Pessimism about Techniques in the Face of AI

General Memory Chat
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The last few years, I have intensely studied memory techniques, learning methods, and other systems that had apparent potential to improve human mental abilities. This was all in an aim to eventually produce my own system that merged them all together in an effective way, such that it would make learning dramatically faster for humans. This was something of a dream.

But something new is on the rise: AI, showing amazing potential and exponentially improving. OpenAI has proved hundreds of significant open conjectures in mathematics with AI, and even in my personal mathematics research the newest models can solve conjectures from my previous papers in minutes.

It seems human intelligence will be rendered basically insignificant in the face of AI, which will be (and in some ways already is) way faster and more efficient than even the smartest humans. If this is all true, what is the significance of making learning techniques for humans?

Even a successful system will be little more than a novelty in a year or two in the face of an agent swarm of 10000 coordinated Opus 7.5 AIs with dramatically cheaper tokens. What will be the point of human intelligence optimization?

I think I studied the wrong field these past few years: I should have focused on optimizing machine intelligence, not human intelligence. Now I don’t know what to do with myself seeing as though my dream has gone the way of the dodo.

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AI is a bad facsimile of the human capacity for imagination, creativity, and capacity. Until we break through the next barrier into General Intelligence, it’s just a factory of millions of monkeys doing the work that no one person has the time to do themselves. Yes, including solving math problems that require tens of thousands of human hours of work to solve.

Every time humans invent a system that makes their lives easier we choose to compromise our ability to perform a task our bodies have evolved to do. And, often, this means we have to compensate by supplementing an artificial version of that task into our already busy daily lives.

We invent writing, so we don’t have to remember oral narratives, but then we have to carry scrolls around with us any time we want to remember something. We invent cars, so we don’t have to walk everywhere, but then we need to go to the gym and get on treadmills. We invent the internet so we don’t have to leave the house to buy things, but then we have to scroll facebook for hours in order to feel a sense of community.

Some developments are neutral, some are positive, and some have an overall negative effect on the world. We invented atomic bombs so we’d never be threatened, but then everyone got them and we lived in constant fear.

LLM-chat and generative AI promises to make it so we don’t have to think for ourselves, and can outsource the one thing that’s always been our own, our minds, to companies that bill us a subscription fee for it. It’s the yawning maw of oblivion, offering to let us drift into the void of obsolescence for a moderate monthly fee. There is no reason, in fact, there is no justification to walk willingly into those teeth.

Unfortunately, many will, which means that what you do, optimizing your mind, is now a premium ability. Unappreciated by many, but vital to others. It cannot be replaced, not by a billion monkeys on a billion typewriters for a trillion tokens.

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I don’t know. Ai can’t write a large book even. If you don’t have studies you have to do low paid jobs. .

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I think there are still many flaws in AIs, and for certain mathematical riddles—even though I am not from the field—AI can create solutions that we lack the equipment to verify whether they are correct. But even if artificial intelligence becomes superior to human intelligence, if we don’t exercise our brains and bodies, they will simply atrophy. I have a strong impression that technological conveniences will be an additional factor in the rise of Alzheimer’s cases. Using memorization techniques brings me happiness, greater attention to details every day, and looking with curiosity at each piece of knowledge I place in a Memory Palace, for example. Because of this, I become more present in every moment and absorb more from meeting people—whom, by the way, I don’t forget the names of five minutes after being introduced. It may be a moment of career transition for you, and that is a great learning experience. But AI cannot remember for me, a computer cannot eat for me, and capitalism itself still needs real people consuming. AI may well be superior to humans in many aspects and replace humans in many ways; that is Darwin’s law. We can also learn to accept this fact, just as many animals have certain abilities that are far superior to ours as humans.

Anyway, just a reflection open to critique upon reading your message.

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