There's little that's "inevitable" about AI | deadSimpleTech

About as common as the statement that AI technology is just a tool is the statement that AI is "inevitable", so we should all just give up and get with the program because the technology is definitely going to persist and we're definitely going to give up our thinking to the machines. This is obviously a thought-terminating cliche, but it's work digging into a little further: after all, given how much it's being said, it would be worth knowing exactly how and why it's wrong.The idea of a technology being "inevitable" is a curious one: after all, nobody knows ahead of time what technologies are going to be developed or adopted by society, so you certainly can't say, for example, that workable nuclear fusion generation is inevitable: that would be foolish. Equally, in hindsight any technology that is widely adopted and popular could be said to be inevitable: you get no points for saying that the development of the iPhone was "inevitable", not the least because we don't actually know if that's true for the shape the technology took. It's probably true for something with the vague shape of the technology in question, but it could have taken any number of forms, including a bunch that we'd probably think are quite strange.So what is meant by inevitable when AI boosters say it? And how does AI measure up by their implicit standards?What does it mean for a technology to be "inevitable"?The glib response here would be to say that no technology is ever inevitable and that everything is contingent. This has the advantages of being technically true and sounding wise, but unfortunately technologies very much exist that a reasonable person might well label that way. Firearms are a good example of the latter case: once they've been developed, you quite quickly hit the situation where if you want to maintain your independence and safety in a society, you have to either use one or have one used on your behalf: no other options really work.The inevitability of a technology is not, however, a factor of the technology alone. After all, mesoamerican civilisations very much understood the wheel as a technology. However, in dense jungle and without a road network already existing, wheels aren't actually hugely useful: it's thus no surprise that mesoamerican civilisations primarily relied on water transport and pack animals and relegated wheels largely to toys for children. More saliently, the value of cannon as a military technology was significantly greater in Europe, where political fragmentation led to fortifications being built with tall, thin walls designed to resist escalade, than they were in China, where stone-faced walls built largely of rammed earth were the norm (a cannon can blast a breach in the first much faster than it can in the second, though it will eventually breach both).The inevitability of a technology is thus, in itself, a thing that is contingent on social and cultural structures: the same technology might prove to be "inevitable" in one cultural sphere, completely useless in another and useful but far from being "inevitable" in a third. Our criteria for "inevitability" relative to a given culture might thus look roughly as follows.A technology is inevitable if:The technology can perform a task to a standard equal or not markedly inferior to that of an alternative technology doing the same task.The task in question is socially valuable: we need a lot of it done, and it's currently done by labour that is, in some sense, scarceThe technology can, in volume of adequate output or in quality of output, overwhelmingly outclass what alternative technologies can do. A moderate improvement isn't really enough to force inevitability: it has to be a massive difference.There's no way in which the people not using the technology can change their behaviour to neutralise the impact of the technology. Firearms were overwhelming in this sense while the counterweight trebuchet wasn't because, while it's essentially impossible to mitigate the impact of cannon without radical changes to how fortifications are built, a counterweight trebuchet can have its impact blunted with incremental changes.Unless all of these conditions hold, the adoption of a given technology can be fairly held to be contingent and not inevitable: it's not a choice that a social grouping was forced into, but one that they chose relatively freely. In short, inevitable technologies are ones where, if you don't adopt them, you will swiftly be overwhelmed by the cultures and societies that do. This seems to me to be largely in keeping with the way that LLM advocates use the term: LLM technology is inevitable because people who don't use it will fall so far behind those that do in power that they will end up under the control of LLM users.Looking at this, we can quite clearly see the pattern of inevitability when it comes to gunpowder. A cannon can breach a curtain wall much faster than a counterweight trebuchet, and more efficiently too. Breaching curtain walls is something that, in a fragmented mediaeval Europe, is very socially valuable: if you can breach a wall, you can take a city or a castle, and the faster you do that, the less time you have to spend laying siege. Cannon is overwhelmingly more powerful than other kinds of siege equipment, and even early small arms were able to deliver overwhelmingly more energy in a shot than an equivalent crossbow or longbow could. Finally, there wasn't any particularly easy way to neutralise firearms: they're very difficult to effectively armour against and while you can design fortifications that are effective against cannon, the labour inputs required for that demand a massive restructuring of society. Practically speaking, then, the moment cannon arrived in Europe, militaries found themselves in a situation where they had to adopt firearms technology as quickly as possible or else be absorbed into the state of someone who had. That, I think, is what we colloquially mean by a technology being "inevitable".We might compare this, for purposes of discussion, against the magnetic compass. The magnetic compass meets the first two criteria: it works a hell of a lot better for finding north than taking sightings of the sun and calculating does, and it works even absent known landmarks. Moreover, knowing the direction of north is rather useful when you're a maritime power and want to be able to navigate effectively. However, it's not overwhelmingly efficient: you can still navigate effectively without one, and it's easy enough to neutralise simply by virtue of not taking an interest in maritime activities and becoming a land power. Thus, while the magnetic compass allowed the colonial powers of Europe to massively extend their reach and exploit resources that would otherwise have been unavailable, Russia, for example, would likely have become and remained a major power on the continent whether they had the magnetic compass or not. The compass, then, while it was a very powerful and useful technology, was not inevitable in the way that firearms were.Are modern LLMs inevitable?So how does modern AI (in the LLM sense) measure up against these standards?The first point is the question of whether an LLM can do work not markedly inferior to that of a human doing the same task or not. This one is debatable. An LLM absolutely cannot produce work to the highest human standards, or even a good human standard at the moment, and it's unlikely that it ever will. Most human work, however, is not done at a good standard. At best it's mediocre, and at worst it's downright horrible. The bulk of human knowledge work done in an awful of settings, then, is unfortunately more or less interchangeable with that of an LLM (seriously, so much human work is just awful: I wish I could say otherwise). On this point, then, LLMs probably pass the criterion.The next question is that of social value. A lot of the knowledge work that LLMs purport to replace is scarce and valued: the writing of software, research work, graphic design and so forth. Generally, however, the LLM can only replace the least valuable parts of that work, to a greater or lesser degree (an LLM can generate a meaningful volume of tolerably mediocre code, but only the very worst kinds of graphic design and fairly superficial research documents). This means that, when any level of real quality is required, human expertise will have to be involved, whether an LLM is being used or not. On this question, then, the results are mixed: LLMs can do socially meaningful work, but only to an extent, and the more socially important the work is, the less useful LLMs are for it.Now we come to the question of whether or not the difference that LLMs bring to the table is sufficiently overwhelming to make their adoption inevitable, and on this I think the answer is a clear no. As established above, LLMs just can't do top-flight work at all: at the heights of basically any discipline, we're still very much relying on unaugmented human work. Even at lower levels of accomplishment, LLMs still aren't overwhelmingly powerful: even when an LLM is being used, the amount of effort that goes into making sure that the LLM is directed correctly and that the output is adequate to the task means that the volume of output is sharply restricted. This means that while you might get some more output from using an LLM than you might without it in some cases, the actual speed-up isn't drastic. You might be getting between 20% and 50% more PowerBI dashboards out of an LLM-enhanced workflow than you would without LLMs, but the dashboards are likely not a core bottleneck in your business in any case, and as of now, at least, it seems that the closer you get to those core bottlenecks the fewer efficiency gains you see. Either way, I cannot help but feel that if there were a real overmatch in capability, we would very much have seen it so far. There would be at least one tech company producing five to ten times as many new