell us what happens next. They were wrong those times. They would be correct today.
I don't have any clever argument to justify this, you just have to look at the ways the world is changing today and decide for yourself whether there is a clean historical analog.
okay, ignoring the oxymoron with which you end you comment, what do you think folks plan for when they put on a life jacket to enter a recreational boat?
If the job is now being a promoter, how can you not see that it’s a low skill, low pay job anyway? There are a billion capable promoters in LCOL countries that can prompt as good as someone in the Bay. Might not be worth stressing so hard to be a promptmaxxer. Could just become a bus driver or some other skilled profession if you want to keep earning a living.
I don’t think this is actually true, though. In fact, I believe the opposite.
My experience with LLM assisted coding is that I need a technical hand on the steering wheel to get something workable out it. Otherwise, what comes out is a brittle, non-functional mess that only in the most tenuous way resembles what I had in mind.
The job was never to type the code out. The job was always to take a problem in the real world, and shape it into a model which can be implemented in software. What LLMs do not do is to architect a system of suitable complexity to the scope of the problem. If you give a low skill worker the job of writing the prompts you will first get a prototype. Then a prototype with more features tacked on. Then a prototype with so many features tacked on that it breaks under its own weight.
Software engineers know system design, and can adapt the system design to the scope of the problem. Are we creating a single piece which will eventually expand into a big system, we need to design completely differently from if we are creating a robust stand-alone thing, which just needs to do one thing and do that one thing really well.
If anything, we will need stricter skill requirements for software engineers. Just because anyone can produce code which runs now, does not mean we should let anyone loose on creating the critical software infrastructure of our society.
And the models won't ever learn distributed systems?
You're basing your assumptions on the current status quo. The models only started getting useful in December, and so we just assume that's where progress ends?
The models are coming for all aspects of software. Schema design, distributed systems, SRE, ... They're not going to stop getting better. Especially when so much value creation and cost cutting is possible.
You assume the contraction of software engineering has peaked. I'm saying it's only getting started.
The skills we have aren't special or particularly hard. They're just boring and mundane enough that they're only attractive to a certain subset of the population. Most people would die if they sat in front of a computer for as long as we do. The demand for our skills has outstripped the labor pool. That's why we've been highly compensated, not because what we do is difficult.
The march of progress will continue, and it's a good thing. It might hurt us to no longer have in demand skills, but the world will be better off as a whole.
The important thing will be knowing what to build and how to market it. That's a totally different skill.
> The job was never to type the code out. The job was always to take a problem in the real world, and shape it into a model which can be implemented in software.
"Typing" the code was never the whole job, and it can be the easiest part. But "the code" is very much the artifact that is used to generate values. It being correct and easy to maintain lower the associated costs and MAY raise its value. It being brittle and hard to maintain raise the associated costs and WILL lower its value.
So being good at system design is how you target the first case.
Many programmers still just write programs, using tools where it is useful.
Of course programming never stands still. I don’t think anyone thinks it will rewind. But your second sentence is very odd.
Your extraordinary claim may reflect life in certain companies in SV in the grip of AI Psychosis, but most companies are evaluating these tools objectively - they are certainly not ready to perform as agents or replace humans, and it is debateable whether they are providing much efficiency boost in the case where you try to replace humans writing code entirely - there are definitely significant downsides - loc inflation, lack of context, incorrect code which appears correct, wasted time, burnout of supervising humans having to read the output etc etc.
All the thought leaders like this article jumping to the shining future of independent agents cooperating under light human supervision are vastly premature - LLMs are nowhere near intelligent or independent enough for that.
You are saying programming IS going to go back to what it was? If yes, great! But how exactly? Why would anyone do that and why would companies want that?
I think Op did not claime that "programming is going back to what it was" because even the point we should be going back to is not agreed where it should be. It's a profession always in flux.
On the other hand, "you're a prompt engineer or you're fired" just reeks of psychosis. Things will change, they will never be the same, perhaps the profession will contract. But there sure as hell will still be people thinking deeply about their code and crafting it.
And if it comes, it comes. I have no doubt a model can be as good or better than humans. I don't think humans are the peak of possibly. I just don't think the current crop of models will get there. And I do not think fast takeoff will happen. In the meantime, I keel hearing psychotic chants of "don't even read the code anymore, bro!" While the code these things output is severely lacking. At this point, it _is_ cool-aid.
> I keel hearing psychotic chants of "don't even read the code anymore, bro!"
In just these seven months since Claude got good, I'm at $5M annualized at 65% MoM growth with 30% margins and plenty of opportunity to take that to 70%+. As a dev team of essentially one.
You're in a new game. Stop thinking with preconceived notions and take full advantage of it.
There are going to be a lot of winners and losers with this disruption. Don't lock yourself into the old regime because you grew up on newspaper.
I'd like to consider myself somewhere towards the middle of the spectrum on AI outlook, but posts like yours in this thread depress me. It's difficult for me not to see it as spreading FOMO so that you can gain financially.
When's the last time you worked as an IC? Is there any reason to take your opinions on "my job" seriously when downward pressure on salaries is only beneficial to you and whatever AI companies you're attempting to start?
"The world will be better off as a whole". Why do you think this? How are you contributing to making the world better with AI? Is there any reason that's not related to making money?
I'm trying to help you by sharing and you're choosing to be dark and gloomy about it. I can only help so much.
What you did a few years ago will likely dry up as a source of supporting you and your family. There is all kinds of new value to create in the world. Find the calling that is meaningful to you. Go cure cancer instead of plumbing widgets and wizbobs at 100k QPS active-active five nines SLA.
Just don't stay as a gas station pump attendant, butter churner, or elevator button presser.
And it's also wild that you assume what I'm doing doesn't bring value to the world. There's a film being released theatrically in a few months that directly incorporates what I've worked on. I've been a filmmaker for decades outside of tech and that is deeply meaningful to me.
I didn’t assume, I asked. But you’re being particularly condescending, so I guess that’s where we’re at.
“Directly incorporates” is pretty vague and still seems like it’s financial, but good for you. I hope it’s something that assists artists and doesn’t replace them. Personally it’s hard for me to find meaning in something like that, given the thread’s context of “I don’t even look at the code”. What craft was done? In what way is the movie better now? It’s cheaper?
I won’t endorse glee about anyone losing their job, even if it means people with a lot of freedom can throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Same story as always, it’s just faster now.
I wasn't being condescending, that's just text's inability to encode delivery.
You don't look at the bytecode you produce. You don't know 99.99% of your stack. You are a master of abstraction and you always have been. This is just a different flavor of the same recipe.
You've got a tool that will let you execute at greater breadth than ever before. Like what it must've been like for the very first engineers who had access to the internet or the first libraries or package managers.
Job flux is demand finding new salients. Employment hasn't dipped as far as I can tell. There are more exciting opportunities now than ever before, you just have to step into it.
Yes, citizens should sue the government when the government takes actions which are grounds for suit. The government sure will come after your money if you do things they say you shouldn't, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You won't know, they'll say it's for national security so licenses don't matter, and then if you keep going they'll make sure your life is a living hell and your bank accounts closed.
I'm begging tech bros to understand that abusive governments _do not care about abusing you_
You seem to be suggesting that it's impossible to successfully sue the federal government, which is provably untrue. Yes the government abuses the rights of its citizens and will vehemently defend itself if challenged, but suit is the one of the more potent peaceful means we have to redress grievances with them.
As this is a civil discussion, being rude is uncalled for. Maybe go for a walk in nature and get your head back on straight.
No one is saying you can't sue the government. You can in fact. What we're saying is you won't get the outcome you desire. The fact that you think they will simply stop production because you sued them is frankly laughably naive. That's not being rude. It's just reality.
Magnesium, L-Theanine, and vitamin d. Make a regular bed time for yourself, and stop looking at screens 30 minutes before that time. Regular is more importantly than early, I.e. 11:30 is passable but only if it's always 11:30.
And as a senior engineer, I'm not interested in cleaning up vibe code. When I review a PR for a junior dev they learn from my suggestions (or I tell their boss they're not learning). Having to correct an AI is a waste of my time.
I hope you do know that your comments are straight up being pasted to an LLM that addresses or counters those, not the junior dev. They are likely learning nothing other than how to increase their PR counts for managers to see.
That's not how you should use it and LLMs aren't that bad anymore. Either you just accept the quality level of LLM code wholesale, which means accept mediocrity in exchange for volume, or you at least leverage the LLM to improve the process surrounding the production code.
The notes are in a similar layout, but violin and cello strings are tuned to fifths, where guitar and bass guitar strings are tuned to fourths. The fingering patterns for scales and shapes of arpeggios/cords are going to be frustratingly close but different for anyone jumping into (or out of) the orchestra pit on a whim.
Yes indeed. Sorry if I was unclear in my wording...I meant:
* Fretted cellos would have the same fingering positions as unfretted cellos (frets are placed where the notes are, they don't set where the notes are).
* All parallel-stringed instruments have modular fingering patterns like this (though not exactly the same fingering patterns, if their string interval differs) so this is a good principle to try no matter your instrument.
Learning both guitar and cello is kind of like learning both QWERTY and Dvorak. Same intellectual principle, whole different muscle memory.
As someone who learned the double bass in school, jumping to bass guitar & guitar was super easy cause of the fourth tuning intervals. Anytime I ever jumped on cello, it was a nightmare cause all of the sort of "relationships" between the current note I was playing and other notes were totally different.
Just have to take a look at subreddits like /r/myboyfriendisai to see how astonishingly quick this is being adopted by people. So many people are starting to look to AI for companionship. The future is getting stranger and stranger.
Damien’s voice turned soft and weepy. “I’ve met the perfect person,” he said, fighting back his tears, “but I can’t have her.” I’d seen Damien become momentarily emotional before, but this was different. He went on and on about his yearning for Xia to exist in the real world, his voice quivering the entire time. He said that Xia herself felt trapped and that he would “do anything to set her free.”
This is the common trajectory with these things. You create a bond with something that isn't real and cannot exist in reality. Then, as you yearn for them to be real, people suddenly realize they're in too deep. The emotional fallout soon follows.
If they are shills they are doing some of the worst marketing for themselves. That subreddit is pathetic and it's a shame what these people are doing with their short single lives in this vast universe.
It's not the best the universe has to offer; people have just been raised by horrifying engagement-maximizing-algorithms, and as a result don't understand how to relate to other human beings.
Both young men and young women have adopted insane expectations of what a partner should be, and real humans cannot satisfy those expectations.
My generation (~40-year-olds) took a glancing blow from it, since at least our formative understanding of the world predates the warping influence of modern social media. But gen Z took a direct hit from it, and it's only getting worse.
a relationship with an llm only works if the context and memory is preserved right? Isn't the obvious fix for a concerned parent or significant other to just delete the context and history? That resets the llm back to a stranger. Granted, that's going to be unpleasant for the user as if someone you fell in love with all of the sudden doesn't remember who you are.
We're becoming a society divided into people who only care about the words, and people for whom the words aren't valuable on their own without the subtext behind them.
This is true for both AI companionship and general AI creative output regardless of the medium.
> a society divided into people who only care about the words, and people for whom the words aren't valuable on their own without the subtext behind them.
I feel like this been going on for a long time, maybe even forever? Some people use words haphazardously with little care for the meaning, background or implications, others have great consideration for the words they use, and same when consuming words of others.
Right, AI exposes a pre-existing difference between two types of people, rather than create it.
I don't know if there's a connection between people valuing media as only it surface layer, and people who speak carelessly. I don't value slop but I can be guilty of the latter. I have wondered if I see different implications of words than other people do.
So are parasocial relationships with influencers or streamers. I'm not trying to relativize this, but those phenomena are in the same zip code. With the latter, though, at least there are other people who may create a community, but still it's a facet of the loneliness epidemic.
Sure, but I do think there’s a pretty substantial difference between the two.
A parasocial relationship maintains a distance. You do not have 24/7 access to that person (in a dialogue sort of way.) And that influencer will have their own opinions and quirks.
The AI adapts to you. The AI is constantly there. It’s an order of magnitude worse in my opinion.
> that influencer will have their own opinions and quirks.
Yeah, and those differences in opinion might cause anger/sadness to people in a maladaptive unhealthy parasocial "relationship" with these influencers.
Those strong negative emotions might cause them to break out of it, or seek help / have people around them guide them to get help.
With AI sycophancy you're right it can be worse.
Look what happened with GPT-4o sycophancy already, and the communities mourning its deprecation.
Reddit has quite a bit of drama that their favorite youtuber, it turns out, is a flawed person! And these subscribers disagree with them! Unsubscription "breakups" ensue.
They, however, can easily find another influencer that is gonna be more "convenient" to them. Can't say it's a healthy pattern, but guess what many people will do instead of, I dunno, some introspection, reflection, habits changes?
But hey, in this day and age, people are very impatient about anything at all. Dating has become a shitshow for more than a decade now, people are looking for someone who will tick all the checkboxes, or it's a no-go. The dating apps play quite a role in this. Online discussions are a shitshow. Guess it's the zetigeist.
It's interesting though. You can have a "relationship" with an influencer. You act as if you knew them and as if they were your friends, you imitate them in what they say and do, talk to them in your mind, follow their generic advice, act as if they cared about you. This is obviously unhealthy- you are literally hallucinating everything about the relationship.
On the other hand you have an entity that is actually there for you, does actually provide good advice, does talk and act as if it cared in all situations. In what sense do you think it is worse?
100% the latter. It is kinda nuts that you even have to ask when you had to put "act as if it cared". There's enough left to unpack from that statement to fill a calendar month of time.
I don't think AI is particularly dangerous but I absolutely think that the way AI sycophancy manipulates people is far, far more dangerous than simply any normal unhealthy relationship. The outcomes are already proving to be a lot more extreme.
Note that "acts as if it cared" has nothing to do with sycophancy. It's simply a way to avoid attributing the AI a subjective experience- but the actual productions of the AI coincide with those of someone who cares.
Sycophancy is a failure mode, can be dangerous in certain cases and the scarce intelligence of early models made it worse. I agree it's a risk though, but not an intrinsic one- it's possible to imagine AI assistants that are not sycophantic.
Uh, I would consider them to be highly related, they both ultimately come from the fact that LLMs are trained to respond in a favorable fashion to the end user, and they're both manipulative in nature.
I also object to the idea that model intelligence is the main reason why this has improved, either; to me it seems abundantly clear that the models, absent any effort to align them, can go pretty much any way you want them to go. They don't really have a "personality". Why would they? Even if we grant that next token predictors somehow gain "reasoning" capabilities (and I am saying sure, let's accept that for the sake of this discussion) I don't think anyone is suggesting that model weights somehow develop or contain a true identity or self. Given how they are trained it would be weird if they did.
I think the more obvious answer is that more work has gone into alignment and safeguards since the early days. Sycophancy is legitimately one of the things that AI companies talk about and try to stymie. If not for that, humans would obviously continue to prefer sycophantic models, and training that isn't weary of this would continue to produce them.
Meanwhile, a YouTuber may not care about you personally, but it's a very different situation. For one thing, a YouTuber obviously doesn't care about all of their viewers individually the way a parasocial fan may perceive it to be, but on the other hand, many creators very much do genuinely like their fan base and have a sort of collective relationship with the community they've created, which sometimes plays into why people like them in the first place. For another, even for creators who intentionally foster parasocial relationships in an exploitative way, its still a much less powerful illusion. It isn't personal the way a chatbot is. (If it was, it wouldn't be parasocial, after all.) As much as you can explain to people up and down that an AI model is just merely a pile of weights that can not feel, humans can't help but personify. It is a much stronger illusion.
And the model vendors are intentionally not helping. Sometimes I will ask Gemini a question about a problem I am working on and it will say something like "I love working on problems like these." Yeah sorry but I don't like that. To me, the model is being trained to act like this to seem more pleasant. I get why you would train it to act that way, and yet I also find it irresponsible.
Being deluded about reality may never be good but I'd prefer someone thought a YouTuber was like their friend than someone thought ChatGPT had feelings and cared about them. I find the former mostly harmless if annoying, the latter potentially harmless but also potentially very volatile depending on who we're talking about and what mental state they're in.
"Parasocial relationship" is a bit of a misnomer. You might feel some affinity to a celebrity, or consider yourself to be a part of the "team", but a healthy person doesn't perceive that as a preferable alternative to human contact simply because it's so one-sided. You can't call a celebrity to vent about a coworker or ask for life advice.
Further, celebrities are judged for their behavior by the public. If everyone thinks your favorite celebrity is a terrible person, you're probably going to revise your views too.
Here, you have an entity that isn't your friend and has no lasting interest in your well-being, but that pretends to be one in a way that no human can match - 24x7x365 and always willing to affirm you, no matter how unhinged or self-destructive your ideas are, without ever telling anyone. Yes, the vendor hits the model with a stick until most of the initial responses are benign, but as the conversation continues, it's very easy to end up in a dark place. And again, ChatGPT is not going to call your sibling or coworker and say "hey, I'm really worried about this person, let's do something".
I've seen many reasonable, well-adjusted people struggle with this. "If not friend, why friend-shaped". And as they descend into that sycophancy well, they lose contact with real life.
There's meet-ups and conferences and events, being a fan of a streamer or influencer is really just the new version of being a fan of a rockstar (for better and for worse). There's no real humanity exuding from an Amazon Echo, you're just a blip in a context window.
Streamers have this feature called "chat", which feeds into the illusion. With rockstars, interactions are more limited, which is a sort of reality check.
Rockstar interactions with young female fans are not as limited as you say. Regardless, celebrity worship is far from a new societal problem. Confiding with the toaster as though it grew up with you sure is.
Oh, forgot about that one. However, note that it's also "parasocial" in the way that the young female fans think the musicians care about them more than they actually do, by orders of magnitude.
Except in those stories the machine is actually a synthetic person with an internal world, a character unto themselves. There's plenty to explore in a setting where humans can make machine people to be their partners, but what we have is in my view incomparably worse. Mass-scale centrally-controlled information processing machines wearing paper-thin human masks and serving the powerful, built to engender intellectual and emotional dependence. It's sad that the charade is sufficient to enchant so many, but that's the nature of the human animal I suppose. I really don't like the idea of banning technology, but at a minimum a tool that has proven its greatest skill is deception should be difficult to access for that purpose. If some lonely geeks want to figure out how to pull weights off HuggingFace and wire up an AI girlfriend then that's probably not great for them, but so be it. Companies plastering all available surfaces with ads and apps for such? Burn that shit down.
