Elsa du Plessis

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

@Lizaard08 @SQLBits @ManningBooks +1
Big hair, shoulder pads and spandex galore! :D

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

@SQLBits In the boardgames sphere:
Pandemic!

(.../s)

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

"...like proteins and farts"

Nap time for me.

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

@mthierba And your last session ended it on a high note! Thanks for the effort you put in to breaking down all the concepts you have implemented along the way. 👌🏾

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

When your smartwatch yells that sleep was stressful and useless and your body confirms... Beanbag floor sessions to the rescue!

Thanks for the headphones and accessibility! @SQLBits

#sqlbits2023

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

@AnnabelHem02 @SQLBits @landrews5807 👌🏾👌🏾

[Karandeep Singh @kdpsinghlab]

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Check out those (recent!) benchmarks comparing {tidytable} with the OG tidyverse:

https://t.co/7yp9A47wbA

Pandas is getting left in the dust. Speaking of pandas, let’s move over to Python.

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

@ingelsby Keep going!

[Hadley Wickham @hadleywickham]

dtplyr 1.0.0 is now on CRAN! — https://t.co/SzjGwygXaG. dtplyr combines the speed of data.table with the syntax of dplyr #rstats

[Amy Berger @TuitNutrition]

1920 called. It wants its breaking news back.

[Amanda Burls @ajburls]

#EBHC2019 John Ioannidis - the bottom line re systematic reviews...

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

Autoimmunity Is a Disorder of Our Time by @tessamlove https://t.co/UZhOagjylJ

[nature @Nature]

If researchers do discard statistical significance, what should they do instead? https://t.co/F4yaWFxJ7Z

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

"Empathy, developed through exposure to others’ work, facilitates collaboration among the types of talent. Work is no longer passed between groups; it’s shared among them."
https://t.co/syfjBjed2T

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

Robust dietary context required. :/
“Ideally you want something that’s going to bring your blood sugars up a little bit and also maintain them there." :(
https://t.co/LvFn6pAYgL

[Elsa du Plessis @elsa_2plus3]

Lol. I need see how far the wetsuit zips up and fits before I buy it, not how much hald-zipped cleavage squeeze potential it has.
https://t.co/b7lwdWsACB