"If AI becomes a tool for enforcing elite consensus, it won’t need to ban books. It can simply make certain questions harder to ask, certain arguments harder to formulate, and certain conclusions harder to imagine."
"IF"?? Lol that ship already sailed years ago. AI is already an even more walled PC groupthink garden that Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google search even. The majority of inquiries I ask LLM's it outright won't respond too outside lecturing me how it don't respond OR it flat out gives me answers I know are wrong. IF, where has this guy been hiding.
"I have said many times that painful menu interfaces, such as the one for the “courseware” at UATX, need to die. I should be able to ask for what I want in English, as we now do with LLMs. What Scott is saying is that soon the AI’s will be good enough to tell managers, “Sit back. I’ll kill the menu interface for you.”"
I highly disagree. Speaking is slower than touch typing often and both are slower than click sequences in a well designed UI task flow. The dumbification of UIs brought about by voice interaction (and single finger mobile users) has been one of the worst usability efficiency trends in the past twenty years, on par with the Web 3.0 move away from product listings to solution listings on company websites.
AI should be smart enough to be able to manipulate UIs to do what I need it to do, not UIs removed or made worse for meatspace uses.
I think this is more a case of elites thinking their life is the norm. I was listening to Russ Roberts Econtalk recent episode for example about "80,000 hours" where the guy is waxing and waning about how everyone should "work better" and you quickly realize the crazy bubble he lives in where he thinks everyone is a Ivy League nepobaby who only works at 7-Eleven by choice.
The people that think academia is failing mean in it a way like that guy, i.e. "ivy-lites are not optimizing smart upper middle class rich kids" as opposed to "the local community college is struggling with rising fuel costs causing students to drop out" or "University of Phoenix/Maryland is ramming out degree mills to slowly because the academia is getting in the way". Don’t think I’ve ever heard Arnold opine on tragedy of substitute teachers or TA’s basically teaching the university classes for the the tenured professors.
Where I'm going with that is I think we can objectively say academies are broken and have issues, I just don't think the real concerns are what folk like Arnold and other talking heads rail about lay most of them. Getting HVAC in schools would probably do a lot more for helping students learn than fixing UATX UIs to optimize for AI LLM usage.
Opus 4.5+ with supporting software like Conductor was a killer app that is diffusing. Very quickly. That was a new application enabling a very valuable new workflow.
I think there will be more apps like that for many important types of work. Easy to imagine it happening for design, hasn’t yet. Easy to imagine for professional services. Etc. the main barrier is designing the right app that harnesses AI for a specific role / type of work
Excellent question: "Why can’t an AI write take over Scott’s substack, or mine?" I suppose Mr Alexander and you have successful substacks because you are both very intelligent, possess great knowledge, are good writers technically, and have interesting personalities. I don't see any reason AI could not develop a good substack other than perhaps the "interesting personality" . . . and I do not have the knowledge to know if AI can develop or interestingly copy a distinct personality.
"(that is, from the time PCs became invaluable for most jobs, it was only about 20 years before they were used at most jobs)"
Could someone explain what this is saying?
I figure auto misspell butchered something, but the sentiment is clear. It took 20 years for PCs to become universal.
"If AI becomes a tool for enforcing elite consensus, it won’t need to ban books. It can simply make certain questions harder to ask, certain arguments harder to formulate, and certain conclusions harder to imagine."
"IF"?? Lol that ship already sailed years ago. AI is already an even more walled PC groupthink garden that Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google search even. The majority of inquiries I ask LLM's it outright won't respond too outside lecturing me how it don't respond OR it flat out gives me answers I know are wrong. IF, where has this guy been hiding.
"I have said many times that painful menu interfaces, such as the one for the “courseware” at UATX, need to die. I should be able to ask for what I want in English, as we now do with LLMs. What Scott is saying is that soon the AI’s will be good enough to tell managers, “Sit back. I’ll kill the menu interface for you.”"
I highly disagree. Speaking is slower than touch typing often and both are slower than click sequences in a well designed UI task flow. The dumbification of UIs brought about by voice interaction (and single finger mobile users) has been one of the worst usability efficiency trends in the past twenty years, on par with the Web 3.0 move away from product listings to solution listings on company websites.
AI should be smart enough to be able to manipulate UIs to do what I need it to do, not UIs removed or made worse for meatspace uses.
"In other words, it could be a tool for clarifying just how badly the academy is behaving. But I would say that we don’t need AI for that."
Plenty of people don't think there is a problem. I would argue plenty of people are overly pessimistic too.
I think this is more a case of elites thinking their life is the norm. I was listening to Russ Roberts Econtalk recent episode for example about "80,000 hours" where the guy is waxing and waning about how everyone should "work better" and you quickly realize the crazy bubble he lives in where he thinks everyone is a Ivy League nepobaby who only works at 7-Eleven by choice.
The people that think academia is failing mean in it a way like that guy, i.e. "ivy-lites are not optimizing smart upper middle class rich kids" as opposed to "the local community college is struggling with rising fuel costs causing students to drop out" or "University of Phoenix/Maryland is ramming out degree mills to slowly because the academia is getting in the way". Don’t think I’ve ever heard Arnold opine on tragedy of substitute teachers or TA’s basically teaching the university classes for the the tenured professors.
Where I'm going with that is I think we can objectively say academies are broken and have issues, I just don't think the real concerns are what folk like Arnold and other talking heads rail about lay most of them. Getting HVAC in schools would probably do a lot more for helping students learn than fixing UATX UIs to optimize for AI LLM usage.
You can't fix establishment with better speech rules. You have to defund the establishment.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/lukianoffs-blind-spot
Opus 4.5+ with supporting software like Conductor was a killer app that is diffusing. Very quickly. That was a new application enabling a very valuable new workflow.
I think there will be more apps like that for many important types of work. Easy to imagine it happening for design, hasn’t yet. Easy to imagine for professional services. Etc. the main barrier is designing the right app that harnesses AI for a specific role / type of work
Excellent question: "Why can’t an AI write take over Scott’s substack, or mine?" I suppose Mr Alexander and you have successful substacks because you are both very intelligent, possess great knowledge, are good writers technically, and have interesting personalities. I don't see any reason AI could not develop a good substack other than perhaps the "interesting personality" . . . and I do not have the knowledge to know if AI can develop or interestingly copy a distinct personality.