Preoccupied

Ethan shared Jenny’s post on choosing friction and I faintly recalled a scene from Jurassic Park. It was during the presentation scene where Malcom (Goldblum) says to the owner and scientists,

Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here. Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun…I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of genuises to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you’re selling it!

Hammond: I don’t think you give us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.

Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

“Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain”, Jenny says, and nothing can be farther from the truth in our age. There’s a certain discipline needed to wield such power from current LLM tools; discipline gained from frictions we face in life. But what if those who sell us LLM tools package it as a friction buster? How can we hope to gain that discipline?

It’s also good to ask if these tools’ creators stop to think if they should have made it the way they did now.