Looks like 12 to me

I can easily imagine having this conversation with someone in the late 90s, when there was so much excitement about the internet. If, as a skeptic, you were to ask me why the internet was really needed or why anyone would take the trouble to connect to it on a daily basis, I wouldn’t have been able to give a complete and correct answer, not being able to predict the future with any accuracy.

But AI is already super useful as a tool for sifting through data, finding patterns and acting based on patterns. Its potential applications in medical diagnostics or surveillance (yes, I hate that too but it is what it is) are huge. People like to shit on LLMs but they do go beyond what search engines or scripts can do. But the real question is what AI will be in the next decade or so. And much like the internet in its early days, we can only guess at its future capabilities, how it will integrate with our lives, what will take off, and what is just a scam. Everyone is selling ideas that don’t work yet but seem exciting. But just because it’s inflated, oversold, and often untrustworthy, doesn’t mean that AI as a whole is just a mirage. It will be huge, and change our world fundamentally. That said, I’m still shorting Palantir ;)

It’s like the dotcom bubble. Everyone got all excited thinking the internet would be the next big thing, change the world, revolutionize the way we do business. And it did. But not without a lot of hot air and snake oil getting sold along the way.

Y’all making fun of this guy, but the fact is I’ve encountered several guys who turned out to be gay. And I don’t have a beard.

Coincidence?

I don’t think it will take long either. When you look at all the grifts the American evangelists pull, and people fall for it every time, then you’ve got all these people thinking that Trump is anointed by God or some such crap. No problem at all in selling these idiots the idea that they have an instant always-on hotline to God via God’s Chosen LLM. Then you’ve got them locked in to whatever psychosis you choose to construct for them.

Before I used Google Maps regularly, I would be more aware of road layout while driving and soon become capable of navigating any town I visited regularly, without a map. It’s weird to drive through a place I last visited twenty years ago, knowing that last time I was there I’d navigate based on memory, but now I’m completely leaning on that device to do it for me. That mental faculty might not be absolutely lost, but I don’t use it and I don’t suppose I would ever have developed it if I were learning to drive today.

Perhaps it’s obsolete, and a modern brain can now use those resources for something more relevant. Over the course of human history we have developed tools to use our finite mental resources more effectively, but never without a price. Socrates feared that the use of writing would weaken our memory and true understanding. I’m sure he was right, at least about the memory, but it was worth the price. Without writing, nobody would know what Socrates thought about anything.

But with AI, we’re not enabling ourselves to do more and develop new faculties, because AI seeks to be our universal crutch. Perhaps under other circumstances it could be better, but the entities pushing AI want us to be compliant consumers hypnotized by a endless stream of advertising slop. Fundamentally, they are not incentivized to help us develop our potential. They want to replace us.

That’s still not doing it justice. If there were one person for every rational number there would be infinitely many in any finite interval (but still actually no more than the top track, go figure) but the real numbers are a whole other kind of infinite!

No but it expires every 30 days and you need to plant it and grow a new potato before you can log in again

Only the good die young.

Prove me wrong.

But Dame Wontsomeonethinkof-de-Children saw a government report which says 65% of children under 5 have seen explicit videos of kittens being raped to death using power tools! Surely this constitutes an emergency which requires us to abandon online anonymity

That’s at least 3

I expect we’ll see a spate of Jewish sounding motorists getting trapped in the car with windows disabled and exhaust fumes diverted to the inside of the car (even though it’s electric; technology finds a way)

or less likely than one-in-a-million

A little at a time. We need to get comfortable doing this to cockroaches before we can start large scale testing on humans

Another quick fix is to set up a “Note to Self” group in Signal (make a group with 2 people then remove the other member). Nice tidy way to move things around, with a history of things you moved earlier

That’s hilarious. I do hope it gets evaluated at run time. That way you could have a program that works most of the time but if some rare circumstance caused it to execute commands in a sequence where the correct level of politeness was not maintained it would get the hump and crash

What benefits me is not what benefits the people owning the ai models

Yep, that right there is the problem

I agree that it’s on a whole other level, and it poses challenging questions as to how we might live healthily with AI, to get it to do what we don’t benefit from doing, while we continue to do what matters to us. To make matters worse, this is happening in a time of extensive dumbing down and out of control capitalism, where a lot of the forces at play are not interested in serving the best interests of humanity. As individuals it’s up to us to find the best way to live with these pressures, and engage with this technology on our own terms.

My PC had been running like shit for a while and I was already weighing up options for replacing it, when I got the popup message from MS about Windows 10 expiring, and how my only option was to dump the PC. So I installed Linux out of pure spite. Runs like a dream now. Thanks Microsoft!

I think the author was quite honest about the weak points in his thesis, by drawing comparisons with cars, and even with writing. Cars come at great cost to the environment, to social contact, and to the health of those who rely on them. And maybe writing came at great cost to our mental capabilities though we’ve largely stopped counting the cost by now. But both of these things have enabled human beings to do more, individually and collectively. What we lost was outweighed by what we gained. If AI enables us to achieve more, is it fair to say it’s making us stupid? Or are we just shifting our mental capabilities, neglecting some faculties while building others, to make best use of the new tool? It’s early days for AI, but historically, cognitive offloading has enhanced human potential enormously.