Practice

Or: do not outsource your mind.

So, let’s skip over the economic and social problems with LLMs. This is ignoring the blue whale in the room, but there’s no purpose in discussing them with someone who likely thinks the whale is their friend. Hint: it’s not your friend.

Let’s just talk about how this plays out in practical terms.

Here are two true stories.

More than fifty years ago a teacher told me that I would be a mathematician. And it turns out they had a point: I was good at maths and good at physics. Really good. I make no claim to be a genius, but I was definitely good enough to have had a career as an academic mathematical physicist.

But I am also lazy as fuck. And because I was so good I found I could just not put in the hours of practice other people needed to do, and while away the hours listening to music and getting stoned and talking to girls.

And I have not had a career as an academic mathematician or physicist, because it all came back to bite me when I was 23: practising is not optional, not for anyone. Not for a genius and certainly not for me. I got half way through a PhD but I just couldn’t cope, because GR turns out to be too hard unless you really know the ropes of the maths behind it, and you get to know those ropes only by spending thousands of hours on them: there is no shortcut, not for me, not for anyone.

Twenty years ago, and again 15 years ago I wrote two large, complicated programs in Perl: one of them was still in use until very recently and may still be. I was really good at Perl. Today I barely understand it, and certainly could not understand the things I wrote two decades ago. I could get good at it again given a year and motivation, sure, but I’m not good now.

Here’s the thing: practice counts. There’s a really compelling argument that the difference between ‘a genius’ and an ordinary person is that the genius has the ability to practise, really a lot. More than that: recent practice counts: I practised writing Perl really a lot up until about 15 years ago. I could, if I wanted to, become good at it again, but I am not good at it now, because all that practice was too long ago.

So how does the LLM thing pan out? It pans out with humans who are no longer practising programming and so are no longer very good at programming checking code written by a machine which they should not trust, but which they do for the reasons I said I would not discuss above. In due course it is going to pan out with humans who never got to be competent at all using code written by a machine that they no longer understand why they should not trust. Worse than that: the people who could have become good if they practised won’t even enter the field, because people like that don’t want to be drones, and don’t need to become one. It pans out with LLMs seeing more and more code written by LLMs, and less and less written by humans, with the resulting model collapse we’re already seeing.

Welcome to the dystopia you are so eagerly building for us all. I hope you enjoy it.

This originated as a reddit comment. And it’s OK: I had a relapse but I’m all better now. Reddit is still a stinking swamp inhabited mostly by fools and trolls. Nobody gains anything by writing comments there.