😔 Everyone'll have an LLM...

What'll it look like then?

As usual, this is a roughly bi-weekly paid post full of half-finished musings of what’s on my mind.

I think this was a staff member wearing a summer yukata making adjustments to a crane game in Japan.

I’m in the last generation that will have memories of navigating in a car using paper maps. In my childhood, since I could read English faster on small road signs than my immigrant parents can at >50mph, I’d be sitting in the passenger seat, map unfolded, pointing out what street to turn on, what exit to take. Later the paper map would give way to printouts of MapQuest directions. Many years later, we’d finally get an in-car GPS unit. Now, everyone just uses their phone.

I occasionally think about that not-so-slow transition of society whenever I’m watching new paradigm-changing technology pop up. The release of GPT-4 this week and the ridiculous hype around large language models in general the past few years, keeps bringing it back to mind.

The reason I keep thinking about navigation apps is because it massively changed how people go from place to place, while very few of us even realize how much of a change it was. It’s convenience and overall harmlessness meant we just accepted it. It’s effect is simultaneously pervasive, but also invisible.

But even “harmless” navigation systems have downsides to them. Now that they’re ubiquitous and will route around traffic, people have noticed that traffic is being routed to side streets and causing traffic issues because those roads weren’t designed with that kind of traffic flow in mind. There’s also endless stories about people trusting the navigation system too much and driving into lakes, construction areas, or undeveloped wilderness. These issues aren’t within the technology itself, but issues in how we humans apply the technology to our lives.

Which is why I look at LLMs and worry. I’m no futurist nor visionary, but it’s obvious that the technology isn’t going to go away — we’re all going to be using a descendant of these things in some form in the future. It’s going to take society somewhere and we won’t know if it’s a net good or bad place until we get there. The lasting effect of a technology isn’t usually what it enables individuals to do, but the emergent effects that manifest when huge amounts of individuals use the technology in their lives.