Neal Stephenson On AI

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As a consummate Neal Stephenson fanboy I subscribe to his sparsely active Substack ¹. Do read the whole thing.

Stephenson proposes a challenge: we eventually will find ourselves in competition with AI in much the same way as

I found it quite interesting when he mentions a McLuhan’s quote: “all augmentations are amputations”. In that he posits that “We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.”

This reminds me of his older thoughts on the Eloi from In the Beginning… Was the Command Line where he mentions

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except that it’s been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it’s the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands. Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and build sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that’s no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.

To some extent this feels like the extension of that: the Ghiblification speaks to this too. It took hard work and soul to come across the style: now it can be replicated at scale but all of the meaning is borrowed: without the original there would be nothing.

I have been quite hesitant to rely upon LLM tools for my own work. Not just because I find they rarely work correctly for my use cases, but also there is something lacking in promoting work that I don’t intimately know (and can defend the details). But now there is an additional motive: to not let my own intellectual fitness atrophy (and stay a Morlock!).