“TheFutureIsDesigned” bluechecks thusly:
You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book
Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I’ve selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I’m looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.
And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.
We are not the same.
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.
You know, Dune.
(Via)
I’ve been thinking about this post for a full day now. It’s truly bizzare, in a “I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain” kind of way.
Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That’s small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:
I can’t even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.
I can’t understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there’s this moment where you think “god I remember there was this particular chart I saw” or “how many people lived in Tokio again?” or “I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once”. In the days of yore you’d write one Google query and you’d get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn’t actually take two minutes either, it’s like an instant one-second thought of “oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere”. You don’t read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you’re supposed to memorise?
How on earth do you think of “precisely the information you need”. What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that’s a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don’t know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don’t you ever read something and go “oh, I never even thought about this”, “I didn’t know this was a problem”, “I wouldn’t have thought of this myself”. If not then what the fuck are you reading??
I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, “did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view.”
This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn’t know you didn’t know. It’s something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don’t comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?
I think they consider “being well-read” solely as a flex, not as a means of acquiring actual knowledge and wisdom.
@HedyL
“I’ve consumed all the ideologically appropriate materials”
What’s more, there’s a reason people write books. Information is best conveyed via narrative with context. You can throw all the stats you want at someone, if you don’t give them a story to tie them all together it’s just noise. That’s why we have teachers instead of just textbooks and textbooks instead of just encyclopedias
This part threw me as well. If you can think of it, why read for it? Didn’t make sense and so I stopped looking into this particular abyss until you pointed it out again.
I think the only interpretation of what this person said that approaches some level of rationality on their part is essentially a form of confirmation bias. They aren’t thinking of information that is in the text, they are thinking “I want this text to confirm X for me”, then they prompt and get what they want. LLMs are biased to be people-pleasers and will happily spin whatever hallucinated tokens the user throws at them. That’s my best guess.
That you didn’t think of the above just goes to show the failure of your unfeeble mind’s logic and reason to divine such a truth. Just kidding, sorta, in the sense that you can’t expect to understand an irrational thought process using rationality.
But if it’s not that I’m still thrown.
I think it’s either that, or they want an answer they could impress other people with (without necessarily understanding it themselves).
Oh, that’s a good angle too. Prompt the LLM with “what insights does this book have about B2B sales” or something.
It may need to be removed for the purpose, but they’ll be fine because you can just ask an LLM how to put it back again when you’re done.
the end
I think the end is way too generous. I don’t think we deserve an end.
Yea, it’s not The End, as in humanity dies off, but the end, as in civilization collapses back in to a disgusting dark age and has mass dieoffs.
It wouldn’t even be the first time in human history.