At the risk of repeating myself, yes the LLM hype is quite overdone and annoying. What you say is true people have bought into a fantasy which is wholly unrealistic.
Unfortunately your view is altogether tiresome and much harder to scroll past than the juvenile LLM excitement because it could actually do some real harm in the long term. No 'The Terminator" was not a documentary, nor was "The Matrix" nor even is your favorite episode of "Black Mirror".
Watts is far more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject matter. I highly recommend this article in The Atlantic by him and if you havent picked up any of his work I highly recommend pretty much anything hes ever written.
I was cured of blind techno-optimism years ago. The race for superintelligence is between ad-slinging megacorps and authoritarian governments. Whoever wins, we humans lose.
I Feel like were having two different conversations here. Who said anything about optimism? Are those the two options now optimism or doomerism? No space left for anything approaching realism?
I criticize blind techno-doomerism for its use of clanky old worn out cliches from the sci-fi of last century. I criticize LLM bros for being naive and blinded by advertising. Both groups completely misunderstood the relevant sci-fi from this century, if they actually bothered to read any.
Sometimes between the rabid hype-bros and the holier-than-thou doomers you can find actual conversation about the nature of human interaction with theoretical future machine intelligence, how LLMs relate to that and the technical aspects of creating such a thing. Its rare but it is out there.
Unfortunately your view is altogether tiresome and much harder to scroll past than the juvenile LLM excitement because it could actually do some real harm in the long term. No 'The Terminator" was not a documentary, nor was "The Matrix" nor even is your favorite episode of "Black Mirror".
Watts is far more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject matter. I highly recommend this article in The Atlantic by him and if you havent picked up any of his work I highly recommend pretty much anything hes ever written.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/ai-conscio...