This really rhymes with C.S. Lewis' take on technology in "The Abolition of Man": "What we call man's power over nature is really the power of one man over another with nature as an instrument" (possibly paraphrased as I don't have my copy in front of me).
> "By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant."
This put me in mind of the perspective on LLMs as a compression of the training corpus.
"... we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information"
"Under electric technology, the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information."
These are definitely prescient about the current economy, including the part where so many facets of our lives become commodified as "content" or data points for targetted advertising algos. I think he oversells it a bit--the information economy has been superimposed on the physical economy rather than sweeping it aside, at least so far.
> Risk, but also the potential for power.
This really rhymes with C.S. Lewis' take on technology in "The Abolition of Man": "What we call man's power over nature is really the power of one man over another with nature as an instrument" (possibly paraphrased as I don't have my copy in front of me).
> "By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant."
This put me in mind of the perspective on LLMs as a compression of the training corpus.
"... we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information"
"Under electric technology, the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information."
These are definitely prescient about the current economy, including the part where so many facets of our lives become commodified as "content" or data points for targetted advertising algos. I think he oversells it a bit--the information economy has been superimposed on the physical economy rather than sweeping it aside, at least so far.