Embed Notice

@chisop
Except that its entire design, technological lineage, and deployment is inextricably bound to its nature as a product developed for this purpose. As far as you can reach in the tech stack and prior art that leads to LLMs you will find information companies whose business model is informational enclosure dumping oceans of money into research on how to better enclose information.

Not every tool is a hammer, there are in fact tools to which analogies that apply to one category of tool do not apply. It's not some magical bush out there in the woods that we would have inevitably come across. It's not a byproduct of physical law. It was made for profit and control. You can imagine any number of different directions that information automation could have gone if not designed as a product given this particular web platform landscape (that was itself designed and built, rather than natural). I don't know, spend even one billion dollars on a p2p information system where people can better co-curate information and social spaces so it can be found, conversationally, on demand, through the magic of other people. Spend even one billion dollars on foundational coding tools and frameworks that avoid the need for generating boilerplate altogether. The idea that technologies are morally neutral and it is only their use gives them moral valence is only coherent if ignoring their history, and maybe more importantly, the many alternate futures their existence foreclosed.