I've been thinking a lot about this quote, and wondering whether it will continue to apply:
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
- In ~2002, i expect a lot of smart people had similar thoughts to yours, with the advent of Google and growth of the web. Information at your fingertips --> commoditized knowledge --> the main thing that matters is creativity / agency
- From my perspective, it turned out that yes, creativity and agency mattered a LOT following the rise of the internet, it turned up the knob on what any one human could accomplish, but also the frontiers of our collective knowledge grew so much that new knowledge kept being created that was not commoditized (a somewhat trivial example being SEO -- people had to figure that out, and it is ever-evolving)
- So i'm wondering whether LLMs will have a similar effect where the "edges" of our knowledge grow so quickly that there will always be new non-commoditized knowledge at the frontier. Or, whether the generalized reasoning really makes them different in kind than the internet and they can just do all the learning for us
Thanks for the thoughts!
I've been thinking a lot about this quote, and wondering whether it will continue to apply:
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
- In ~2002, i expect a lot of smart people had similar thoughts to yours, with the advent of Google and growth of the web. Information at your fingertips --> commoditized knowledge --> the main thing that matters is creativity / agency
- From my perspective, it turned out that yes, creativity and agency mattered a LOT following the rise of the internet, it turned up the knob on what any one human could accomplish, but also the frontiers of our collective knowledge grew so much that new knowledge kept being created that was not commoditized (a somewhat trivial example being SEO -- people had to figure that out, and it is ever-evolving)
- So i'm wondering whether LLMs will have a similar effect where the "edges" of our knowledge grow so quickly that there will always be new non-commoditized knowledge at the frontier. Or, whether the generalized reasoning really makes them different in kind than the internet and they can just do all the learning for us