BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge
I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.
Great essay by Nilay.
It feels to me like the whole industry has forgotten about the “personal” in personal computer. I’m someone who loves computers, or at least I used to. But I think it sounds awful to have to remold my entire life to suit the computer.
The irony here is that LLMs are the first technology that really could make the PC personal. But instead we are on a path to remake our lives to suit the LLM, not to mention our land, water, and electricity.
I hope as a society we can course correct. I hope, if LLMs have to be a permanent part of the computing landscape, small, efficient models that run on the hardware we already have take over. Then we might have some hope of making computers personal again.