I love a good literalization of metaphor, or as I prefer to call it, playing grug. Steve Jobs apparently said a computer is a bicycle for the mind, but Farrington takes the bicycle literally and quips
Note, by the way, that bicycles do not ride themselves. Humans ride bicycles, and while they consume 3x fewer calories and go 3x as fast as running humans, they nonetheless do not replace 9 humans.
It's a fun way to think about technology that empowers people to do more work. The internet made previously important things irrelevant -- things like post offices, dictionaries, and newspapers (to name but a few) and yet we have more mail, more definitions, more news than ever before.
Technologies may obsolete other technologies, but they never obsolete people because people can learn to use them.
Tools that let one person do more, let every person do more. New technologies may change how we do things, but it's still people who do the things -- and who want the doing done.
This is so painfully obvious it might just justify all these confusing metaphors in allowing us to recognize that all capital ultimately rests on human capital.
This man has gone hard for the subjective theory of value! I won't deny that I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint. If a thing is capable of "doing the work of 10,000 people" or "taking the jobs of millions of workers," the implication is that we are getting a LOT more done. And when people get more done, we tend to do new things.
Reading Farrington, it feels painfully obvious that AI isn't going to lead to some dystopia where everybody is sitting around at home playing video games and waiting for their gov't check, anymore than the invention of electronic calculators swept masses of people into the unemployment lines.
Speaking of calculators: Farrington has this beautifully simple way of characterizing them: word calculators. Now this is the stuff we've come for!
I think LLMs are like calculators or spreadsheets, but for words instead of numbers (pick according to your age and formative experiences). What electronic calculators enabled was an interface for people to perform much, much more complicated arithmetic operations than they could possibly hope to have done in their heads or by their own workings with pen and paper. Spreadsheets generalized the operations and the interface by making it even easier to treat different types of data as numbers to be computed on, and returned to whatever original form they were presented in. LLMs are word calculators: they do the same thing but they let you ask in words and get answers in words as well. Since code is a form of language, hey presto, code itself can be “computed on” in this way.
I would love to get Farrington's take on whether there are invention that's hold human growth back.
A link to Farrington's article was posted on SN a couple days ago: #1092878