I will claim the CNC analogy though - I sometimes feel like a modern machinist just walking between machines and listening for screaming metal.
There's no such thing. You're probably thinking of "AI"-regurgitated essay.
Come to it with knowledge and understanding of a subject matter, asking for an implementation? That's different from going to it with no knowledge, asking for guidance on everything.
He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow."
I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what we've all done and been through with SO answers.
You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness.
Bleak.
Such people are extremely predictable.
You may have already noticed, before LLMs, cliché? Talking points that make a group identifiable? Words and phrases that act as applause lights or cognitive stop signs? (That last sentence itself being a pair of clichés that you can use to identify where I hang out online).
Anyway, point is, LLMs will give us a memetic monoculture before they turn us all into a world of correctly personalised Whispering Earring wearers. That makes them predictable, that makes them exploitable. It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves.
(Of course, the fact I've said this in writing means this is in the training data; in the general case this means the LLMs will know that and account for that, but I suspect comments like this won't shift the needle all that much compared to the aggregate output of 3 billion people reacting to short-form emotional manipulation A/B slop)
My dog often gets misidentified as a restricted breed. This used to make apartment hunting difficult because, occasionally, the property manager would visually ID the dog breed as banned, I’d have to go to the vet and get paperwork, potentially gene testing, arguing she wasn't, it was a whole thing.
But, recently, the apartment I moved into had an online portal where I had to upload a photo and it would identify the breed to determine if it was approved.
I correctly assumed the portal was using an LLM for this purpose. I wrote a script which submitted different photos of my dog to the major LLM providers until it found a photo which all the LLMs would identify as the correct breed.
I simply submitted that photo and, as expected, passed with flying colors.
I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how Stockfish works, and I don't believe this is how AI works.
Stockfish isn't winning because it's playing a better sequence of programmed steps, and having access to "the next version of Stockfish" doesn't mean it can "guess the next move" and play against that.
You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1.
The steps are not pre-programmed, but the program itself is (modulo hardware imprecision) deterministic. If there's a RNG in there then sure, this doesn't work as easily as I wrote it; and there may be randomness in the thing that this is a metaphor for, regardless of if there's one in Stockfish or not, but that's not hard to work with when you want to win against an aggregate: we invented the field of statistics to deal with random numbers because they come up so often.
This is by design, and very much necessary for a competitive chess engine. Otherwise, people could do basically what you say: Run an offline (as in, ahead of time, with ample compute resources) search against stockfish that finds a line where it loses, then make an engine that plays that every time.
As a consequence, even if you know that your opponent is running stockfish, you can't really use that against them. Your best bet is also just running stockfish.
The danger isn't everyone but you getting wealthy. The danger is that wealth tends towards concentration. And it tends to concentrate around people who are already wealthy. The danger is, bluntly, that things will get worse for all but a few and most people will be so caught up in a red queen's race that they can't see how to stop.
Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.