AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.
The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.
AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.
And ecological
Yep. Sounds about right
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
You will get an email at some point asking you if you would accept some well paid contract to train an LLM to answer like you would. That’s how they simulate professional behavior on top of the probabilistic monsters that is behind.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
apparently ai just broke a cryptographic scheme, hawk, that the us government was assessing to standardize.
This is me right nowWhat do you mean? Cory figured it out like 20 years ago already, he was reporting on tech bro grift from the beginning
He’s a funny one though, cause whilst warning about it, he does two really annoying things;
- “LOOK AT HOW SMART I AM” self-aggrandizing, he seems to think he’s the smartest person in every room
- Falling for other different grifts
Falling for other different grifts
Which ones? I’m not familiar with this side of him
Cory has been that “crazy” guy warning of all sorts of grift, exploitation, privacy fuckery and security forever like a modern-day Kassandra. Now that we start to see the direction the technology sector is headed more clearly, his warnings finally start to ring true.
Lots of luddites in this thread. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. We are at the dawn of a Cambrian explosion of intelligence. Frontier level models are finding novel solutions to decades-long unsolved maths problems. The only limits are compute power and even more simply, energy. See you guys in the singularity
AI isn’t real, but it’s gonna ruin society anyway. There is absolutely zero possibility for genAI to develop intelligence because it’s just a probablistic chatbot. It doesn’t know anything; it’s just rolling dice to guess what word to spit out each time. A high school student who copies his friend’s calculus homework will eventually learn a little calculus. A chatbot will never learn any calculus. Claiming these genAI models will develop intelligence with better compute technology is like claiming a puppet will develop intelligence with better string technology.
Yes I am a Luddite, a proud tech-loving Luddite. And if you think there’s a contradiction in that, then you need to read up on what the Luddites stood for.
The problem is not that AI tech exists. Machine learning has been around for quite a while, and the modern neural processor chips are a great evolution of it. The problem is that corporations are using the tech for exploitation, plagiarism on an industrial scale, and creating misinformation ant terrifying speed.
Though you reference to the Luddites is quite appropriate in that they opposed the replacement of skilled labourers with child workers, just as modern day opponents of AI slop seek to stem the tide of skilled programmers being replaced with vibe coders, artists and illustrators with prompt writers, and the myriad of workers being replaced with inferior imitations of intelligence.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank Herbert, Dune
I rank LLMs as game changing as Google Search when it first came out. It’s a tool, nothing more.
It does seem like it’s positioned to replace search engines
It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.
Looking at the shape it’s taken so far, do you really think you’ll be included in that singularity? Or will you be just another ape roasting to death as your brain rots? If it’s energy-intensive, then what matters is who controls the factors of production. They see you as a cost, not a useful friend who simped for Pascal’s Basilisk.
We could have a positive singularity, or we could have a malevolent singleton. And it depends on your rationality right now.
I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
I mean… it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it.
that’s just called writing.
that’s bullshit.
“I dont write anything but i take credit for everything”
You’re lost in the sauce. Do you know any other writers in real life? How do they feel about this?
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
Only pro is laborious, tedious programming tasks have become significantly faster to do, along with testing edge cases and stuff a programmer should be able to do but maybe doesnt need to.
Just about everything else is negative.
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.
We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.
Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.
I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?
Trust me, bro!
They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.
But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Super cool! Well we can base your personal healthcare on AI’s sole guidance and if you are misdiagnosed, injured or dead as a result of an “oopsie”, no human will be held legally liable - fun!
So no real stakes for anyone to get it right, as with human-led interventions (with careers on the line at every stage to keep people engaged and honest). But corporations will probably just naturally do the right thing.
But you’re brave, you offer yourself as tribute to the lying machine. Tight tight tight!!!
You seem very passionate about this topic, but you’re not really adding much to the discussion.
Don’t worry, its coming across loud and clear that AI could cure cancer and you’d still think it was better to have cancer than use AI. I get it. AI = bad, full stop. Message received.
Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.
There are studies that show that LLMs (chatbots) perform as well or better than human physicians.
I’m not suggesting getting rid of physicians, though. This is a tool for humans, not a replacement.
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
“But the charts say AI is helping”
Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
They’re not using LLMs to analyse MRI scans. There are image processing algorithms for that, but they’re a whole other thing to what this entire thread is about.
Also, are you a fucking bot? I’ve read all your comments so far in this thread and uhh yeah. Please feel free to jog on now.
I’ve read all your comments so far
I’m flattered. Did you read the first one where I said it was reductive to equate AI with chatbots?
c/nothingeverhappens
It’s not lying if they have no idea what they’re talking about and constantly swoon over it.
What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.
Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Well I wouldn’t recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.I mean, I’m sure the same applies to all tech sectors and likely worse. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It’s just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
That’s all an LLM is, a gas-powered bullshit firehose.
Well, he hasn’t been describing our future for at least two decades. /sarcasm
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
I’m glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They’re very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn’t warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI…
Wasn’t Nano predicated on those lines? I remember reading transactions could be done locally, even off-line, validated beetween the parts and only later added to the global ledger.
Nano uses “proof of stake” instead of proof of work to decide the order of transactions, and who receives block rewards.
The main problem with PoS is that it’s essentially the same as Federal Reserve bonds: all the new money goes towards people with extra money to freeze. This is part of why inequality has spiraled out of control since the Nixon Shock. Proof of work literally burns most of the profits because of difficulty adjustment.
A more specific problem with Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) is that the entire supply was centrally issued, with a pinky promise from this private organization that they only issued coins by CAPTCHA. If they were lying, then they could have issued 51% of the supply to themselves for permanent control. The only way we’d be able to detect it is if the price kept going down for years.
That requires a global ledger. Blockchain is an appallingly bad way to implement one.
What I understood then was that the local ledger of a given user of the coin would authorize and register the transactions done on/off the recorded balance and, when network available, would broadcast such transactions to the global ledger.
The global ledger was the total sum of transactions, not imperatively required to authorize transaction by transaction.
Funny, that you even know about Nano!
…it’s one of the often overlooked projects because it doesn’t have a ton of fuck-off-money and instead tries to focus on a solid protocol.Nano has a lot of interesting attributes, but I fail to see how what you describe would work in practice.
If both parties want to make sure there are no shenenigans at play, they need to know about the most recent state of the respective account chains, which essentially requires them to be online for agreeing on said transaction.
But overall Nano is very fast and efficient by design and only a failure in terms of “gainz for Lambo”.As we’re here in a thread about AI I should remark that machine-to-machine-payments - in this case: agent-to-agent-payments - would work pretty well with Nano as currency because of the transaction finality (typically less than 1 second) and the feeless nature of transactions.
If AI agents are looking for the most viable way to transfer tiny amounts of value fast and without fees they might find Nano and use it - who knows…
…and just like Nano showed that efficient ways to create digital money are possible I’m hoping for efficient AI models that are economically and ecologically worthwhile.What I understood then was that in person transactions could be done, as the local ledger of each user would authorize and record operations on and off the available balance and wait until network availability to syncronize with the global record.
Returning to the subject at hand: I can imagine very specialized “AI” being useful for scientifical research, where very knowledgeable people use it as a tool to facilitate processes but are nonetheless capable of reviewing whatever results it produces.
Not gigantic datacenters required for this but small, purpose made and perfected, locally run, even if on higher specifications hardware to do so, but machines built for a given task and purpose. The economic viability on it be damned; it’s a tool for research, it is not made to earn money.
To put it bluntly: if you do an offline transaction, you’re prone to fraud.
If you expect the senders account chain to have balance x (because that’s your offline record for that) and the sender has sent all funds to a different address after you synced that account chain, you receive money that isn’t there - kind of like an invalid cheque.
I have no clue how that would work in practice, because to know a random account in advance, you’d have to sync the whole amount of account chains there is (called block lattice in Nano’s case).
With a mobile device that’s hardly feasible and without a mobile device I don’t see how you’d get in contact with people to make such an offline transaction.That kind of specialized AI is what I imagine to be a use case for locally run AI, too.
After all you don’t want to build processes on an AI, where you have zero control over what happens behind the curtains.
That includes feeding potentially sensitive data back to it as well as being unable to control the training data set, its learning, version numbers, etc.
I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
The core issue feels like the dead torrent problem.
Its distributed, so it needs to be hosted, by several locations. Which becomes probitive over time as.it becomes huge. Its also massively inefficient for what its trying to do.
At some point, its basically just one server farm somewhere hosting a glorified MySWL database that doubles as a space heater for the entire planet every time you need to add a row.
I was thinking that with legal backing, blockchain could be a good record of ownership for deeds. Like NFTs but for physical property.
The history of ownership and the public visibility are good features there.
Lack of reliable, authoritative attribution of changes and no rollback or compensatory transactions are all dealbreakers.
Yes, exactly.
Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.
It can still be used that way. While most people talk about how corrupt politicians enrich themselves with fake currencies, more legal and legitimate uses can still use decentralized ledgers for useful things. Of course these won’t make headlines.
There are far better global ledger approaches than blockchain.
I believe you, but can you name one so we can all learn more about the alternatives out there?
That’s top down thinking for you.
AI is changing everything… Mostly to bad, that’s the part they keep.
But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.
It’s changing a lot of things, but many of them in only relatively minor ways. It’s not affecting e.g. food supply systems in a significant way - it might be screwing up the management structures of companies involved, but that will be repairable fairly quickly…
