“TheFutureIsDesigned” bluechecks thusly:
You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book
Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I’ve selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I’m looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.
And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.
We are not the same.
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.
You know, Dune.
(Via)
I’ve been thinking about this post for a full day now. It’s truly bizzare, in a “I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain” kind of way.
Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That’s small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:
take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need
I can’t even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.
I can’t understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there’s this moment where you think “god I remember there was this particular chart I saw” or “how many people lived in Tokio again?” or “I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once”. In the days of yore you’d write one Google query and you’d get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn’t actually take two minutes either, it’s like an instant one-second thought of “oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere”. You don’t read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you’re supposed to memorise?
How on earth do you think of “precisely the information you need”. What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that’s a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don’t know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don’t you ever read something and go “oh, I never even thought about this”, “I didn’t know this was a problem”, “I wouldn’t have thought of this myself”. If not then what the fuck are you reading??
I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, “did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view.”
This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn’t know you didn’t know. It’s something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don’t comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?
I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain
It may need to be removed for the purpose, but they’ll be fine because you can just ask an LLM how to put it back again when you’re done.
the end
I think the end is way too generous. I don’t think we deserve an end.
E: sorry slight spoilers for old and popular science fiction series. (You’d think they would have picked some more positive but less well known transhumanist science fiction books with nice societies, or pick specifics they liked but nope).
The Foundation is a horrible place to live, it is a frontier city created under false pretenses where you live under constant threat of a crisis, manipulated from afar by the second foundation, while ‘Rome’ falls apart around them. Billions die.
Hyperion is a horrible place to live, the main hegemonic force is a hypercolonialist empire that destroys all variety, kills the dolphins, is secretly run by AIs who abuse humanity, power everything by destroying the energy that gives us love, and morph into a authoritarian theocracy secretly run by AIs who are now at war with the beings in the love dimension. Also, billions die when the first empire falls.
Ringworld is … not a book series I remember much from, read it when I was young, might be ok might not be.
Also all these worlds also have a big magical element in it, dune with all the spice stuff, hyperion with the love dimension, foundation with the psi powers and magical prediction powers. And they are setups for the stories conflicts (and well, stories).
It is all a bit like saying you want Singularity skies Festival arrive without reading up on what happens afterwards. Helps if you actually read books not skim through them in 2 hours.
E: I need to make a confession, this guy changed my mind on agentic LLMs. They should use them, it will improve their reading comprehension. (they should also add pronouns, if they don’t want to be called they)
The only place I’ve read about in an SF book where I’d really like to live is the world of Neal Stephen’s Anathem, and that’s mostly because they keep all the nerds in big nerd communities where they nerd away without being hassled by the outside world.
LMFAO, Dune? The setring where computers don’t exist anymore because mankind doesn’t want machines thinking for them? That dune?
See the bright side: chatbots are going to ruin the speedreading industry.
Dune
Prompts ChatGPT, skims the output because of muh ‘fishency
The Omelas Hole sure sounds like a paradise, I want to live in there!
I don’t want to live in the world of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
I don’t want to live in the world of The Giving Tree.
I don’t want to live in the world of Pippi Longstocking (Sweden).
I want to live in the world of Goosebumps, The Yellow Pages, and JBL Tune Beam Quick Start Guide.
Your bonus points link is even dumber than you’re suggesting. The first half of the tweet:
I don’t want to live in the world of “Camp Of The Saints”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “Atlas Shrugged”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “The GULag Archipelago”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.
I don’t want to live in the “Brave New World”.
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune
I don’t want bad things! I want good-ish things!
Also I’ve never read Ringworld or Hyperion but the other two stories span literal millennia and show wildly different societies over that period. Hell, showcasing that development is the entire first set of Foundation stories. Just… You can absolutely tell this sonofabitch doesn’t actually read.
Asimov being Asimov, the human consequences of the decline and fall of the galactic empire happens mostly of screen.
How exactly Trantor in a couple of hundred years went from a bustling planetary city to a planet where the last survivors scratch out a living from farming the former imperial grounds, is better left unexplored. If you are living in that world you are much more likely to be among the masses were stuff happens that will eventually be noted by Foundation scholars as “population decline”, than being a Foundation scholar.
It’s been ages since I read Hyperion but I think it’s one of those settings that start out somewhat utopian but as the story progresses you are meant to realize they are deeply fucked.
Also I had to look up Camp of the Saints, and I think complaining about living there may be a racist dog whistle.
spoiler for hyperion
In the first book it is revealed that the utopian hegemonic force is actually hypercolonialist, which destroyed one of the main characters planets (and killed the dolphins) and made him turn to terrorism. The later books make everything worse.
“The Camp of the Saints is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world.”
More of a train whistle than a dog whistle this one.
No may be about it, Camp of the Saints is only ever mentioned by big racists these days. Might as well be the Turner Diaries.
I live how he put The Gulag Archipelago in there along a bunch of speculative fiction.
The Gulag Archipelago is the dystopian future after (((Those People))) successfully destroy Western civilisation by flooding it with gay Muslims, of course.
Found a primo response in the replies:
Would be interesting to put him to the test vs someone who had spent two hours reading the book.
He gets 1 prompt and his little agents. He can’t keep prompting for every question.
Maybe he didn’t read Dune he just had AI summarize it.
I mean even if you somehow miss the whole computers are haram aspect of the duniverse, being a space peasant ruled by psychic tyrants still hardly seems like a winning proposition.
