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[deleted] t1_jdy83bi wrote

Reply to comment by nxqv in [D] FOMO on the rapid pace of LLMs by 00001746

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ginsunuva t1_jdyu8d2 wrote

Some things don’t need impacting and yet people need to force an impact (which may worsen things) to satisfy their ego, which usually soon goes back to needing more satisfaction after they realize the issue is psychological and always relative to the current situation. Not always of course, duh, but some times. I usually attribute it to OCD fixated on fear of death without “legacy.”

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nxqv t1_je006pc wrote

Yeah "legacy" is another one of those ego-loaded words that doesn't always mean what it looks like it means.

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Impallion t1_je07in1 wrote

I completely agree and of the things that u/nxqv listed, I think impact is the thing that most everyday people want and fear they will no longer have, more so than fame, riches, clout etc. It's totally natural to want the things you spend effort on to have impact.

Now what I'm more interested in is the argument of how much impact is enough to make you feel satisfied, and I think this is where the FOMO starts to set in for people. People want to have a "large" impact - making company-wide differences, influence large swaths of people. I think the fear is that in the face of a ChatGPT, your little model or little application can only reach a handful of others.

Extrapolate current trends and you might think, oh well AI applications are just going to get bigger and bigger. Midjourney 5 or SuperChatGPT-12 are going to be so insanely capable that we will have no more use for human writing, human art, human music, human programming. There will simply be no more room for my work to EVER have a big impact in the future. (Maybe this change is also similar to how the scientific greats back in the day could discover big theorems like Einstein's relativity, but nowadays you need to hyper-specialize in academia to produce results for your tiny corner)

My solution is that we need to dig a little deeper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good meaningful life? If your answer to that is that a good life worth living is one where you impact on the order of thousands or millions of humans, then yes we might be shifting away from that possibility. But humans are built for connection, and I think we will need to look inwards and realize that we don't need to influence thousands to experience that connection. You can make a little model or application that affects hundreds. You can write a song just for your friends and family. You can paint a piece of art that just hangs on your wall and gets a single compliment. To me that is already human connection, and is just as meaningful as making a large model that drives the next Google/Meta forward.

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nxqv t1_je0cw14 wrote

>People want to have a "large" impact - making company-wide differences, influence large swaths of people. I think the fear is that in the face of a ChatGPT, your little model or little application can only reach a handful of others.

Yes, it's this idea of wanting to make "as large of an impact as possible" that I was starting to chip away at. A lot of people - myself often included - feel dismayed when we think about our work only impacting a tiny corner of the world. It feels like you're "settling for less." But when you finish that thought, it sounds more like "settling for less than what I'm capable of" which has a lot to unpack.

And for the record, I think it's okay to want to make a big splash to satisfy your own ego. I wasn't trying to say that it's immoral. I just think it's important to understand that you're in that position and unpack how you got there. Mindfulness is the way to combat FOMO, as well as all sorts of other negative emotions.

>My solution is that we need to dig a little deeper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good meaningful life? If your answer to that is that a good life worth living is one where you impact on the order of thousands or millions of humans, then yes we might be shifting away from that possibility. But humans are built for connection, and I think we will need to look inwards and realize that we don't need to influence thousands to experience that connection. You can make a little model or application that affects hundreds. You can write a song just for your friends and family. You can paint a piece of art that just hangs on your wall and gets a single compliment. To me that is already human connection, and is just as meaningful as making a large model that drives the next Google/Meta forward.

Yes yes yes.

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nxqv t1_je00ks4 wrote

Also, don't lose sight of the forest because of a tree. We're talking about impact in the context of FOMO - if you feel that level of anxiety and rush about potentially missing out on the ability to make an impact because others are already making the impact you want to make, it's more likely to be ego-driven than genuine altruism

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