The Value of Things

Summary

One of the reasons I write is to help me organize my own mind. I have a compulsive need to figure things out and I’ll lay awake at night shuffling sentences around in my head until it hangs together. Then I just have to try to get it all down in Markdown before it dissolves back into chaos. Like a lot of people these days, I am losing a lot of sleep over LLMs and generative AI. I mean that literally. I’ve had nights where I tossed and turned worrying about whether AI is going to destroy a career I love or wreck modern society until the sun comes up. For brevity’s sake, I’ll use “AI” here mostly to mean “generative AI”. The stuff that LLMs and products like ChatGPT do. I think it’s useful to distinguish that from other uses of machine learning like categorization and labeling. But here, all I care about is the generative stuff. I keep hoping I’ll sort it out in my head enough to reach some inner peace. I’m not saying I will literally figure it out, like, for the world. But I keep hoping I can at least figure out my own relationship with AI. I’m still not there, but I was able to pull one thread out of the tangled discourse around AI and get it to make sense in my head. I hope it will help you too. Or maybe this is all nonsense and you’ll point out the myriad ways in which I’m wrong. That’s a possibility, but I’m trying to be more courageous in my writing, so here I am. Anyway. Generative AI is about using machine learning to produce digital things. For AI to be a net good for the world, at the very least, the things it produces must have value. But what does it mean for a thing to have “value”? I say “at the very least” here because even if AI produces valuable things, it can still be a net bad. Societal effects and other externalities matter! But I haven’t untangled any of that stuff in my head yet, so I’ll ignore that here. The obvious answer is that a thing has value if it’s useful. If it solves some material problem in the world or at least creates some joy, that...