the pursuit of understanding as an art form
the manipulation of data to practical ends
these things are not the same.
they seemed to overlap, for much of the 20th century. that was an illusion.
the illusion was only possible because the conflict between them was indirect. it is now direct, and we don't think it'll be possible to see them as the same, ever again.
it will always be possible to use understanding, once you have it, to practical ends
it is often impossible to use a practical tool to create understanding, depending on the nature of the tool. in computing, we now have tools which actively work against the user's ability to understand anything. that's... that's quite a horrifying thing for humans to have invented.
we try to be deliberate about our word choices, and "user" is a word we often reflect on. tool user, drug user, passive recipient of someone else's work, person on the unhappy side of the technocratic power dynamic, .......... these are all meanings that pass through our mind, any time we say it. we think they all apply here.
tools are good. human civilization would not exist without tools, and we do think that the world we live in is better than one in which civilization never existed
but tools are not neutral. that is a self-serving lie told by people trying to sell guns.
to have a tool is a form of power: the power to do whatever it is the tool does
is that good? is that bad? it depends on what the tool actually does, it depends on the things it can be used for. different kinds of tools can lead to radically different social structures. it is the moral responsibility of anyone who creates tools, to think that through, to game it out adversarially.
some of the worst, least productive coding experiences of our life have been when we were convinced we already knew what the problem was and just had to poke one small thing to make it work. we wound up trapped in a loop of constantly changing small things and not keeping good track of our hypotheses, and it went on for hours and hours until we woke the fuck up and started thinking.
of course, we did that without the use of generative machine learning
a significant portion of our earned wisdom is the ability to recognize when we're not thinking enough, and stop and re-orient
so it makes perfect sense to us that a machine that offers that death spiral as its ONLY mode of operation, would cause people to lose their core thinking skills
but why anyone would put up with it....... that, we will never get
humans are tool-users
let's try to stay that way. let's try to not be used by them.
all on the same page? good? good.
💜✊
[the fedi version of this post is the thread at https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01KVKCS999F8PXTVVWBGFJMGZB]