The Internal Combustion Engine
This is a post about LLMs
An internal combustion engine is a tool. A thing. In and of itself it is neither moral nor amoral. On its own it can do nothing. Its entire usefulness is based on how it's used.
No doubt great, world changing things have come about because of the internal combustion engine. Industrial farming, which produces enough food to feed the world multiple times over, would not be possible without tractors to plow and till, trains and trucks for transportation, and lots of other small utilities almost all of which are powered by internal combustion engines.
Modern transportation: cars, trains, airplanes, modern ships. All these things run on internal combustion engines ranging in size from small to huge. There's been a move towards electrification, but in most cases petrol or diesel engines rule the roost for powering transportation.
That said, all these great uses also come with great caveats. We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but, putting aside the fact that we don't, there's also the fact that entire continents' worth of native habitats have been plowed up for agriculture. The Amazon rainforest (and others) lose hundreds of acres a day, and none of this could be done without tractors, chainsaws, and other heavy machinery.
With cars we have the freedom to drive pretty much anywhere at any time, but at the cost of doing it by yourself or with less than a handful of people. Travel has lost a "we're going somewhere" experience to an "I'm going somewhere" experience. We get mad at traffic without realizing that we are the traffic.
Giant container ships allow us to get cheap stuff manufactured from far away, but now we're drowning in cheap shit made far away.
That's not to mention the environmental impacts of internal combustion engines. Despite the best efforts of many in power to erase climate change from the global conversation, it is impossible not to see. Melting ice caps, increasing temperatures, more volatile storms. Granted it's not all due to the internal combustion engine, but it undeniably has played an outsize role.
And wars. Political and social upheavals. Untold death and destruction. Amassing of great power and attempts to appropriate it. All based on controlling sources of oil, on which internal combustion engines rely.
This is a post about LLMs.
In the first half of the 1800s no one could have predicted the type or scale of changes produced by the internal combustion engine, neither the gains nor the ills. In the first half of the 2000s no one can predict the type or scale of changes that will be produced via LLMs.
We can look for parallels, though. We can examine what must be destroyed for the gains. We can examine how our social interactions change due to their use. We can watch what happens in the political and business worlds to see how LLMs are affecting the state of global affairs.
I don't maintain that the world would be a better place if the internal combustion engine was never invented. I do, however, think that the world could have been a better place if our use of it was more thoughtfully considered and if detrimental uses of it were more tightly regulated.
LLMs are a tool. We have to choose how to use them. We can use them responsibly. We can use them irresponsibly. It's the way we choose to use the tool that's important.
The analogy could be extended based on how the input of the tool is acquired and the ethics thereof – getting oil vs getting training data – but that is a post for another day.