We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go? Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer. ![]() Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on? Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on? But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.īut since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen at least for me. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day. StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.Ī canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. ![]() Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow.
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