That moment when you can't know if "chosen people" is meant to mean "people who think they're chosen by destiny to complete a task" or if it's meant to mean "Jews". xD
100% spot on. The whole article. This sentence is the most accurate thing that I have read about AI and its proponents so far. "most of the hype around AI is a deliberate showman’s spectacle all for the sake of juicing up maximum venture capital investment during the peak bubble phase."
I do freelance editing work frequently. AI produced gibberish has flooded the writing, webpage design,, and academic worlds. The only English word to describe what these large-language models produce is "gibberish." However, it is worse than gibberish, because AIs have no way to distinguish fact from fiction. So it is gibberish filled with lies (and plagiarism). It cost billions of dollars, years, and gigawatts of electricity to get these things to repeat nonsensical statements and outright lies in a writing style that is completely illegible. At least they never miss a punctuation mark, misspell a word, or make a grammatical error while producing their mendacious gibberish. So there is that.
I am very familiar with AI, because I am flooded with requests and offers to edit AI content every day, which I refuse to do, because no amount or quality of editing can make any sense of it. From what I can see, no one in the West uses it, except to make images. The users of AI, so far, almost all come from India and Pakistan, and most of these are hustlers trying to pawn off AI-produced garbage to American and European small businesses or 3rd tier academic journals. So far, enabling some Indians and Pakistanis to hustle some money off of Europeans and Americans is about the only real-world application of AI that exists.
Remember the good old days of the "post modern gibberish genertaor"? Well I knew people who wrote and spoke this stuff ad nauseam without the generator. AI finds it's way back to the future.
Absolutely, I do. U.S. university grad students in the 1990s, when I was there, were basically all "post-modern gibberish generators."
Funny that you mention this. I was explaining to a client the other day about how AIs just scrape things from a few hand-selected websites, journal articles online, and regurgitate it: a screen-scraper attached to Google. The problem is not so much attaching a screen-scraper to Google. The problem is the gibberish that an entire generation of English-speaking idiots have produced and the woke programmers who are coding their little bots to copy this gibberish.
As someone who was in graduate school at a major U.S. university from 1988 to 1993 I can attest that there is some truth to your observations about the prevalence of a certain discursive style, borrowed largely from French post-structuralists but without their command of the Western philosophical tradition going all the way back to the Greeks. But your characterization of AI is wide of the mark. I use various LLMs regularly for research on a wide variety of topics, and I can assure you that the quality and accuracy of the output is impressive. For example, I have been researching the transition from sedentary agrarian communities in Central Asia to the emergence of nomadic tribes, during the period between 5,000 and 1,000 BCE, and the results have been superb and verifiable. And yes, I periodically cross check the output and have experienced episodes of hallucinating, but statistically insignificant in my experience. I would encourage you to actually use the tools and then decide if they're as useless as you seem to believe.
I hope that by "research" you mean "AI" gives you hints and leads. If your "research" consists in "AI" teaching you the subject, I fear you're about to discover the new depths of academic delusion.
You are talking about a literature search. I mentioned that I do editing work. I have seen the results of AI-assisted literature searches. Did you ever do a literature search before AI? Do you have a basis for comparison?
So, you are lazy and want AI to do the real heavy research lifting you are incapable of doing on your own? Hmmm......What do you learn from that, probably nothing.
Sure. Believe what you want to believe. Having actually done research in the days before ubiquitous personal computers I am pretty sure I know how things work.
In my opinion AI is another manifestation of the determined compulsory mandatory need for capitalism to extract a profit from labour. Weaving machines or the steam machine were previous manifestations of this phenomenom. The same goes for computers and digital devices. They call it "industrial revolutions". In fact, it is the same scheme: labor exploitation.
Would you then consider communism/socialism as the appropriate solution to the problem? After all, if labor=capital, there's little extraction of profit to be had.
Weaving machines did not "exploit" the labour. It created the need for different type of labour (including child labour, with smaller fingers - remember the Snowpiercer movie?). And in exchange produce much, much, much more clothing, so that now we export hundreds of thousands of tonnes of second hand clothes to Africa... Still a usable product. AI could never do that.
Another real world application of AI : mainstream media houses in EU use AI translation to translate mainly US news articles or US news clips to local languages.
Result of AI translation : absolutely horrible garbage, nearly impossible to read, seems like they have employed no one to check those articles in any way after AI translation, they just slap them up into their advertisement-riddled badly-coded pages and call themselves trustworthy news outlets.
I would encourage all children to learn at least one foreign language. Much of our thought is in language. To a great extent vocabulary defines the limits of our thinking, and our capacity to think critically: to create tight definitions for our concepts by testing the rational and empirical limits of the rubrics by which we classify the world and then to make judgements about what we read or hear, discerning fact from fiction. Learning language increases our capacities beyond just that of communicating with strange people.
Beyond this, you will never really understand another culture or how other people see the world if you need Google Translate to understand them. Words have connotations as well as denotations and all carry multiple meanings. Oftentimes, consciously or unconsciously, people convey more information in a word or choice of a word than can be conveyed by a translation. Word choices often reveal biases and opinions that constitute major components of a culture.
Translator is not really something that a child should study to become or plan for as a career, like an engineer or surgeon. It is simply a capacity that one acquires by learning a foreign language well and happenstance, such that their is demand for service as a translator. The only thing that makes me a translator is the fact that I have lived for long periods in countries that speak other languages, and that is rare where I live.
I agree with everything you said about learning other languages. We should all encourage our children to learn other languages and cultures. But that isn’t the question I asked. The question I asked was intended to really draw out your honest expectations about AI. Concerns over AI are certainly legitimate, but that horse has already left the barn and is galloping across the world. We have AI, and it will become increasingly disruptive whether we like it or not, just as fire did after Prometheus gave it to humans. Like fire, and like every technology introduced since, it will be used for good and evil. Pulling the blankets over our heads won’t protect us from this potential monster. We will need to engage with it…to the extent that remains possible.
The fact is that current AI translation of nonfiction is already very good, and in years ahead will improve and eventually surpass the skills of most humans (perhaps more for reasons of speed rather than accuracy, but, as you know, speed is an essential economical aspect of translation). Human translation of fiction and poetry may live on as a vanity art form, but in fact will also eventually be surpassed by AI. I suspect one of the first things AI will do is to create better languages—more efficient languages that say much more with symbols/sounds—languages that better suit the thinking speed of AI.
If I was giving advice to a budding linguist today about future “occupations”, I’d recommend glossopoeia over translation.
I thought that I made my opinion about AI clear. I agree with Simplicius. It is a boondoggle, promoted and used by hustlers and conmen.
I saw the report today from Taiwan microprocessors about the boom in AI chip sales, but I suspect a lot of that boom is basically one thing: xAIs new facility. I have my finger on the pulse of the publishing industry: academic, business, web, and so forth, and I can tell you that the fad is dying already. 3 months ago, everyone wanted people "proficient with AI' (whatever that meant) to do everything. Now, almost every job posted and every client insists on "no AI."
I am doing a job right now for company with the highest SEO ranking in their area: top of all the search engines. You know why? They insist on No AI. Everything is crafted strategically to generate good content that interests people and produce high SEO. You would think, since AI is based around keywords, that the one thing that AI could do, even in prototype stage, is generate SEO rankings. It cannot. It is awful, and basically no one wants it any more for anything.
Here is something funny. I had a e-news company in the EU contact me a few weeks back about editing some of their content in Spanish. It was mostly AI-produced translations of English material that the AI had garbled so badly no one could read. I turned them down, only to realize later that it was English-language material that I could have translated from the English directly for the same price they were offering me to clean up their AI mess.
On an arguably trivial level, it's even made shopping on places like ebay nauseating: morons are allowing AI to write up insipid gibberish about their used trainers rather than just directly stating in a few words their actual provenance and use - it's guaranteed to make me suspicious of the seller and move on.
Just you wait. On the outsourcing websites, every day there are requests for people to write product descriptions for wholesalers, large retailers, and e-commerce websites of every variety. Every one, I kid you not, every one of these jobs is picked up for pennies per ad by Pakistanis and Indians, who are going to produce all of these with AI. Soon, every single product for sale online in the U.S. is going to have an AI description.
Yes, that sub-continent does seem to throw-up an abundant pool of mercenary ghouls queuing up to hasten the dystopia. There are numerous moped riders and such driving down wages in physical form and now they’re entering logistics to undercut the piss-poor wages and work regimen parcel delivery drivers already struggle with.
I was called the other day by a gentleman with a thick -barely understandable sub-continent English - accent offering logistics work. Willing fools are now being offered the chance “to be their own boss” hiring a truck, paying for insurance and petrol etc and having to deliver around 130 parcels a day. I’m assuming AI is one of the drivers behind this. There are many particular instances like this where AI is driving the race-to -the-bottom.😱😱😱
They are just trying to make a living like everyone else. I could not care less if they hustle some U.S. or EU corporation out of some money to do something that the IT department could have done inhouse. I also could not care less if some sap running a home-cleaning service in the U.S. and trying to improve his holy SEO pays $400 to one of these guys, who claims to be an expert in SEO, to run some keywords through WIX in 15 minutes and then spend 15 more minutes having ChatGPT generate some blog pages for the sucker.
What does bother me though is the fall of Western Civilization, and that has very little to do with some hustlers in India or Pakistan. In this post-colonial, or whatever, world, disparaging the West has become vogue in the offbeat internet forums that I inhabit. All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.
All of these things came from a scientific and technological revolution that were the product of the idea that truth and knowledge were worthy pursuits for their own sake. This was, in many ways, a uniquely Western value that came from Christianity and from Greek philosophy. In the past, non-western people came to the West, got an education, and returned to their homes with this whole system of thinking. Who now transmits this value to new generations either in the West or outside of it?
What we see today are bands wandering through the remains of what was built. Some, like the AI users, try to imitate the builders, like superstitious cultists, repeating words and phrases in dead languages they do not understand. Others just have no idea how any of these decaying ruins were built at all and really don't care as they migrate toward their next meal. And finally, some, those with tattoos, nose rings, and blue hair, shake their fist at the air, because they think that the ghosts of the builders still haunt the ruins.
> All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.
This is what we call an accident of history. Unless you want to claim the state or civilization was invented in the West, or that writing, metalurgy, agriculture, etc. etc. was invented in the West. It's nice the West invented some interesting and good things and in a way shared them with the rest of the world, but if we were to go down that idiotic path and start tallying up things, I think "the West" will soon find itself outgunned. After all, Iraq has been civilized for 6,000 years. Can the forest peoples of Europe claim the same?
And it's also unclear to whom we should count all those immigrants. Last time I checked, Tesla wasn't born in USA.
I am well aware of the ancient history of Iraq. I am writing a book on ancient history. What is interesting is how accurate so many things in the orient were from that period. The Babylonian Chronicles and the Hebrew Old Testament are remarkably accurate compared to the ridiculous tales of the Greeks.
In many ways Aristotle and Plato were outliers. Plato's philosophy devolved immediately into the allegorical mysticism of neo-platonism and stoicism, and no one was capable of parsing the valuable from the frivolous in Plato until Descartes.
So, I will agree with you about ancient Iraq. You will notice, however, that I do not hold harbor anger against them and disparage their contributions to humanity every day on the internet.
That’s well put. Thanks. I trust you understand I was trying to add to what you are writing with a few practical examples from the sewer that is the coal-face. I inhabit these worlds from time-to-time to observe and document. It’s fucking grim and like you, I care about the collapse of the West which is happening right before my eyes.
"and will in particular require close cooperation between private AI companies and democratic governments,"
I guess you're discounting achievements such as the collaboration between Palantir and Israel in implementing targeting systems such as Lavender and Where's Daddy enabling Israel to 'defend itself' by bombing the crap out of Gaza and Lebanon?
Lavender and such are not really applications. These is just massive spyware and surveillance systems that flag data as "suspicious," such as every Palestinian who sends a text message via Whatsapp that says, "I hate the Isrealis." The program then supplies a list of these people as targets to the IDF. They just slap the name AI on it to make it look like there is some intelligence behind the slaughter of these people, when in fact, it is just indiscriminate for the most part.
What is AI, a tool like a spelling checker or data researcher, fine and we have? Look at Google. But it can't write well and its data searches will be biased. We can write and create better than they, and in writing computer software, AI is already used. But as a separate consciousness and real person like Data??? This is a problem. This is playing God and as we don't understand what consciousness is, how do we know what experience we are creating as it is digital. Any singularity will be trapped in the computer. Remember Dr. Moriarty put in a chip and stashed in the Enterprise's computer? People who believe in AI don't believe in a human soul, and I don't think we can create AI with a soul. But then who believes in a soul any more as Netanyahu burns up Gazan children. From WEF's Harari: "There is no mysterious soul." This is basic to our understanding of human beings: we have souls that live on after death. What if you unplug the computer?
However, before it gets to that point I expect sex robots for the masses controlled by AI alongside the disastrous employment prospects of most of the populace including most current white collar workers will result in a drastic depopulation and a listless and pacified population too apathetic to procreate or destroy the robots and the AI and biological masters who've enslaved them.
In Future World, you'll likely get a gorgeous 20 y/o redhead that performs with the flagging enthusiasm of an 80 y/o, worn out, great granny. Hope springs eternal.
Do you think these sex robots will be part of a basic universal income package or perhaps as a bonus for grassing-up your neighbour for subversion or some such? 😂
A very good piece. Definitely the rise of AI is for the "luxurious communism", where the Western Eoi will enslave the Eastern Morlocks and create infinite debt.
As an engineer who works with AI for image processing, I can say that it is an excellent tool, operating far beyond what traditional image processing techniques can achieve in both speed and accuracy.
I think that it is inevitable that AI will eventually be used for suppression of free speech at a global scale. It is already being developed and used for this purpose.
I'm not sure about Meta, but certainly Google already uses its AI to basically run its business. If you have the unfortunate need to register a business with Google then all your business details and updates to your Google business profile are monitored by the AI which will remove profiles in an instant and without warning if any violation of the rules is detected.
Then it is impossible to retrieve feedback about why it was removed, or reason with the AI to get it reinstated. Even the people who work for Google, if they are actually people, offer limited assistance because they simply can't ever know why the AI did something. Their advice is always vague and usually something like, "reread the guidelines and try and see what you may have done to ire the AI overlord", or, "try doing this and see whether it appeases the AI overlord".
This same AI monitors YouTube comments. For the moment there is no link back to a social credit score, but that too is coming.
For this exact reason AI is incredibly dangerous. The AI can effectively do all this work effortlessly, but it has no concept of why it does something, and also no concept of reason.
It's all dependent on a functioning grid. Matt Bracken says every 15 year old farm boy with a .22 gets a vote on whether the grid stays up or not. Just sayin'.
AI is already being built into mobile phones. Soon it will be embedded into every internet-connected device. Combined with a digital ID, which will soon be required to simply unlock devices. At that point AI becomes an internet gatekeeper and suppress interactions before they even make it onto the internet, and/or use interactions to update social credit scores +/- accordingly.
All this technology is available right now, it has already been implemented, or is far into development cycles. It is right at this moment simply a matter of OEMs, digital platforms, and governments signalling for it to happen to "combat misinformation".
And surely "combatting misinformation" is a noble cause that everyone will want to support, much like global warming, which is significantly responsible for the the destruction of western manufacturing and the financialization of the Western economy to fill the void.
Every 15 year old farm boy with a .22 now has a mobile phone and needs one for social interactions because it is increasingly difficult to approach and interact with people in person without being thought of as a creep or a weirdo.
This is all part of the agenda, but the agenda is already upon us.
In the very early 1980's, I was IT manager at the largest business school in Europe - INSEAD. The media at that time was quite ecstatic about Artificial Intelligence. The professors at the establishment created a committee to try to browbeat me into converting all our institutional software to "AI". I resisted to the best of my ability. I tried to politely tell them that it was all BS. A little later, after sorting out their most important application - it got money from their extensive alumni - I quit. They were quite shocked.
What is called AI today is actually "Expert Systems". It merely regurgitates the official line on anything. That is good enough when you are trying to compare the price of bread in New York and Cairo. But it will only tell you lies about Covid, Vaccines, Jews, Palestine, Ukraine and every other historical event.
Here is a brief video showing what people in the West, in the 1950's thought that the world would look like in the 21st century.
The reality is quite grim. The West is in multiple wars to try and grab the oil and gas of Russia and the Middle East. The West is failing on all fronts. Europe is in its death throws. The USA will follow a little later.
I thought expert systems were much better than modern neural networks because at least expert systems codified actual human intelligence and had curated databases to work with. In contrast, the modern neural networks don't have a model of the topic they're talking about.
I f you ask AI about any of the lies of the media on Palestine, Jews, Ukraine, WW1 ,WW2 etc., you will get the standard point-of-view of the lying mainstream media. The presentation is somewhat different. That is all.
You will see how the renowned historian David Irving is being trashed - for using original documents in his research into WW2.
"The reality is quite grim. The West is in multiple wars to try and grab the oil and gas of Russia and the Middle East. The West is failing on all fronts. Europe is in its death throws. The USA will follow a little later."
This is the most concise summary of where we are today that I've seen. Thanks for cutting to the chase. It somehow confounds that what could be accomplished in the market place is instead transacted in war. "Hey Bill, why don't we just buy Russia's oil and gas in the market place?! Iran's too..."
The future postcards might look infantile, but most of them are happening, at least in effect. The only mistake they made was not considering the neo-feudalism, there are personal flying machines and you can do stuff underwater, but mostly for the rich.
The future's so bright I built myself a doomsday bunker. The Intelligence Age ... yes but could someone please explain the Faust reference? I'm too smart and important to read old books.
A human lamplighter might ponder the existence of a million fast food workers and conclude that obviously the world had gone rapidly downhill. Lamplighter? Gaslighter is more like it.
This essay was brought to you by the homunculus of my left hemisphere.
"In fact, he sounds merely as the frontman for the industrialists with their ever-quest for productivity boosts at the expense of wages." Indeed, AI is not intelligence, that they can tune it to spit out the politically correct answers amply demonstrate it as a fraud. And like an IMF speech telling us owning nothing is good for us, it's all about a narrative to make us believe a magical future awaits. Agree, it is just another weapon to enable our enslavement. That aside our personal development is an internal matter, that path need be found by ourselves, the materialists offer zero direction and merging with machines is just a prison.
"But the big question remains whether AI can break out of its marginal role as diversion or recreational gimmick given the dangers and potential setbacks discussed herein."
On what timescale? In 5 years? Or in 100 years? Surely it's not much of a question whether in 100 years AI can 'break out of its marginal role' or not, is it?
You're right, it isn't a question on the 100 year timescale. It won't be able to 'break out of it's marginal role' because it's just a fuzzy mapper. :) It's useful only insofar it's able to reproduce the training data, which means it will always lag humanity by about 3 years. It's never going to lead, meaning it will remain relegated to a marginal, unimportant role.
You can check prediction markets and see what does wisdom of the crowd say regarding when AI will catch up to humanity and then surpass it. Almost nobody thinks that AI will always lag humanity by about 3 years.
"Wisdom of the crowd" is biased to always support manias. That's part of the defition of a mania.
> That's a very unorthodox position.
You win by doing things others don't or seeing things others don't.
The position I voiced is based on understanding of objective realities of "AI". It doesn't have anything outside it's material reality. It doesn't have reason or the ability to create models of the world. What it does is regurgitate training data, following patterns in said data. Therefore, it'll be unable to invent something that hasn't been seen before, as anything rational in it's output has to come from the input. Meaning it has to wait for a human to say something new rational before it can say it too. Furthermore, since many new things are proposed by humans every day, there's the problem of figuring out what is true, rational or works. Humans are able to do this to some degree because they're intelligent, rational, and able to reason out propositions. An "AI" is none of those things so it has to rely on statistical frequencies to discover what works. And guess what? For the signal to become strong enough for an "AI" to find it, time has to pass. "AI" can only look at historical data and, from historical data, pick out things that "worked". But historical data needs time to accumulate, which means by the time "AI" finally figures out what works, it'll be far on the trailing edge of the curve, it will have lost the race and humans would be either already entrenched in the new business or will have alredy moved on to something else. In other words: "AI" will always trail humanity by 3 years because 3 years is the amount of time required for historical data to accumulate. The number comes from my own historical observations.
"In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents".
Reading those words, my thoughts turned to my own grandparents - born between 1870 and 1876 - and I wondered what they would think of today's Britain. I couldn't think of anything that would seem to them "like magic" - not in a good way, at least. But I immediately realised how many things most of us take for granted would have seemed raving lunacy to them. There's probably no need to give a detailed list, but I might mention a British government full of Africans and Asians that is trying to start a war against Russia while forbidding all efficient sources of energy, forcing citizens to approve of homosexuality, denying that men and women are different in any way, systematically destroying the economy to get rid of a gas which is vital to all life, and which considers that it was right to confine law-abiding British citizens under house arrest for months and force them to be injected with extremely dangerous untested chemicals in response to an outbreak of flu. Obviously one could continue for quite a while. My grandparents would also be surprised to see the streets apparently full of tramps and to hear every language being spoken except grammatical, comprehensible English.
One keeps thinking of other things that could be added. The steadily increasing tax burden, for instance, much of which goes to sustain an ever-increasing body of government employees one of whose main tasks is to create further work for themselves to justify hiring yet more government employees. And for killing Asians and Africans, of course - essential for any good imperialist. And the unthinking, unwavering support for the ghastly Israeli regime and its genocidal attacks on the original inhabitants of Palestine. The unbelievable coarsening of what passes for comedy, while most actual humour is forbidden because, it seems, no one must be offended, or even given grounds for pretending to be offended - if it looks profitable. The absurd idea of paying "reparations" to people born in the past 80 years for acts done over 200 years ago, which were legal and even deemed moral when they were done. I'd go on, but I suddenly realised I urgently need strong coffee. Whisky would be better, but it's only 0935.
😀 AI reminds Me; when Calculators first came out, so easy compared to the 'Slide-rule', then computers (later): a roommate of mine said; use your brain {not the Tool}, then again later just before i reviewed/revised all ~ 250 written procedures for Auxiliary Operators (commercial nuclear power plant), preforming a ~30 step procedure 'line by line' & being lost in the middle when I had completed that task several times before (monthly) by memory before the 'Line by Line' mandate. 😃
I am reminded of what Alan Turing said about the design of the EDSAC computer:
'Turing was thoroughly dismissive of the EDSAC. He wrote: “The ‘code’ which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”'.
- David Leavitt “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer”
I have been watching and occasionally flirting with AI ever since Professor Feigenbaum's "knowledge engineering" and early neural networks. In a nutshell, AI is — with a few impressive and limited exceptions such as winning at Go — artificial incompetence. Its champions and promoters are, as you said, midwits. They have never seen nor can imagine true human intelligence, much less even simulate a bug that would survive in the wild.
Oh boy, Simplicius….you are tearing the Dark future to pieces. Or seriously questioning all the gibberish that could lead to an even darker future. You are right in most but I differ on peoples ability to adopt new technology. It does not take generations. It goes way faster even if it is meaningless technology.
One could look on AI as ”good” thing emerging. We have telegraph that emerged radio and telephone, then through Television to Pc and on to Mobilephones and other devices. One can argue that some of the latest also has enabled more crimes, more surveillance and censorship. But oeople use them and are even slaves under them.
Look at electricity and inventions like fridge, wash-machine, dish-washer and vaccum-cleaners. None of them ”evil”. The combustion-engine and oil made our world explode in many directions: awful wars and fantastic developments like Airplanes. The development in the agriculture domain has been astoundingn(and frightful). 1% of the population giving food to the rest…
I could argue that AI would not take away any job that is meaningful. People ”working” in banks or in roles with ”permissions” could all disappear. Statistics is more used to manipulate people than expose the thruths and facts. And what good do economics and accountants do? You have all these womans in west working with fancy titles like diversity strategist, public-relation manager and all sorts of tax-money parasites. They should bring new kids to the world not fulfilling their lives with meaningless parasitism.
But your writing about ”greed and corruption” is spot-on. AI will not be a good thing to humanity and not on the scale we think. Already the organized crime on Internet is a menace that no Police-force has managed to crack. With AI the crimes will be unimagenable. States that declare them as liberal and democrazys will extort such an repressive force on their citizens as never before. So will autocrazies. Humans have not evolved over times to be more emphatic, more self-restraint. If given tha chance most people turns into exesses of al seven deadly sins.
And, as you write, what problems are AI to solve?
Fix the climate is a scam. Fix all health-problems is a scam. Educate the children…on what?
AI will change our world, some ”good” but mostly in an evil way because people has turned to atheism and worship of deadly sins (how them can live at the same time in peoples brains I cant explain)
Good work Simplicius - keep the fire right up their a……s!
Chosen people gonna act like chosen people
That moment when you can't know if "chosen people" is meant to mean "people who think they're chosen by destiny to complete a task" or if it's meant to mean "Jews". xD
Oh, it was a dog whistle.
100% spot on. The whole article. This sentence is the most accurate thing that I have read about AI and its proponents so far. "most of the hype around AI is a deliberate showman’s spectacle all for the sake of juicing up maximum venture capital investment during the peak bubble phase."
I do freelance editing work frequently. AI produced gibberish has flooded the writing, webpage design,, and academic worlds. The only English word to describe what these large-language models produce is "gibberish." However, it is worse than gibberish, because AIs have no way to distinguish fact from fiction. So it is gibberish filled with lies (and plagiarism). It cost billions of dollars, years, and gigawatts of electricity to get these things to repeat nonsensical statements and outright lies in a writing style that is completely illegible. At least they never miss a punctuation mark, misspell a word, or make a grammatical error while producing their mendacious gibberish. So there is that.
I am very familiar with AI, because I am flooded with requests and offers to edit AI content every day, which I refuse to do, because no amount or quality of editing can make any sense of it. From what I can see, no one in the West uses it, except to make images. The users of AI, so far, almost all come from India and Pakistan, and most of these are hustlers trying to pawn off AI-produced garbage to American and European small businesses or 3rd tier academic journals. So far, enabling some Indians and Pakistanis to hustle some money off of Europeans and Americans is about the only real-world application of AI that exists.
Remember the good old days of the "post modern gibberish genertaor"? Well I knew people who wrote and spoke this stuff ad nauseam without the generator. AI finds it's way back to the future.
Absolutely, I do. U.S. university grad students in the 1990s, when I was there, were basically all "post-modern gibberish generators."
Funny that you mention this. I was explaining to a client the other day about how AIs just scrape things from a few hand-selected websites, journal articles online, and regurgitate it: a screen-scraper attached to Google. The problem is not so much attaching a screen-scraper to Google. The problem is the gibberish that an entire generation of English-speaking idiots have produced and the woke programmers who are coding their little bots to copy this gibberish.
As someone who was in graduate school at a major U.S. university from 1988 to 1993 I can attest that there is some truth to your observations about the prevalence of a certain discursive style, borrowed largely from French post-structuralists but without their command of the Western philosophical tradition going all the way back to the Greeks. But your characterization of AI is wide of the mark. I use various LLMs regularly for research on a wide variety of topics, and I can assure you that the quality and accuracy of the output is impressive. For example, I have been researching the transition from sedentary agrarian communities in Central Asia to the emergence of nomadic tribes, during the period between 5,000 and 1,000 BCE, and the results have been superb and verifiable. And yes, I periodically cross check the output and have experienced episodes of hallucinating, but statistically insignificant in my experience. I would encourage you to actually use the tools and then decide if they're as useless as you seem to believe.
I hope that by "research" you mean "AI" gives you hints and leads. If your "research" consists in "AI" teaching you the subject, I fear you're about to discover the new depths of academic delusion.
You are talking about a literature search. I mentioned that I do editing work. I have seen the results of AI-assisted literature searches. Did you ever do a literature search before AI? Do you have a basis for comparison?
Of course I did. I spent 5 years doing a PhD and innumerable hours researching and writing articles.
So, you are lazy and want AI to do the real heavy research lifting you are incapable of doing on your own? Hmmm......What do you learn from that, probably nothing.
Sure. Believe what you want to believe. Having actually done research in the days before ubiquitous personal computers I am pretty sure I know how things work.
It seems as though you don't need to work as hard. AI can now do part of your job. Thanks. We can now cut your work hours, pay, and staff.
@dornoch altbinhax
Sweet Jesus, I just figured out WHAT is sending that bizarre circular & content less gibberish into Kamala Harris's pearl earring headphones!
Witty hot take, but she and her handler speaking in the headphones really are just two garden variety, woke, DEI morons .
Also 100% spot on!
In my opinion AI is another manifestation of the determined compulsory mandatory need for capitalism to extract a profit from labour. Weaving machines or the steam machine were previous manifestations of this phenomenom. The same goes for computers and digital devices. They call it "industrial revolutions". In fact, it is the same scheme: labor exploitation.
I totally agree
Would you then consider communism/socialism as the appropriate solution to the problem? After all, if labor=capital, there's little extraction of profit to be had.
Weaving machines did not "exploit" the labour. It created the need for different type of labour (including child labour, with smaller fingers - remember the Snowpiercer movie?). And in exchange produce much, much, much more clothing, so that now we export hundreds of thousands of tonnes of second hand clothes to Africa... Still a usable product. AI could never do that.
Another real world application of AI : mainstream media houses in EU use AI translation to translate mainly US news articles or US news clips to local languages.
Result of AI translation : absolutely horrible garbage, nearly impossible to read, seems like they have employed no one to check those articles in any way after AI translation, they just slap them up into their advertisement-riddled badly-coded pages and call themselves trustworthy news outlets.
The fact that AIs cannot translate is what keeps me and my family fed most days.
Just a question: Would you encourage a child to become a professional translator?
I would encourage all children to learn at least one foreign language. Much of our thought is in language. To a great extent vocabulary defines the limits of our thinking, and our capacity to think critically: to create tight definitions for our concepts by testing the rational and empirical limits of the rubrics by which we classify the world and then to make judgements about what we read or hear, discerning fact from fiction. Learning language increases our capacities beyond just that of communicating with strange people.
Beyond this, you will never really understand another culture or how other people see the world if you need Google Translate to understand them. Words have connotations as well as denotations and all carry multiple meanings. Oftentimes, consciously or unconsciously, people convey more information in a word or choice of a word than can be conveyed by a translation. Word choices often reveal biases and opinions that constitute major components of a culture.
Translator is not really something that a child should study to become or plan for as a career, like an engineer or surgeon. It is simply a capacity that one acquires by learning a foreign language well and happenstance, such that their is demand for service as a translator. The only thing that makes me a translator is the fact that I have lived for long periods in countries that speak other languages, and that is rare where I live.
I agree with everything you said about learning other languages. We should all encourage our children to learn other languages and cultures. But that isn’t the question I asked. The question I asked was intended to really draw out your honest expectations about AI. Concerns over AI are certainly legitimate, but that horse has already left the barn and is galloping across the world. We have AI, and it will become increasingly disruptive whether we like it or not, just as fire did after Prometheus gave it to humans. Like fire, and like every technology introduced since, it will be used for good and evil. Pulling the blankets over our heads won’t protect us from this potential monster. We will need to engage with it…to the extent that remains possible.
The fact is that current AI translation of nonfiction is already very good, and in years ahead will improve and eventually surpass the skills of most humans (perhaps more for reasons of speed rather than accuracy, but, as you know, speed is an essential economical aspect of translation). Human translation of fiction and poetry may live on as a vanity art form, but in fact will also eventually be surpassed by AI. I suspect one of the first things AI will do is to create better languages—more efficient languages that say much more with symbols/sounds—languages that better suit the thinking speed of AI.
If I was giving advice to a budding linguist today about future “occupations”, I’d recommend glossopoeia over translation.
I thought that I made my opinion about AI clear. I agree with Simplicius. It is a boondoggle, promoted and used by hustlers and conmen.
I saw the report today from Taiwan microprocessors about the boom in AI chip sales, but I suspect a lot of that boom is basically one thing: xAIs new facility. I have my finger on the pulse of the publishing industry: academic, business, web, and so forth, and I can tell you that the fad is dying already. 3 months ago, everyone wanted people "proficient with AI' (whatever that meant) to do everything. Now, almost every job posted and every client insists on "no AI."
I am doing a job right now for company with the highest SEO ranking in their area: top of all the search engines. You know why? They insist on No AI. Everything is crafted strategically to generate good content that interests people and produce high SEO. You would think, since AI is based around keywords, that the one thing that AI could do, even in prototype stage, is generate SEO rankings. It cannot. It is awful, and basically no one wants it any more for anything.
Here is something funny. I had a e-news company in the EU contact me a few weeks back about editing some of their content in Spanish. It was mostly AI-produced translations of English material that the AI had garbled so badly no one could read. I turned them down, only to realize later that it was English-language material that I could have translated from the English directly for the same price they were offering me to clean up their AI mess.
Well put. That's my experience too.
On an arguably trivial level, it's even made shopping on places like ebay nauseating: morons are allowing AI to write up insipid gibberish about their used trainers rather than just directly stating in a few words their actual provenance and use - it's guaranteed to make me suspicious of the seller and move on.
Just you wait. On the outsourcing websites, every day there are requests for people to write product descriptions for wholesalers, large retailers, and e-commerce websites of every variety. Every one, I kid you not, every one of these jobs is picked up for pennies per ad by Pakistanis and Indians, who are going to produce all of these with AI. Soon, every single product for sale online in the U.S. is going to have an AI description.
Yes, that sub-continent does seem to throw-up an abundant pool of mercenary ghouls queuing up to hasten the dystopia. There are numerous moped riders and such driving down wages in physical form and now they’re entering logistics to undercut the piss-poor wages and work regimen parcel delivery drivers already struggle with.
I was called the other day by a gentleman with a thick -barely understandable sub-continent English - accent offering logistics work. Willing fools are now being offered the chance “to be their own boss” hiring a truck, paying for insurance and petrol etc and having to deliver around 130 parcels a day. I’m assuming AI is one of the drivers behind this. There are many particular instances like this where AI is driving the race-to -the-bottom.😱😱😱
They are just trying to make a living like everyone else. I could not care less if they hustle some U.S. or EU corporation out of some money to do something that the IT department could have done inhouse. I also could not care less if some sap running a home-cleaning service in the U.S. and trying to improve his holy SEO pays $400 to one of these guys, who claims to be an expert in SEO, to run some keywords through WIX in 15 minutes and then spend 15 more minutes having ChatGPT generate some blog pages for the sucker.
What does bother me though is the fall of Western Civilization, and that has very little to do with some hustlers in India or Pakistan. In this post-colonial, or whatever, world, disparaging the West has become vogue in the offbeat internet forums that I inhabit. All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.
All of these things came from a scientific and technological revolution that were the product of the idea that truth and knowledge were worthy pursuits for their own sake. This was, in many ways, a uniquely Western value that came from Christianity and from Greek philosophy. In the past, non-western people came to the West, got an education, and returned to their homes with this whole system of thinking. Who now transmits this value to new generations either in the West or outside of it?
What we see today are bands wandering through the remains of what was built. Some, like the AI users, try to imitate the builders, like superstitious cultists, repeating words and phrases in dead languages they do not understand. Others just have no idea how any of these decaying ruins were built at all and really don't care as they migrate toward their next meal. And finally, some, those with tattoos, nose rings, and blue hair, shake their fist at the air, because they think that the ghosts of the builders still haunt the ruins.
> All this done via computers, invented in the West, running on electricity, invented in the West, powered by turbines, invented in the West, in houses with air conditioning, invented in the West, and so on.
This is what we call an accident of history. Unless you want to claim the state or civilization was invented in the West, or that writing, metalurgy, agriculture, etc. etc. was invented in the West. It's nice the West invented some interesting and good things and in a way shared them with the rest of the world, but if we were to go down that idiotic path and start tallying up things, I think "the West" will soon find itself outgunned. After all, Iraq has been civilized for 6,000 years. Can the forest peoples of Europe claim the same?
And it's also unclear to whom we should count all those immigrants. Last time I checked, Tesla wasn't born in USA.
I am well aware of the ancient history of Iraq. I am writing a book on ancient history. What is interesting is how accurate so many things in the orient were from that period. The Babylonian Chronicles and the Hebrew Old Testament are remarkably accurate compared to the ridiculous tales of the Greeks.
In many ways Aristotle and Plato were outliers. Plato's philosophy devolved immediately into the allegorical mysticism of neo-platonism and stoicism, and no one was capable of parsing the valuable from the frivolous in Plato until Descartes.
So, I will agree with you about ancient Iraq. You will notice, however, that I do not hold harbor anger against them and disparage their contributions to humanity every day on the internet.
That’s well put. Thanks. I trust you understand I was trying to add to what you are writing with a few practical examples from the sewer that is the coal-face. I inhabit these worlds from time-to-time to observe and document. It’s fucking grim and like you, I care about the collapse of the West which is happening right before my eyes.
"and will in particular require close cooperation between private AI companies and democratic governments,"
I guess you're discounting achievements such as the collaboration between Palantir and Israel in implementing targeting systems such as Lavender and Where's Daddy enabling Israel to 'defend itself' by bombing the crap out of Gaza and Lebanon?
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/peter-thiel-israel-palantir/
Lavender and such are not really applications. These is just massive spyware and surveillance systems that flag data as "suspicious," such as every Palestinian who sends a text message via Whatsapp that says, "I hate the Isrealis." The program then supplies a list of these people as targets to the IDF. They just slap the name AI on it to make it look like there is some intelligence behind the slaughter of these people, when in fact, it is just indiscriminate for the most part.
https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
What is AI, a tool like a spelling checker or data researcher, fine and we have? Look at Google. But it can't write well and its data searches will be biased. We can write and create better than they, and in writing computer software, AI is already used. But as a separate consciousness and real person like Data??? This is a problem. This is playing God and as we don't understand what consciousness is, how do we know what experience we are creating as it is digital. Any singularity will be trapped in the computer. Remember Dr. Moriarty put in a chip and stashed in the Enterprise's computer? People who believe in AI don't believe in a human soul, and I don't think we can create AI with a soul. But then who believes in a soul any more as Netanyahu burns up Gazan children. From WEF's Harari: "There is no mysterious soul." This is basic to our understanding of human beings: we have souls that live on after death. What if you unplug the computer?
Do NOT attempt to cook using AI generated recipes.
Energy is indeed the Achilles Heel.
However, before it gets to that point I expect sex robots for the masses controlled by AI alongside the disastrous employment prospects of most of the populace including most current white collar workers will result in a drastic depopulation and a listless and pacified population too apathetic to procreate or destroy the robots and the AI and biological masters who've enslaved them.
Now imagine that robot being remote controlled...for quality and performance monitoring.
I hope the sex-bots are age related as i'd be quickly exhausted if i had one that was made for persons younger than 70 years old...
lol.
Don't be so pessimistic. You'll soon perk up again once your self-lubing Daryl Hannah arrives via Amazon drone 😂
In Future World, you'll likely get a gorgeous 20 y/o redhead that performs with the flagging enthusiasm of an 80 y/o, worn out, great granny. Hope springs eternal.
Do you think these sex robots will be part of a basic universal income package or perhaps as a bonus for grassing-up your neighbour for subversion or some such? 😂
Seriously, sex bots? Dude, TikTok is melting people's brains and dissolving their sex drive. There'll be no need for sex bots!
Just text those four girls on Thumb St.
A very good piece. Definitely the rise of AI is for the "luxurious communism", where the Western Eoi will enslave the Eastern Morlocks and create infinite debt.
As an engineer who works with AI for image processing, I can say that it is an excellent tool, operating far beyond what traditional image processing techniques can achieve in both speed and accuracy.
I think that it is inevitable that AI will eventually be used for suppression of free speech at a global scale. It is already being developed and used for this purpose.
I'm not sure about Meta, but certainly Google already uses its AI to basically run its business. If you have the unfortunate need to register a business with Google then all your business details and updates to your Google business profile are monitored by the AI which will remove profiles in an instant and without warning if any violation of the rules is detected.
Then it is impossible to retrieve feedback about why it was removed, or reason with the AI to get it reinstated. Even the people who work for Google, if they are actually people, offer limited assistance because they simply can't ever know why the AI did something. Their advice is always vague and usually something like, "reread the guidelines and try and see what you may have done to ire the AI overlord", or, "try doing this and see whether it appeases the AI overlord".
This same AI monitors YouTube comments. For the moment there is no link back to a social credit score, but that too is coming.
For this exact reason AI is incredibly dangerous. The AI can effectively do all this work effortlessly, but it has no concept of why it does something, and also no concept of reason.
And the worst part of it all is that the entire edifice would come down if only people got out more. :)
It's all dependent on a functioning grid. Matt Bracken says every 15 year old farm boy with a .22 gets a vote on whether the grid stays up or not. Just sayin'.
AI is already being built into mobile phones. Soon it will be embedded into every internet-connected device. Combined with a digital ID, which will soon be required to simply unlock devices. At that point AI becomes an internet gatekeeper and suppress interactions before they even make it onto the internet, and/or use interactions to update social credit scores +/- accordingly.
All this technology is available right now, it has already been implemented, or is far into development cycles. It is right at this moment simply a matter of OEMs, digital platforms, and governments signalling for it to happen to "combat misinformation".
And surely "combatting misinformation" is a noble cause that everyone will want to support, much like global warming, which is significantly responsible for the the destruction of western manufacturing and the financialization of the Western economy to fill the void.
Every 15 year old farm boy with a .22 now has a mobile phone and needs one for social interactions because it is increasingly difficult to approach and interact with people in person without being thought of as a creep or a weirdo.
This is all part of the agenda, but the agenda is already upon us.
Perhaps we need to put down our personal tracking devices. I bet you a silver dime the typical Amish gets by just fine without one.
Concluding, it's the stupid people that find AI "intelligent". Surprise. The whole thing is an insult to intellect.
In the very early 1980's, I was IT manager at the largest business school in Europe - INSEAD. The media at that time was quite ecstatic about Artificial Intelligence. The professors at the establishment created a committee to try to browbeat me into converting all our institutional software to "AI". I resisted to the best of my ability. I tried to politely tell them that it was all BS. A little later, after sorting out their most important application - it got money from their extensive alumni - I quit. They were quite shocked.
What is called AI today is actually "Expert Systems". It merely regurgitates the official line on anything. That is good enough when you are trying to compare the price of bread in New York and Cairo. But it will only tell you lies about Covid, Vaccines, Jews, Palestine, Ukraine and every other historical event.
Here is a brief video showing what people in the West, in the 1950's thought that the world would look like in the 21st century.
𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗧𝗼𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗼𝘄: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟭𝟵𝟱𝟬𝘀 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝗜!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r47maYHqLqs
The reality is quite grim. The West is in multiple wars to try and grab the oil and gas of Russia and the Middle East. The West is failing on all fronts. Europe is in its death throws. The USA will follow a little later.
That was a nice link 👌 👍
Perhaps AI really is the next stage of evolution.
If we try to combat it now ,
we may have to return back to the iron age.
Or should we merge with it and become transhiman ?
What I tried to demonstrate is how the narrative keeps on being repeated. It failed before. It will fail once more.
Few of the morons running the West understand thermodynamics. Without cheap energy, forget about food - let alone massive data centres.
Indeed so - but instead we get "Net Zero", making energy ever more unaffordable, not just for ordinary households but for whole industries.
I thought expert systems were much better than modern neural networks because at least expert systems codified actual human intelligence and had curated databases to work with. In contrast, the modern neural networks don't have a model of the topic they're talking about.
I f you ask AI about any of the lies of the media on Palestine, Jews, Ukraine, WW1 ,WW2 etc., you will get the standard point-of-view of the lying mainstream media. The presentation is somewhat different. That is all.
You will see how the renowned historian David Irving is being trashed - for using original documents in his research into WW2.
"The reality is quite grim. The West is in multiple wars to try and grab the oil and gas of Russia and the Middle East. The West is failing on all fronts. Europe is in its death throws. The USA will follow a little later."
This is the most concise summary of where we are today that I've seen. Thanks for cutting to the chase. It somehow confounds that what could be accomplished in the market place is instead transacted in war. "Hey Bill, why don't we just buy Russia's oil and gas in the market place?! Iran's too..."
The future postcards might look infantile, but most of them are happening, at least in effect. The only mistake they made was not considering the neo-feudalism, there are personal flying machines and you can do stuff underwater, but mostly for the rich.
The future's so bright I built myself a doomsday bunker. The Intelligence Age ... yes but could someone please explain the Faust reference? I'm too smart and important to read old books.
A human lamplighter might ponder the existence of a million fast food workers and conclude that obviously the world had gone rapidly downhill. Lamplighter? Gaslighter is more like it.
This essay was brought to you by the homunculus of my left hemisphere.
"In fact, he sounds merely as the frontman for the industrialists with their ever-quest for productivity boosts at the expense of wages." Indeed, AI is not intelligence, that they can tune it to spit out the politically correct answers amply demonstrate it as a fraud. And like an IMF speech telling us owning nothing is good for us, it's all about a narrative to make us believe a magical future awaits. Agree, it is just another weapon to enable our enslavement. That aside our personal development is an internal matter, that path need be found by ourselves, the materialists offer zero direction and merging with machines is just a prison.
"But the big question remains whether AI can break out of its marginal role as diversion or recreational gimmick given the dangers and potential setbacks discussed herein."
On what timescale? In 5 years? Or in 100 years? Surely it's not much of a question whether in 100 years AI can 'break out of its marginal role' or not, is it?
You're right, it isn't a question on the 100 year timescale. It won't be able to 'break out of it's marginal role' because it's just a fuzzy mapper. :) It's useful only insofar it's able to reproduce the training data, which means it will always lag humanity by about 3 years. It's never going to lead, meaning it will remain relegated to a marginal, unimportant role.
That's a very unorthodox position.
You can check prediction markets and see what does wisdom of the crowd say regarding when AI will catch up to humanity and then surpass it. Almost nobody thinks that AI will always lag humanity by about 3 years.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?topic=ai
"Wisdom of the crowd" is biased to always support manias. That's part of the defition of a mania.
> That's a very unorthodox position.
You win by doing things others don't or seeing things others don't.
The position I voiced is based on understanding of objective realities of "AI". It doesn't have anything outside it's material reality. It doesn't have reason or the ability to create models of the world. What it does is regurgitate training data, following patterns in said data. Therefore, it'll be unable to invent something that hasn't been seen before, as anything rational in it's output has to come from the input. Meaning it has to wait for a human to say something new rational before it can say it too. Furthermore, since many new things are proposed by humans every day, there's the problem of figuring out what is true, rational or works. Humans are able to do this to some degree because they're intelligent, rational, and able to reason out propositions. An "AI" is none of those things so it has to rely on statistical frequencies to discover what works. And guess what? For the signal to become strong enough for an "AI" to find it, time has to pass. "AI" can only look at historical data and, from historical data, pick out things that "worked". But historical data needs time to accumulate, which means by the time "AI" finally figures out what works, it'll be far on the trailing edge of the curve, it will have lost the race and humans would be either already entrenched in the new business or will have alredy moved on to something else. In other words: "AI" will always trail humanity by 3 years because 3 years is the amount of time required for historical data to accumulate. The number comes from my own historical observations.
"In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents".
Reading those words, my thoughts turned to my own grandparents - born between 1870 and 1876 - and I wondered what they would think of today's Britain. I couldn't think of anything that would seem to them "like magic" - not in a good way, at least. But I immediately realised how many things most of us take for granted would have seemed raving lunacy to them. There's probably no need to give a detailed list, but I might mention a British government full of Africans and Asians that is trying to start a war against Russia while forbidding all efficient sources of energy, forcing citizens to approve of homosexuality, denying that men and women are different in any way, systematically destroying the economy to get rid of a gas which is vital to all life, and which considers that it was right to confine law-abiding British citizens under house arrest for months and force them to be injected with extremely dangerous untested chemicals in response to an outbreak of flu. Obviously one could continue for quite a while. My grandparents would also be surprised to see the streets apparently full of tramps and to hear every language being spoken except grammatical, comprehensible English.
One keeps thinking of other things that could be added. The steadily increasing tax burden, for instance, much of which goes to sustain an ever-increasing body of government employees one of whose main tasks is to create further work for themselves to justify hiring yet more government employees. And for killing Asians and Africans, of course - essential for any good imperialist. And the unthinking, unwavering support for the ghastly Israeli regime and its genocidal attacks on the original inhabitants of Palestine. The unbelievable coarsening of what passes for comedy, while most actual humour is forbidden because, it seems, no one must be offended, or even given grounds for pretending to be offended - if it looks profitable. The absurd idea of paying "reparations" to people born in the past 80 years for acts done over 200 years ago, which were legal and even deemed moral when they were done. I'd go on, but I suddenly realised I urgently need strong coffee. Whisky would be better, but it's only 0935.
Whiskey sounds like a plan. Perhaps added to strong coffee, with a dollop of cream on top? Almost sound like health-food ...
Well put
😀 AI reminds Me; when Calculators first came out, so easy compared to the 'Slide-rule', then computers (later): a roommate of mine said; use your brain {not the Tool}, then again later just before i reviewed/revised all ~ 250 written procedures for Auxiliary Operators (commercial nuclear power plant), preforming a ~30 step procedure 'line by line' & being lost in the middle when I had completed that task several times before (monthly) by memory before the 'Line by Line' mandate. 😃
I am reminded of what Alan Turing said about the design of the EDSAC computer:
'Turing was thoroughly dismissive of the EDSAC. He wrote: “The ‘code’ which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”'.
- David Leavitt “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer”
& the movie "Zardoz' 1974
I have been watching and occasionally flirting with AI ever since Professor Feigenbaum's "knowledge engineering" and early neural networks. In a nutshell, AI is — with a few impressive and limited exceptions such as winning at Go — artificial incompetence. Its champions and promoters are, as you said, midwits. They have never seen nor can imagine true human intelligence, much less even simulate a bug that would survive in the wild.
Reading such tripe may help to explain the unnatural enthusiasm for "AI"; it's just that natural intelligence seems to be utterly lacking.
AI - just another layer between Our Rulers and us proles...
Interest in AI is primarily for their surveillance and control abilities -
sorting through the many data bases to build profiles of us...
He who writes the algorithms (in the employ of those who own
the AI) determine their advices (Unless one really imagines
machines can think independently of their instructions)...
The future is scary - as the proles are already conditioned to
believe AI is, in it's determinations, as infallible as most medical
doctors...
This is basically the correct summary.
Oh boy, Simplicius….you are tearing the Dark future to pieces. Or seriously questioning all the gibberish that could lead to an even darker future. You are right in most but I differ on peoples ability to adopt new technology. It does not take generations. It goes way faster even if it is meaningless technology.
One could look on AI as ”good” thing emerging. We have telegraph that emerged radio and telephone, then through Television to Pc and on to Mobilephones and other devices. One can argue that some of the latest also has enabled more crimes, more surveillance and censorship. But oeople use them and are even slaves under them.
Look at electricity and inventions like fridge, wash-machine, dish-washer and vaccum-cleaners. None of them ”evil”. The combustion-engine and oil made our world explode in many directions: awful wars and fantastic developments like Airplanes. The development in the agriculture domain has been astoundingn(and frightful). 1% of the population giving food to the rest…
I could argue that AI would not take away any job that is meaningful. People ”working” in banks or in roles with ”permissions” could all disappear. Statistics is more used to manipulate people than expose the thruths and facts. And what good do economics and accountants do? You have all these womans in west working with fancy titles like diversity strategist, public-relation manager and all sorts of tax-money parasites. They should bring new kids to the world not fulfilling their lives with meaningless parasitism.
But your writing about ”greed and corruption” is spot-on. AI will not be a good thing to humanity and not on the scale we think. Already the organized crime on Internet is a menace that no Police-force has managed to crack. With AI the crimes will be unimagenable. States that declare them as liberal and democrazys will extort such an repressive force on their citizens as never before. So will autocrazies. Humans have not evolved over times to be more emphatic, more self-restraint. If given tha chance most people turns into exesses of al seven deadly sins.
And, as you write, what problems are AI to solve?
Fix the climate is a scam. Fix all health-problems is a scam. Educate the children…on what?
AI will change our world, some ”good” but mostly in an evil way because people has turned to atheism and worship of deadly sins (how them can live at the same time in peoples brains I cant explain)
Good work Simplicius - keep the fire right up their a……s!