The Calculator Moment

A couple of years ago I speculated about the possible trajectories for AI development in terms of social impact. A recent article has reminded me of this but in a rather irritating manner : it claims that LLMs aren't calculators. Well, obviously this is literally true on a superficial level, but the article goes considerably further. It claims that LLMs will have entirely negative impacts in a way that makes the comparison to calculators not just wrong, but invalid.

I strongly dispute this. I think the calculator analogy is an extremely useful one, albeit one that's most helpful only when properly defined and constrained. I think LLMs are indeed calculators in a very meaningful (if strictly analogical rather than literal) sense... if we ask only what life was like before and after the pocket calculator, and do not ask how calculators work, then the scope and intent of the analogy becomes clearer. I find the article an extremely frustrating read because it badly confounds these two different issues, among other things.

Before I go into this in more detail, let me here briefly revisit my own predictions.

Back To The Future

I claimed :

• The effects of AI wouldn't be extreme. That means no revolutions, no societal collapse, no mass layoffs, and equally not a total non-event. This is self-evidently correct so far, though admittedly it's still early days.
• LLMs were hobbled by censorship. Certainly true at the time, but this is at least reduced these days. That said, I've moved on from my "generate all the crossover stories !" phase and usually use chatbots for actual work, so I can't really evaluate this one from personal experience. Galaxy evolution has never been sexy or offensive enough to be censored, and I have no interest in a chatbot either sexting or swearing at me to fill some bizarre emotional void in my life.
• Chatbots don't replace search engines. Again, definitely true at the time, being rife with inaccuracies and hallucinations, but this is definitely not true any more. Google's usefulness as a search engine is all but dead; AI is incomparably better for complex queries (and even quite a lot of simple ones). A major caveat is that chatbots now act directly as search engines themselves, providing direct links as well as in-context content. So they've replaced search engines in part by becoming them.
• AI is a useful aid, not a replacement for anything. This is still true, I think, and if anything even more true now than it was then. But recent results mean that I'm more prepared to believe it's moving towards a true replacement stage, even if I still don't believe this is on the immediate horizon.
• The most likely trajectories would be a sustained net positive improvement but possibly with a plateau. No exponential growth either in the technology itself or changes in society resulting from it : its effects will always be tempered by our innate tendencies to adopt things at a pace most of us can handle. It's still possible that we might hit a plateau soon, though recent improvements (see below) tend to discredit this.

Right, so what do calculators have to do with this ?

The Linguistic Abacus

Well, specifically, pocket calculators. When you have a device which is cheap, widely available, accurate, and easy to use... it is lunacy itself to pretend that people won't or shouldn't use it. The world of mathematical calculations post-calculator is not the same world as that of textbooks full of tables of logarithms. It just isn't. The fact that millions of schoolteachers refuse to acknowledge this is besides the point. 

To be sure, to reach the transformative impact of a calculator requires crossing certain thresholds. It doesn't have to be free, but it has to be affordable to the masses. It doesn't have to be useable in every single situation (you don't need it to be waterproof) but it can't need to be kept at sub-zero temperatures to be safely operable. It doesn't even need to be entirely, 100% accurate (it may break, after all), but it needs to be work correctly at a very high fraction of the time and it needs to be obvious when it isn't working.

After a series of recent tests of ChatGPT-5, I think we might just have reached a calculator moment – or if not, then we're awfully close.

What are the claims against this ? 

Unfortunately, the author of the article in The Conversation (a perfectly decent website) appears to fall for the classic fallacy of taking the analogy too literally. I view the calculator as a metaphorical comparison for the impact of the technology; they appear to think it needs to function with a sort of exact equivalence, if not quite literally the same thing. I'm going to ignore the no small amount of tiresome invective running through the article : at best this is highly selective and one-sided, at worst some of it is simply wrong.

Not A Calculator ?

Their claims :

1. Calculators do not hallucinate or persuade. This is true. Calculators and LLMs don't do the same thing at all. LLMs are certainly not unbiased truth engines and they can and do get things wrong. This is uninteresting; the important thing is whether they are accurate enough to be useful. I claim that they are, and that GPT-5 is a significant development compared to previous models. They are no longer just inspiration machines. They actually produce useable, rather than merely provocative, content. 
2. Calculators do not pose fundamental ethical dilemmas. True, but this miscasts the situation, conflating the choices of the companies with the technology itself. And the argument that the energy use of LLMs is "killing the planet", as a I heard a recent conference attendee assert, is becoming increasingly tiresome. Even under older assumptions that an inquiry used 10x as much energy as a Google search, it was clear that this wasn't an issue*, and now we know this was an overestimate and efficiency has increased (the graphs here nicely show just how pointless worrying about inquiry energy usage – though not training – actually is).
3. Calculators do not undermine autonomy. Well of course they do ! That's their whole point. You no longer have to do tedious things with numbers and can worry about the mathematical operations instead. The same arguments have been raised time and time and time again : television, the printing press, even writing... all of it supposedly undermines critical thinking and turns us into morons. All nonsense. What matters is what you read, what you watch, what questions you ask... all valid concerns, but nothing at all unique to LLMs.
4. Calculators do not have social and linguistic bias. Well, no, but this is like saying that we should chuck out all of our history just because we don't like it any more. If this is an argument against LLMs, it's also an argument against reading. I really don't see the point of this one at all.
5. Calculators are not ‘everything machines'. Yes, obviously, but this seems plainly unfair and circular. The whole point of an AI is to be able to deal with a broad set of inputs; if you're got something against them on these grounds, you're never going to be happy. Essentially you've defined them to be useless because they're too useful, which is silly. That said, I do like the points in this article very much that single-purpose devices can be better for creativity; of course, both everything machines and one-trick-ponies have their place.

* That link rightly points out that we can't consider energy used by LLMs as simply lost, since (as with web searches) we do get a positive benefit back as well. Likewise, I've seen LLMs do calculations that would take me much, much longer, or even find impossible. So how much energy would I have had to consume instead of the LLM ?

The Calculator Moment

So I think the calculator analogy is a great one. LLMs form coherent sentences (with sufficient training) just as calculators accurately manipulate numbers. Granted, coherency is not accuracy, but even inaccurate statements can be useful, sometimes a good deal more so than correct ones ! Moreover, if accuracy hasn't increased to calculator level – it will never do this until we have infinite knowledge, so this is a foolish expectation – it's still already enough to be useful, even leaving aside significant recent improvements.

And that's where I think the analogy has its greatest value. LLMs have now reached, or are reaching, comparable levels of usefulness, affordability, and accessibility to pocket calculators, so the comparison helps us to consider what we're going to do with them. As The Conversation quotes at the start, they're just tools. Not necessarily always perfect ones, but then, what is ? The analogy is scarcely less valuable because it isn't a direct equivalence.

The old “what if you don’t have a calculator with you” mentality was wrong-headed when I was growing up and it’s wrong now. I will always have a calculator with me. There’s very little use in being able to do accurate mathematics in one’s head for its own sake. It might, I fully concede, be good for mental self-discipline and critical thought more generally, but I could never do long division in school and I still made it in a career which involves no small amount of maths. 

So how do we deal with this new reality ? Probably, I think, in largely the same way as we did (or should have done) with calculators. You don't try and put the genie back in the bottle, but you also don't count on the genie to give you infinite wishes. Calculators and LLMs do undermine autonomy, but this can be harnessed positively.

The solution is simple : gradual access. There are some things you just have to know; you don't give five year olds calculators. You shouldn't be letting children loose on LLMs either, but teaching them the basics first. Later, you introduce into lessons slowly and with monitoring. Even in higher education you still wouldn't replace lecturers with chatbots. You'd continue teaching students both the benefits and the downsides as long as possible, just as we should be teaching people about the media already. Just because we shouldn't fully trust something doesn't mean we either can or should discard it entirely : after all, the front line of research is where results are most tricksy, but it'd be utterly stupid to stop doing research because people made mistakes.

This is not to say that LLMs won't change things. They will. Coursework, in particular, might have to end, because the temptation to ask the AI would likely be irresistible. But the adaptation may not be as difficult as it would seem : examinations in which calculators are forbidden are already a thing, so controlled conditions in which AI access is denied is hardly asking for a sea change.

More difficult may be accomodating LLMs within professional research. "I was overwhelmed by the power of this place... but I didn't have enough respect for that power, and it's out now", to quote Jurassic Park. On the other hand, there are plenty of things I don't want LLMs to do. I see no point in using them for writing text in my own papers because then it's not me expressing myself. I don't want them to write my blog posts for the same reason (here's an experiment in having GPT-5 write an outreach piece on one of my papers – it's quite passable, entirely accurate, but it's not me).

So have a little faith in the future. Undermining the need to do things we don't want to do doesn't mean we'll stop wanting to do other things where we can challenge ourselves productively. If anything, I suspect the opposite is true.

My guess is that a lot of what looks like AI-hate pieces actually stem from angst. AI has too many similarities to previous technologies to cause us any really deep, pure horror or fear (or indeed joy) over what's likely to happen next : for those we'd need something genuinely new and unpredictable, and I don't think this version of AI – unmotivated, controllable, emotionless – comes close to fitting the bill. 

What we have instead is uncertainty over the specifics of how things will play out – in part from an entirely justifiable cynicism not over the tech itself but those who are marketing it. That's healthy. Pretending it's something we can't act on, with no recourse but to just hope everyone stops using something at least as useful as a pocket calculator, is not.

Review/Rant : Andor

When Andor first came out I gave up after about twenty minutes. I enjoyed Rogue One a great deal, but I didn't feel the need for Cassian Andor's backstory, and the apparent bleakness of the thing didn't fill me with optimism : oh, no, not another "let's ruin your childhood by making everything grim" franchising operation.

Plus, there's just too much Star Wars already. Do something new, for heaven's sake.

Recently, for no particular reason I decided to give it another go, perhaps having had a sufficient break from Star Wars and seeing occasional glowing recommendations in my social media feed. And I'm very pleased I decided to give it a second chance... provisionally. This is a tale of two halves if ever there was one, and I can't have a proper rant without spoilers. I'll try and keep these to a minimum (I mean come on, you guys know about the Death Star... right ?), but if you really don't like knowing anything in advance, then consider yourself duly warned.

Right, season one. Wow ! This was amazeballs. I have essentially nothing bad to say about this one at all. It's an incredibly smart re-imagining of the Star Wars universe and succeeds at something I'd normally think impossible : going beyond the happily-ever-after. Or more generally and more accurately, trying to put a gritty gloss over what's fundamentally a fairy tale. Trying to tell a realistic story in a universe set up to be deliberately unrealistic is usually a Bad Idea.

In fact I'll go further and say that Star Wars is, if anything, not just a fairy tale but almost a pantomime fairy tale : the goodies are happy-go-lucky adventurers and the baddies are so evil they get a menacing theme tune just for entering a room. You see them committing atrocities but in a family-friendly way that has an emotional impact when you're a kid but isn't going to leave you scarred for life. It may have planetary genocide, but Watership Down it isn't. The emotional stakes are low and excitement is high. It's full of space wizards and talking robots and it's absolutely goddamn great.

The second reason I wouldn't expect something  like Andor to work is probably more subjective. To me the Star Wars universe exists solely to facilitate the escapades of its main protagonists, to tell that story and nothing else. You can expand upon the central plot but only by telling stories connected with it. There's nothing especially interesting in the universe itself; it is, to a large extent, just making shit up. It isn't obviously expandable as Star Trek is. True, Rogue One succeeded, but mainly through that connection to the Main Plot. Telling the backstory of someone created as a supporting character for a supporting movie still seems like something... inadvisable.

And yet the first season of Andor is nigh-on perfect. It starts off feeling so different to Star Wars that you forget it's even supposed to be in the same franchise at all and can appreciate it on its own merits. Its social and political commentary on the nature of Imperial tyranny is razor sharp and immensely topical. The visual aesthetic is an absolutely brilliant update on the original movies : essentially the look and feel of the Empire is identical but far less cheap. Uniforms look like things people would actually wear, not costumes. Computer interfaces have a combination of smartscreens and physical buttons that make me think "I want one of those" rather than being an easy backdrop of randomly-blinking lights only put there to fill up screen space.

The plot is also intensely focused and the characters serve its purpose without being wooden or one-dimensional. Andor himself is usually a sidekick in his own series, which works perfectly well because everyone else is at least as interesting and often more so. The story is told from the point of several different main characters, all of whom feel like they're the hero, in their own minds, of their own narrative. In particular this is used extremely effectively for two of the main Imperial agents, one of whom feels like the worst aspects of Tom Cruise crossed with a micro-manager I once endured, and the other was clearly Liz Truss' personal understudy. Acting is of a uniformly excellent standard and there's quite a few headliners in there.

It is, to be sure, serious. But this works because the parallels to contemporary politics is bang on point. If the Star Wars you grew up with had the Empire in place of the Nazis, in Andor the Imperials have assumed the role of the American government. And yet, it doesn't venture into bleakness porn. It's still family friendly. There's still a sense of fun to it, still cool stuff that happens just because come on we're having space adventures here. There's spectacle and excitement and visually beautiful scenery and special effects. It's also incredibly tight, with almost nothing superfluous ever happening to anyone. There's great political speeches of the rebels, dark charismatic figures on the Imperial side, and a relentless, compelling, absolutely gripping sense that you need to know what's going to happen next to everyone. Even the characters you hate.

And then we come to season two. Spoilers will grow steadily more substantial from here on in.

Disney... who hurt you ? What happened ? I wish I could say it was a broken masterpiece or a hot mess, but it's.... well, just a broken mess, really. Now to be fair there's still some great stuff here. The development of the Empire from feeling like a inconvenient (if domineering) presence in the lives of the ordinary folk, to a full-on sadistic villainy, is nicely done. Again, we get some powerful political statements along the way. That most people are content to just make do and get by in such a system is handled with some subtlety, as is the tendency of the hierarchical Empire's distrust of its own personnel to carry a self-destructive streak (even if one character's suicide is rather too sudden, in my opinion). The development of Cassian's cool sidekick robot is also very well-executed indeed, providing good, solid fun without being crude or tacked-on comic relief.

The problem is that everything else is all over the place. Pacing is way off, wasting a good three or four entire episodes dealing with the wedding of Mon Mothma's pointless daughter. Pointless ? Yeah. The wedding serves an important political purpose, to be sure, but we don't need to see Mothma getting drunk out of sheer despondency. The fate of the main instigators of the wedding itself is never revealed, and when Mon eventually flees to Yavin, we're not told what happens to her daughter. Far worse is that the endless wedding sequences come at the expense of much more interesting potential storylines, like how Mothma is working behind the scenes to help organise the rebellion, the growth of the Yavin base itself, or... well, anything really. Even the personal tension with her daughter is totally lost because we never hear of her ever again after the wedding. It's backstory of the very worst sort.

There's a lot one of one year time jumps throughout this season in which apparently an awful lot happens the viewer would actually quite like to know about, and in like fashion, far too much is left unstated. There's a pointless episode featuring some utterly feckless rebels on what turns out to be Yavin, but the development into the main rebel base is skipped over as unimportant. The principle rebel leader from the first season is now "revealed" to have been crucial in setting this all up, somehow, but for some reason everybody now both hates and fears him. Sure, he does questionable things for the cause, but good grief, he's a rebel. Of course he's going to do some, well, rebellious things. Quite why he's treated like the spawn of satan is a bafflingly-omitted major plot point.

There are weird minor issues too. There's one very short scene, interposed between two unrelated shots, in a which a character asks who owns a particular weapon. Somebody answers that it's theirs and that's it. It's exactly the sort of pointless scene you expect to find in the Deleted Scenes in the extras, as though there was originally some plan for a side-plot but they dropped everything else except this one random bit.

Pacing also has minor as well as major issues, with the rescue sequence of one rebel being implausibly drawn-out for the sake of utterly pointless dialogue. Given that we're aware the Imperials have knocked out communications, shall we make a speedy getaway ? No, we'll spend ten minutes whining about how nobody on Yavin will be her friend. Yay. 

Another major sub-plot is also woefully mishandled. The Empire needs access to a mineral on Ghor (a wealthy, popular, influential planet) so spends some considerable propaganda effort in depicting its citizens as terrorists. This is well done, but the finale is lame. One of the main Ghor rebels is badly inconsistent, but worse is that the destruction of Ghor would have been a perfect opportunity for the spectacle that the second season is badly missing. This wouldn't have had to be anything extreme; we could see it from space rather than dwelling on what happens to the individual citizens. But it would have been a powerful final completion of the Empire being an essentially hidden evil in everyone's life to something of more naked villainy. We could also have seen the Death Star's development as the final act in the desperation and insecurity of tyranny rather than an expression of its power : this concept is very nicely explained on screen, but the specific link to the Death Star itself would have made this all the better.

(Yes, true, the Death Star construction began many years before. But this could easily be spun as a lesson on the deep underlying insecurities of fascism and how the mask of normalcy in the Empire's early days was only ever mask for its true nature.)

What we actually get for the ending is pure dogshit. We get no clear message, no finale of any sort. We just get... Cassian flying off into space. That's it.

Presumably this links directly to Rogue One, which I do plan to rewatch imminently. Fine. But the series could and should have easily been at least partially self-contained, serving to give more depth to Andor (and various other characters in Rogue One who have some screen time in the series) and filling in some interesting details to present a new spin on things when the audience chooses to watch the movie. It isn't necessary to end at the exact moment the movie begins, but even in choosing this, we could have had a better more rounded ending. As it was, it barely classes as an ending at all, more of a sort of weird break point. Without doubt, it's one of the worst and most disappointing endings to a series I've ever seen.

Oh well. Season one is still worth watching on its own, an unexpected delight which rekindled the old Star Wars magic in a whole new way. But season two robs it of what should have been a slam-dunk triumph. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... not since The Hobbit movies have I seen someone snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in quite such a spectacular fashion.

I therefore partially withdraw my opinion that the Star Wars universe isn't interesting enough to expand. In fact, it presents a fine vehicle for some extremely important contemporary themes. But as with all series, without good writers it's a dead duck.