You are given limited access to the Gearworks of Reality. You may delete one of these from human civilization.
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@mttaggart Limited only to casinos, prediction markets, etc.. GenAI and it's not close.
Far more destructive.
@distractal Watching what gambling's done to a lot of lives, I'm really not so sure, hence the poll.
@mttaggart As a Methodist, I chose gambling. Maybe we can compromise somewhere on no one being a billionaire.
@vwbusguy Extreme wealth and poverty is such a low bar to clear for a just society, but right there with you
I don't want to remove responses, but for clarification, I am referring to recreational gambling such as casinos, sports betting, and prediction markets. An overbroad definition of "gambling" is pointless.
Edit: And yes, day-trading and otherwise gamifying securities markets.
Fascinating to see how many folks think these are identical.
I remember once being called a "lumper" in school—trying to make the case that many different categories were in fact indistinct, thereby rendering the discussions of differences moot. This is in contrast to "sorters," who prefer to highlight differences.
I can see how these two things look similar, but I also think it would be imprudent to regard all the tools of oppression without distinction.
Or perhaps y'all think one is a subclass of the other? Are LLMs just gambling? I find that a tad reductive, if I'm honest.
I guess I turned into a sorter with time.
@mttaggart we're just looking for a loophole to get rid of both.
(Although to be honest, I like the transformer model a little bit for options it gives to human computer interfaces, but I really don't like how many people are gambling everything on LLMs doing more than just predicting the most likely next word)
@mttaggart LLMs as gambling is horseshit. That's like saying statistics is gambling. And cryptocurrency = gambling. People, save your anger for the things that are truly evil.
@codinghorror @mttaggart You give it a prompt. You push the button. Maybe you get what you were looking for, most likely not. You give it a prompt, you push the button…
In terms of behaviour and feedback that seems fairly similar to playing a slot machine.
> Fascinating to see how many folks think these are identical.
I came here to mention I think there's an overlap. But I think I could also argue generative tools can also be a higher-level paintbrush, which gambling never is.
@mttaggart Most people are sorters in my experience. I have that experience because I'm often accused of being a lumper. Thing is, I'm neither.
If I see a duck and a goose, I don't think of them as the same. I don't think of the goose as a big duck, or the duck as a small goose. I see the value of each.
But I do think that their similarities warrants a waterfowl category, and some properties most waterfowl share.
People tend not to have patience with that and accuse me of lumping.
@mttaggart Anyway, genai and gambling share something, yes.
The commonality is the variable ratio reinforcement schedule. You can't be sure that the next prompt is going to reward you with a good result, so you pull the one armed bandit's lever again. And again. And again.
And you focus on the great results you sometimes get, and not the many in-between failures. Those are explained away with "prompt skill issues" and whatnot.
@jens @mttaggart I'll tell you this .. you will almost always get terrible results on any question (beyond incredibly trivial, simple questions) unless you pick the longest think modes. Gemini is the worst for this.
@codinghorror I'm not known to be a fan of LLMs, and never got great results out of them. But then, I don't keep trying... 😂
I'm more of a schmeerer then. There are distinct boundaries, but there's lots of schmeer in between.
I had so many arguments in college about the definition of a species. Turns out that homo neandertalis is homo sapiens (neandertalis).
There are places where bright lines can be drawn, I'm not sure this is one of them.
@johntimaeus Here are a few worth considering:
- Gambling actually makes money for the game operators (unless you're DJT, who couldn't even make a casino profitable)
- The ability to create a gambling operation is far more accessible to more people than LLM generation
- Nobody is claiming gambling is the key to a new future for humanity. While that's marketing, I do think some of the leaders of the adventure are true believers.
- This last one is a matter of degree, so definitely fuzzier. But the "win rate" for LLMs is, objective depending, not nearly as poor as recreational gambling, IME. It would be much easier if the technology never worked. But in many cases, it does upsettingly well.
@mttaggart One could argue that generative AI is a form of gambling, but so would farming and moving to a new town.
@linuxandyarn I think you need a useful distinction between recreational gambling and risk-taking.
@mttaggart generative AI wouldn't be so bad if the world's wealthiest and most powerful weren't gambling so much wealth on it being able to replace human labor.
