This is an old opinion piece by Northrop Frye way back in 1986(!) about thought, articulation, social control, and militancy. It’s an increasingly difficult article to find (for some reason/s) so I’ve liberated it and posted it.
And I can’t help but feel that in LLMs we have reached the apotheosis of Frye’s feared “verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking”.
I think Frye, had he lived to see their introduction, would likely have sunk into a great depression over LLMs and what they represented.
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cant agree more with this para
A STUDENT often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure.He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus.
Against the tide of doom and gloom I do hold out hope that the infamous star of LLMs will fade once private capital realises that the work of modern society cannot be foisted upon these fumbling, empty-headed verbal firehoses, and that there is ultimately no gold rush, only shovels.
They’ll eventually retreat, and though many of us will have willingly relinquished our skills, our sanity, and some of us even our lives already, we will rebuild and (at least for a time) carry on with a renewed appreciation for the work of human thought, and the stories that caution us against powers we did not create, and do not fully comprehend.
I hear you. There’s a good amount of diversity in humanity, I think, and a good amount of dynamics in the ensuing interactions. My fear is that there’s a lot of “good enough is good enough” and consumerism and materialism in humanity. Maybe not everyone, but enough. And that makes for a hungry species. Add large social structures on top, and you amplify the social trends that may be governed by only a small amount of choices or people.
I hope too, but I think I’ve concluded that humanity is just a bit of a headless chicken of a species.
I think on some level there’s this crack we’re collectively falling into where we’re smart enough to articulate the ideas that should shape how the world works - but we’re foolish enough, or un-self aware enough to not actually run society correctly. It’s the whole “smart but doesn’t take their own advice” cliché writ large.
We are slightly a headless chicken, but we’re so close to not being that. It’s almost an evolutionary liminal space, a paradoxical state of foolish and wise. I have no suggestions for what’s to be done if I’m right, though. Just enjoy the ride?
Enjoying the ride is perhaps all we have!
And yea, the liminal space point is very good point, part of the human condition you could say I think. Like I was saying, the potential is there, it seems, but we’re just a bit too reward seeking and lazy, as our evolutionary baggage likely dictates.
The only thing I see changing the balance is categorically longer life. If the average age of all humans at any given time was like 100yrs, that could be a massive addition of calm centerdness.
Robert Anton Wilson’s recipe for the betterment of mankind was SMI²LE; space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension. That was back when Trek was new, they’d just gone to the moon, and technology was such a hopeful thing.
Nowadays people seriously bandy theories about higher intelligence being an evolutionary dead end, America now has Space Force and a mainly corporate space industry, and the economics of impoverishing the younger generations for the benefit of boomers has paired with increasing lifespans to create a demographic timebomb in basically every post-industrial society.
All that to say, I don’t know if that recipe will suffice anymore. It was rooted in a bygone optimism. The amount of life extension we’ve already achieved should have convinced the rich to look after the planet better, but they’re only interested in rebuilding feudalism. Would it change if they lived 300 years? I doubt it.
End of the day I think it’s going to be a pretty big fight to make anything good happen in the 21st century. Or the next.
Totally fair.
Where I was coming from was trying to balance our consumeristic imagination with enough time to get bored by it and value something more.
Even if that’s possible, that longer life would also just feed wealth accumulation and feudalism, as you say, is a point well made.
A bigger question then seems to be whether human nature can handle technological progress. As you imply - tenuous at best!
Something I’ve come around to in recent weeks is the idea that with every single technology, there is a cost beyond materials and work that comes in the form of de-skilling. We invented writing and lost oral traditions. In this case I’m ruling that as a “good choice”, but part of the problem is that it’s almost never a conscious choice. Setting aside the high material costs of LLMs, e.g., the de-skill cost is clearer than ever. I hope that the sentiment goes against them because if we do willingly de-skill by accepting this so-called AI into our work, when it inevitably all comes crashing down will enough of us still know how to do without them? That’s what I worry about, these days.
We invented writing and lost oral traditions.
Then we reinvented oral traditions through illiteracy and social multimedia. I read an Atlantic article that talked about how we’ve been living in an oral age for some time now, and it has stuck in my mind ever since.
Even though it’s technically written communication, texting, slack, teams chats, and platforms like Twitter have much more in common with oral societies than ones based upon written text — and this leaves out oral platforms such as YouTube, podcasts, and TikTok. Having a debate about something on Twitter is more akin to getting into a verbal spat or an oral debate than it is to long-form letters sent back and forth between two disagreeing parties, or people publishing pieces making arguments in newspapers.
I think it also aligns with the American environment of increasing illiteracy. Some teams messages I receive daily are obviously orally dictated speech to text. My company may be an exception but there is a large emphasis on long meetings where people are forced to regurgitate written communications and parts of documents live.
I apologize a bit because this takes this thread in a completely different direction, but once you realize we live in an oral age it’s basically impossible to unsee.
Yea.
The writing/reading vs oral one is interesting to me. Obviously we’re both on one side of that transition, and so biased by that experience. And I certainly would like to have been exposed to more of a traditional oral approach to knowledge. But like you I think it’s a reasonable choice on balance because it can naturally complement what came before. Writing can extend the reach of what one can gain access to and memorise and then share and engage with orally. While engaging with a text orally, by speaking it out loud or to an audience while you’re completing the writing process can likely aid the reader quality of the written text. If used correctly I suppose.
The point being that maybe there are technologies which necessarily involve more or more categorical de-skilling than others. And maybe that’s a property of technologies that can be assessed and tracked.
