I really wanna punch this asshole. Just once.
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In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a large scale demonstration of the uses and benefits of AI in many various industries, most of which do not involve image generation or writing a single line of computer code.
I'm so sick of asking people for demonstrations of AI use and it being 100% programmers going "oh it's really good at writing functions", now I have no idea if it is, or isn't, any good at writing functions, but since I don't write functions, that example is of no use to me.
I want to know how good it is at writing technical documentation for proprietary hardware solutions that the AI will have no experience of in its training set, because I suspect it sucks at it. How good is it at taking poorly written guides in Chinese, translated into English via Klingon and ancient Babylonian, how does it handle it if it comes across the sentence "absolutely do not ever warning" with no additional information as to what I absolutely should never not do. Because that's when thinking is involved, and AI doesn't think.
But... But... Will nobody think of the stakeholders?
"Nobody Asked for AI" is a pretty stupid argumentative approach.
- It's obviously wrong because a lot of people ask for AI which actually works. And I myself use AI daily because it does work for some things better (and yes, sometimes that just means faster and/or cheaper) than the alternatives right now.
- If actually nobody had asked for AI, that would still be a null-argument because AI is pretty damn useful regardless. There was a massive resistance against locomotives, cars, power looms... technology in general. Some new technology was outright wrong. But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization. Not knowing that it will be useful doesn't imply it isn't useful. You are using technology which simply didn't exist a hundred years ago right now. Technological advancement is actually a proven-good thing.
- Arguing against AI in general completely misses the point. What people actually hate is US AI companies. And rightfully so. The self-licking ice cone of circular funding brought us the RAM shortage, massive power grid destabilization, local environmental problems because of reckless construction and operation of data centers (on paper, data centers are the absolute cleanest thing you can build; but they use dirty gas turbines because the grid can't sustain them; and somehow they also manage to waste massive amounts of water - no idea, how though, as all professional cooling tech uses closed loops).
But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization.
So far. The consequences of industrialization are still pending.
I remember after the rise of social media, the world was always going towards decentralized finance, blockchain and many other things. Hell even Meta burnt massive cash in metaverse which supported cryptos. But after Covid, the whole AI episode started playing out of nowhere, and even now, the whole push around it just feels unnatural, almost as if staged. Today's so called AI success is 30% based purely on merit and 70% based on coordinated media management and unsoliciated offerings of desperate investment.
The innovations in AI/ML were always part of the modular infrastructure, specific to the enterprise level products and not su much for the retail users.
I think the idea of decentralized finance was to normalize company scrip again.
Now that AI can be used to track and geofence workers, you don't actually need to get rid of the USD. You just need to have an AI flag every transaction that happens 50 miles outside your registered address to be considered fraudulent and rejected. The anti-fraud infrastructure is already there.
I think the idea of decentralized finance was to normalize company scrip again.
It also makes regulatory scrutiny even harder, enabling many traditional methods of fuckery which have been made illegal in other contexts.
The whole idea behind defi isn't just minimizing frauds; it's literally to decentralize the monetory system and giving the control in the hands of people. The last thing people need is another layer of data collection on top of it.
I've avoided it entirely but I was trying to look for forum threads to help me get the right console commands to fix Skyrim glitches. At first I didn't realize I was getting AI results, but at some point I realized not only was I using AI, it was a MASTER at fixing Skyrim glitches.
I did not read the full article since it is paywalled.
But well, nobody asked for the internet either.
Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.
AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.
I just re-watched Willy Wonka from 1971 - there is a scene in there where they ask the computer to find a golden ticket and it converses in a very AI-like fashion. The 1968 movie 2001 definitely went hard on HAL, the "Intelligent Computer". People have been pushing hard advancing the technology any way they can since even before then.
nobody asked for automobiles
This likely refers to the famous fictitious quote from Heny Ford that wanna-be self-important "innovators" like to trot out to show how they are smarter than the customer when they put out some unasked for bullshit.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
People like to imagine the car as some miraculous thing no one but a genius could have imagined wanting and the genius descending from on high and delivering. Truth was people could easily imagine and want it, the genius was in knowing how to make what people knew they wanted.
Instead, Henry Ford said: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”
So essentially the exact opposite of "screw the customers, we know better!"
Yeah, nobody asked for fire, either.
your life is made immeasurably easier by both technologies