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  • I remember trying to investigate using crypto as a replacement for international bank transfers. The gas fees were much larger than the greatly inflated fee my bank was charging. Another time, I used crypto to donate to a hacker I liked the work of. I realized the crypto transfer was actually more traceable when accounting for know your customer laws and the public ledger. That was when I realized crypto was truly useless. AI is mildly useful when coding, to point me to packages I wouldn't have heard of, provide straightforward examples. That's the only time I use it. The tech industry and investor class are desperate for it to be the next world-changing thing which is leading them to slap it on everything. That will eventually wear off.

  • Sorry, you have people like Ezra Klien modeling the world around it in their head. It's baked in now, better learn to reject everything AI until it becomes the thing they say it is or accept anything with AI tag on it will be complete shit.

  • AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.

    That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.

    What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.

    Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they 'think' like us.

    Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.

    Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.

    What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.

  • Not a tech bro but have watched a few channels of people who are:

    First off a lot of people have jumped on ai in comments. So I will too. But to the question raised - if you are taking about "establishment/established tech bros" and if by 'jump on' you mean innovate then I say nothing. If you look at a lot of leading lights in all sort of fields a person often gets one idea and that makes their fortune - and the rest of their ideas are shit. Zuckerburg's metaverse anyone? This is true of companies too that appear to become ossified. Because, like you know - Widows 11 is orgasmic. So what orgasmic idea will come to the fore from some unknown: it is not possible to say because it will come from the unknown. All the sci-fi of 70 years ago thought it would be talking watches, no one guessed the phone would be the utilitarian tech.

    However there are fads and forcing use and so on. So tech bros will jump on whatever is the next fad or thing that is forced into use (implanted microchips for id, 24 hour tracking, payments... social credit scores anyone? I mean its what the mobile phone is doing anyway).

    To ai: imo we need to separate general ai, ie Chat GTP, deepseek etc from more narrowly trained ai use cases. The general ai have (almost) run out of data to (freely) train upon: in fact there is a worry that it's starting to eat itself - that is, ai is consuming ai generated content to train itself (ie mad ai): also the line on the graph is flattening as far as performance is concerned. AI that is trained for specific tasks however I feel is a different animal: think material sciences or cancer research. However in everyday use with a few years I can see you asking for a song that "is heavy with a punkish sound using violins about the folly of using a rotating wire brush as a masturbation tool" and there it is (though is it here now? I can't keep up). Depending on where these are (freeware, open commons, closed propriety) depends on what happens: Spotify/the music distributors could become totalising monopolies of music, or they could implode. In ten years you could be saying "make a film about a man scarred for life by said wire brush": sure it's take days and only be 360p to start ---- to start. Again creative commons or monopolies?

    So: "It's a bit hard" DIY on personal computers, or "easy as the cloud" and marketed and convenient and just pay a monthly subscription: I think we all know the answer - because we are lazy and stupid:

    That is why we will welcome the chip into our wrists.

  • Just like that ridiculous "internet" hype train from a couple of years ago

  • TBH, the AI hype is much more annoying. I don't get the point on NFTs either, but at least it was easy to avoid.

  • Hey, A1 is great so long as you have it on the right dish. I dunno that I'd call it a "hype train" either, because it's been around for years!

    /s

471 comments