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points by hnlmorg 13 hours ago | 0 comments

I would say your reply feels like you didn’t read beyond the first sentence of my comment.

If you did, then I apologise. But my point is about accessing that knowledge when AI isn’t available. Not about how AI discovered its corpus to begin with.

[–] andsoitis 13 hours ago

I re-read it. I think your thesis is that we ought not to depend on technology in case the infra to support it goes away. Does that capture it?

[–] hnlmorg 13 hours ago

No. It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

Absolutely we should use all the tools at our disposal which enhances productivity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also learn how’re to do things for ourselves too.

To use a contrived example, there’s no shame in using a dishwasher. But if you cannot wash dishes by hand when the dishwasher breaks down, then you know you have problems.

[–] andsoitis 13 hours ago

> It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

I made the general tech-dependence statement, but it sounds like you think it is only AI tech that shouldnt' depend on. I wouldn't worry about it; humanity has proven itself to be INCREDIBLY resilient and adaptable when the things we've come to depend on go away or change materially.

[–] hnlmorg 13 hours ago

We aren’t just talking about technology, we are talking about knowledge.

Like I said, I have zero issue being “AI first”. 90% of my day-to-day is using AI. But the part I objected to in the OP was “we don’t need to know things because we have AI” (to paraphrase. So I was asking the question: what if AI goes away?

I agree humans are resilient. But that’a not a good excuse for complacency.

[–] andsoitis 10 hours ago

I think open weights and local AI will distribute the knowledge across the planet, avoiding a single point of failure. All you would need is electricity and a computer. And if we have no way to access it, there will always be enough people who either have sufficient knowledge already or the hunger to rediscover things.

[–] hnlmorg 8 hours ago

I think we are still a long way from that becoming an option due to the cost of hardware to run even the lower end models. But I do like this prediction of yours

[–] CookieCrisp 12 hours ago

I feel like having a local qwen model that could run without the internet competes with having a local searchable wikipedia. If disaster does strike, we could now recreate a lot of knowledge with a single high end pc