Great write up! Unfortunately, I think this article accurately reflects how we've made little progress on the most important aspects of LLM hype and use: the social ones.
A small number of people with lots of power are essentially deciding to go all in on this technology presumably because significant gains will mean the long term reduction of human labor needs, and thus human labor power. As the article mentions, this also comes at huge expenditure and environmental impact, which is already a very important domain in crisis that we've neglected. The whole thing especially becomes laughable when you consider that many people are still using these tools to perform tasks that could be preformed with a margin of more effort using existing deterministic tools. Instead we are now opting for a computationally more expensive solution that has a higher margin of error.
I get that making technical progress in this area is interesting, but I really think the lower level workers and researchers exploring the space need to be more emphatic about thinking about socioeconomic impact. Some will argue that this is analogous to any other technological change and markets will adjust to account for new tool use, but I am not so sure about this one. If the technology is really as groundbreaking as everyone wants us to believe then logically we might be facing a situation that isn't as easy to adapt to, and I guarantee those with power will not "give a little back" to the disenfranchised masses out of the goodness of their hearts.
This doesn't even raise all the problems these tools create when it comes to establishing coherent viewpoints and truth in ostensibly democratic societies, which is another massive can of worms.
A small number of people with lots of power are essentially deciding to go all in on this technology presumably because significant gains will mean the long term reduction of human labor needs, and thus human labor power. As the article mentions, this also comes at huge expenditure and environmental impact, which is already a very important domain in crisis that we've neglected. The whole thing especially becomes laughable when you consider that many people are still using these tools to perform tasks that could be preformed with a margin of more effort using existing deterministic tools. Instead we are now opting for a computationally more expensive solution that has a higher margin of error.
I get that making technical progress in this area is interesting, but I really think the lower level workers and researchers exploring the space need to be more emphatic about thinking about socioeconomic impact. Some will argue that this is analogous to any other technological change and markets will adjust to account for new tool use, but I am not so sure about this one. If the technology is really as groundbreaking as everyone wants us to believe then logically we might be facing a situation that isn't as easy to adapt to, and I guarantee those with power will not "give a little back" to the disenfranchised masses out of the goodness of their hearts.
This doesn't even raise all the problems these tools create when it comes to establishing coherent viewpoints and truth in ostensibly democratic societies, which is another massive can of worms.