I try to play outside (in grassy/cozy, not in the city/busy place), bringing my phone/laptop, looking at internet & reality simultaneously, using SoTA while touching grass, just to train my perception and understanding, ngl feels like uncanny englightment, what’s that name?
Let’s say I’m someone from a rural place, go to the mountain forest, take a pic of some berries with my phone, then ask o3, “What kind of berries are these? Do they contain poison or curse?” For me, that was mind-blowing. What do you mean I have the same access as people on the tech frontier in the world?
But when I look in front of my eyes, culture and people surrounding me are still the same. They still plant watermelon and cabbage with a hand and hoe. Actually, they can afford more than a cheap phone and drone to do some futuristic stuff.
If I reflect on current human advancement, how funny, me and uncontacted tribes have the same opportunity to learn cool and advanced stuff easily.
I’ve talked to a bunch of locals, yup they didn’t know what AI is.
My neighbor works in agriculture as a manager, and he only uses Excel and Word. He asks me how to input data faster, like how to label people’s names into a spreadsheet quick. I ask him if he knows what ChatGPT is… he doesn’t! What the? I’m not even kidding.
I have a few compsci acquaintances, almost 100% didn’t know what a LLMs actually are, or as simple as what is Cursor. How? What are they doing with the internet? Dooming and gooning? Trapped in the mass algorithm?
In my bubble I see folks talking about benchmark comparisons, in my real world I’m surrounded by people talking about supernatural powers.
Am I too advanced for knowing current SoTA capabilities? Am I consuming the wrong news? Am I in the wrong place? Am I too unemployed to know all of this? Am I the only one who feels like we’re already in the next step of globalization, like we’re in a semi singularity? Or what?
People who know position where we are right now are only in a very tiny bubble. In fact: 1 million is ±0.01% of 8 billion people on Earth, that’s astonishing.
Somehow I realize I often get overwhelmed by information. Freeing myself from the screen once again, giving attention to the breeze, feeling the chaos that nature gives, the sun, the moon, the heat, the rain, the pain in my feet from walk fast and run bad, somehow it gives me purpose and energy, rather than the chaos in the timeline of human opinion that drains all my attention and worries.
When I’m in a natural place, far from humans in sight, I don’t know how, but everything feels right. Nothing to worry about that much.
