César Hidalgo: preference

Transcript context

…There is obviously 2 schools of thought. 1 is, you know, just what you've said that it's a cultural technology and the locus of cognition, thinking, understanding, and and action comes from us. The other school of thought is that they are agentic, you know, cognizant machines in in their own rights. And I just I don't think that's true. For me, like, what matters is that they're useful. I I I'm I'm more pragmatic when it comes to that, know. So are they useful? Yes. Are they perfect? No. Nothing is perfect and a lot of things are useful and I think they fall into that category, know. I I learn a lot by talking with LLMs. For example, I I moved to France, you know, 5 years ago. There's 's a lot of things that I don't know about the local rules that I can more easily consult using an LLM than a Google search, you know. So I wanna know about, you know, tax law, you know, in France, know. There's a lot of details. Well, I I explain my situation, I get those answers, and then I have an accountant and when I meet with my accountant to discuss that, I'm much better informed and I can make better questions. So I think I'm becoming smarter through those conversations because I'm learning faster thanks to those interactions. Is it because DLLM has knowledge? Is it because I have knowledge? Or is it because we are wiser when we're together? So then there's the question of how efficient your book is at knowledge diffusion. So I I absolutely loved reading it. I actually read it in in the space for 24 hours and I I gobbled it all up but it but it it's I want to read it again several times just to get all the value out of it. But in the afterword, you said that, I think it was about 10 years ago, you you wrote a book, I think it was called Why Information Grows. Yes. And, you know, you've done your PhD and you were using very abstract thought experiments and now you've had time to think about it and you've told it using stories, know, like you you found really interesting examples that exemplify all the different ideas and it makes it so much easier to understand. Tell me about that journey.…

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