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Chris Diehl's avatar

Hi Delip, There is so much here that I resonate with. These forces you are highlighting speak to a broader malady that will be our undoing if the tide does not turn. That is disconnection. Disconnection from ourselves, from each other, and from nature. It reminds me of an event I participated in a number of years ago now in the Valley on AI. In the first group discussion, the discussion lead asked "how do we accelerate our progress toward the singularity?" I about jumped out of my chair, shooting my hand up to interject with "I object to the premise of the question!" The techno-optimism on display back then was shocking to me, as two weeks before then I had been sitting with a single mom with 10 kids on the south side of Chicago to better understand her day-to-day struggles. The folks in that AI gathering might as well have been living on another planet. I know we've seen nothing yet in terms of the weirding to come. And I pray we come to our senses and change course before it's too late to overcome the ecological disasters that are well underway.

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Davis Yoshida's avatar

> You know when you have some ideas brewing in your head, but you cannot immediately put them into words because the proper terminologies don’t exist, and you are so deep in the rabbit hole that anything you say comes out garbled, and it is too much work to climb out of the rabbit hole to give a guided tour. So you don’t bother saying it out loud, except maybe scribble something cryptic in your notebook?

This is so familiar to me, but I've never seen someone describe it so well. My PhD was basically from slightly before ELMo until now, so I feel like I understand the arc of development pretty well. I end up at a loss for words trying to communicate my mental model to others. It comes up often with AI doomer types. Bridging the gulf between our perspectives would require so much tacit knowledge, I can't imagine doing it successfully. Or maybe I'm the crazy one and all my hard to verbalize thoughts are incoherent.

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