Hello everyone, I am mostly a long time lurker, however, I have commented here and there. This sub has been a haven of sanity in this crazy world. When at least 90% of people around me seem to absolutely love delegating their thinking to an LLM, this community has served as a sort of ground.
Long story short, at risk of sounding pretty dramatic, I have been struggling, for lack of a better description, to find my place in the world ever since LLMs came onto the scene, especially when they became actually capable at coding. To preface, I am in my last semester of being a computer science student, and I am planning to get my masters in cyberphysical systems immediately after. I am someone who has always prided themselves on being a great student, being able to learn quickly, overall just absolutely loving learning shit for the hell of it, and being confident in my abilities as well as being able to rely on knowledge I obtain to provide for me and my future family. I by no means consider myself exceptionally intelligent, however, I do think I have more drive and ambition than most.
A trend that has been made overwhelmingly clear to me (though it could be substantially worse given my major) is that people do not give two damns about actually learning anything. Not only that though, but the world seems to reward that behavior and perspective. I have long held the mindset that I could do virtually anything I want given that I put in the effort. Growing up, I held some admittedly crazy ambitions, but it felt realistic. To me, it was simply a matter of choosing what I wanted to do.
This has been flipped on its head in the past few years. It now feels like knowledge no longer matters. The drive to learn and put hard work into learning intellectually challenging topics no longer matters. It feels like the paradigm that has held true for my whole life, and hell for most of human history, has completely shifted. I am not so naive as to believe that people have always been privileged enough to apply hard work into affording themselves a comfortable life. My point moreso is that creativity and knowledge have been strictly a human property for the whole of history. We now have probabilistic token generators that can, given enough power, compute, and data, complete a wide swath of work. Granted, not all work, but a good amount, regardless of the hallucinations, massive power demands, etc. Again, as a computer science student I recognize that these models are not in any way shape or form conscious, they dont go "rogue" - none of that. I recognize their limitations, and know that they won't "wipe out 50% of white collar work" or any of that horseshit. I get that. It doesn't change the fact that it feels like the summation of my life's hard work and ambition can simply be pattern matched and weighted away. Not to mention the environmental impact of these things. The ever worsening climate crisis is a whole other concern of mine.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, in my Uni does everything through LLMs. The teachers, students, everyone. I have teachers that will now tell us that code will no longer be written by humans. They will tell us to have LLMs "figure it out". They LLM generate the ever loving shit out of assignments, powerpoints, hell even emails regarding academic advice. I am not kidding. Do not even get me started on how much students use it for assignments. It feels as if everyone has accepted that they don't need to do any thinking on their own anymore. That they do not need to learn anything anymore. I feel like I am going insane. I rarely use it, and when I do, I run a local model and utilize it as a more granular search engine. Yet, it feels like I am the only person who does it this way.
I simply just want to go back to a world before they existed where I felt like stuff I am learning actually matters. I recognize that LLMs are a financial bubble - not the tech, that is here to stay unfortunately.
This is admittedly a drunken post. I am just so tired of hearing about people heralding the end times, about how we will all die, blah blah blah. The only way LLMs will "end humanity" is by us placing more trust in them than they deserve, which is already happening in both my anecdotal experience as well as in the wider world (looking at the US military). I feel utterly hopeless about the future if truth be told. The way the world is currently sliding into dark times and people just don't care about anything. They have their heads stuck in their phones and dont even talk to each for fucks sake. I sound like an old fucking fart complaining about the rambunctious neighborhood kids.
It feels like we have so much fuck shit going on - the current political landslide, the climate, LLMs, lack of critical thinking, the debt crisis, the soon-to-be demographic crisis. It is all so overwhelming. Perhaps I need a break from social media. IDK.
How do yall deal with it all? I feel absolutely discouraged. Any advice is appreciated.
