Collaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.

There's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people.

The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

The social content or science of development vanish.

People become islands working on something without the bigger picture.

This is very dangerous.

> the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being

Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.

I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours...

And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.

with AI, one person can accomplish much more

collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits

This is the exact same thing that we have been seeing in open source software.

The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not

For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.

And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.

If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science.

Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.

I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.

It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.

It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.