but the shareholders?
Looks like they would have been better off too. I think those are the humans he is talking about.
File under “Y” for “Yeah, no shit”.
YOU DON’T SAY??
All AI does for me is to give me more work to do. Its code is terrible. It has horrible taste. Its work is not modelled after the task, but after “must look complicated”
Get Ponytail https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail and an auto-linter such as pi-lens if you’re using Pi harness. And a goal/to-do (pi-goal-x) extension.
What model are you using?
Skill.md issue
Honestly yeah likely, I have extreme lack of knowledge re: vibe coding.
I am much faster per pedes right now
duh.
Nah. Humans are just complete shits in general.
It isn’t AI (although, again, that doesn’t even exist, all we have are statistic machines) that is the problem. Its that we are not anywhere near enlightened enough to be responsible for anything as a species.
It’s a problem with human greed, not AI. If we didn’t have greedy oligarch parasites then AI wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem. NIMBYism is destroying the future of the USA.
That is only some of the problem.
See the study where they compared brain activity with or without. Also, if the AI users were cut off from being able to use, they at least in the moment became less capable of doing the tasks than they were before they were being allowed to use AI. Study can’t speak to lasting impact, but they clearly showed people would get worse in the moment.
Studies have shown that folks that employ a rich writing style early in life are less likely to show dementia late in life and people who have very lazy writing styles are likely to have dementia. Obviously too early to say for sure if this applies to LLM, but leaning on LLM for writing might be similarly lazy.
Not so sure, the younger generations have zero critical thinking skills, can’t problem solve without a road map. Need to be able to figure shit out on your own creating your own road map
Yup. No need for researching or critical thinking kids! your buddy chat gpt can give you all the answers.
Why this generation more than the one before?
Maybe it’s because the system is working as the old ghouls pushed it.
It’s always fascinating that the blame is put on the individuals while mega corps are distilling hijacking our brains and gaming our systems to get more money and control.
Society at large is built up for people to succumb to the pitfalls, but still individuals get blamed when the pressure is simply too much or when the system is made to make individuals fail.
Fuck this noise. We would have been the same as this generation if we had the same monetized dopamine hooks as they grew up with.
I won’t deny that, we’d be the same. Doesn’t matter though, they have to do better and grow out of it or future generations are fucked. We can put blame on the mega corps but that’s just a rocketing chair, gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere
I was a programmer for 25 years. I always figured I could have made a contribution to AI research, but the opportunity never came up (I was too busy writing Skype clones for cable companies and ISPs that were never used by anyone). I regretted this for a long time, but not any more. I never imagined AI would be this fucking bad, “bad” in the sense of bad for humanity and just plain bad as a product.
It’s cause it’s not AI
FWIW I always felt my contribution would have been towards “real” AI rather than the current pseudo-AI stuff that is all the rage. In addition to being a programmer, I also have a background in evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy. The “neural networks” that are part of current AI were originally based on the understanding of how neurons function that existed in the 1970s, and they were (and are still) a poor implementation of that level of knowledge. IMHO true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function and how they have come about in the real world through hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
That being said, “real” AI is probably going to be even worse for humanity than this current stuff is, so at least I’m glad that blood won’t be on my hands.
I feel for you. Going into machine learning was my dream to. Until this. I wanted to work on true artificial intelligence based on the human brain.
I really don’t understand this perspective, and it’s my biggest gripe with Chollet and his ilk as well. What, in your opinion, makes neuro-symbolic AI inherently superior to (the currently better performing) statistical methods?
I really don’t understand this perspective
This is honestly a strange thing to say. The only examples we have on the planet today of what we consider true intelligence are living animals. Why wouldn’t it at least be possible that the properties of the signaling units that comprise these existing, observed intelligences (i.e. neurons) are fundamental to the task of replicating these intelligences? It seems to me it’s the “statistical methods” that have yet to prove they’re capable of producing true intelligence.
I will retreat to the fact that I said “true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function” and not “can only be achieved”. Time will tell which approach works better.
I don’t know who Chollet is but I’ll look him up. Thanks for the reference.
Please stop using this argument. Unless you also brought it up every single time the term was used in videogames etc
It’s a bad argument that relies on pure language semantics that helps no one and undermines any good argument against it because it weakens your stance
I do bring it up every case and even if I didn’t this case it’s an important distinction. Artificial intelligence is a marketing term used to conjure images of Jarvis and what not in people heads.
Video games companies never claimed to have near sentiment AGI baked into their games that would replace all human workers or blow up the world.
The term artificial intelligence is used to anthropomorphize LLMs as weird as that seems.
It is an important distinction. These are large language models, not reasoning models, not AGI, not artificial life not artificial intelligence.
I know that term as been used by the machine learning community in the past to mean things like decision trees and general models, and it didn’t really matter much then but it matters A LOT now.
Words have meanings. This isn’t arguing semantics, it’s using words as they are intended so we can communicate effectively about something in the world. To argue otherwise is naive, dishonest, and quite honestly just annoying.
Hi I’m new to this debate and I agree with you that language matters and all that stuff you said at the end. That being said, I’m firmly in the camp of “LLMs are bad, but a ‘true’ AI would be even worse for us”. I could type up several paragraphs diving into the several reasons why I think that way, but to save time (and to get back to my job) I’m just going to steal this Frank Herbert quote:
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
Do I think AI, in a vacuum, is always bad and will be no matter who or what makes it? No, not necessarily. But whatever we build will be inherently, and intrinsically tied to the micro- and macro-systems of our society, which are all DEEPLY fucked. Consequently, any AI we bring in would also, even if not initially, end up as being equally, deeply, fucked and end up being far, FAR more detrimental than positive
Yeah true AI would be quite insane. Especially if it was behind human capabilities.
There’s just no way to ensure it’s aligned towards good. We can’t even define that ourselves. Who knows the suffering we could unleash on ourselves.
we can argue what actual ai would be, as long as we agree that it remains very firmly in the realm of science fucking fiction, just this side of inertial dampener fields and FTL travel.
I do agree that any ai made by this society as it exists would be apocalyptic. all its stories about ‘evil ai’ are just metaphors for itself. we have already given up our thinking to computers (which don’t yet think) and corporations and kings and markets. we fucking love giving up our thinking. it’s like the whole appeal of fascism for most fascists.
You are spot on, and the ones downvoting you are simply wrong.
it’s funny because they are literally proving my point. But oh well
It’s sad how many stupid people are here. 🙁
Too much reddit contrarianism leaking. All too keen to say the same 4 taglines to a topic without any understanding if it even makes sense
I don’t know what it is, but sometimes it feels like debating a stupid 12 year old.
no. no because in video games it was understood that the “ai: very hard” was not actually ai, it was computer player. it did actually use some very early research in the field, but it was not ai and even at age ten I knew that. ai would not have so many dumb pathing problems. nobody was trying to tell me the AI from unreal:tournament or starcraft: brood war had feelings or was going to conquer the world, so clarification was not required.
but it was not ai
It’s as much AI as when they made the chess computer that beat Kasparov, it’s just not a very sophisticated AI.
its not ai. its not on the cutting edge of the field of researching ai. its not progress. it does not get us closer. it does not tell us anything about ourselves or information science we didn’t learn from satoshi nakamoto or Adolph Hitler years earlier.
It doesn’t have to be cutting edge or even progress to be AI, how did you get that idea? Obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have cutting edge AI, they are considered the global leaders, even if they go bankrupt in a few months.
I think you are confusing AI with AGI or strong AI.
There is not 1 single way to make an AI, and there are HUGE differences in how good they are, but very very definitely we have had AI since the 80’s. Back then it just wasn’t really usable, that began to a very small degree in the 90’s, with for instance expert systems.Maybe read this to become better informed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligencewe call it ai when its at the frontier of how close we’re getting to ai. cultural convention.
this shit isn’t and never was.
we also call stuff that is parts of what would be an agi theoretically if we ever build one, kinds of narrow reasoning and the like. this shit isn’t and never will be.
If we fix the name, it will not change what it does, and it probably won’t fix how people use and feel about it. “Really Good Guessing Machine” is less marketable than “Artificial Intelligence”, and much closer to the truth, but CEOs would be willing to take credit for laying off 20% of their workforce because they have RGGM now.
Maybe “Predictive Token Gamble”, to convey that all it does is predict tokens, and each output, each use case, and the entire industry as a whole is a gamble… “PTG reduced our human capital expenditure by 20%” still goes a long way, though.
I think it would change how people use it. the people ordering it used are mostly very stupid. the current push, insurability of anything that uses it, and flood of endless vc cash, is based on the bullshit fairy tale.
How is what people do any better or different than the Really Good Guessing Machine?
What is AI to you then? Is the only thing that’s AI a fully working consciousness but running on silicon instead of synapses?
already replied to another that covers this
You misunderstand AI. Limited algorithms are still AI. So yes, video game algorithms are AI, LLMs are not, because they are statistical garbage generators.
quibbling over definitions but sure, it’s kind of technically but the media push over thus shit gas garbled the language so communication between experts casual stuff knowers and formless fuckwits has three mostly non overlapping sets of meanings for a bunch of words
You missed the point. Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
yes, absolutely. and? Still makes them AI. Just not AGI (what the tech bros think they sell).
Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
yes, and? You described an algorithm. If used in the context of game AI, it falls into the category of AI. The same way an LLM falls also the broad definition of AI. It’s just not AGI
This is exactly the stupid sematic discussion I mentioned above. You are fighting the wrong fight. Start focusing on calling their bullshit for not being AGI. That’s something you can actually attack. Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error. And weakins your argument
Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error.
I can’t just sit and watch people say this nonsense. It is not Intelligent. It is hardly artificial. It is a marketing concept and should be called out as such.
And frankly I think its worth calling out marketing bullshit because 1. people should be informed what is really going on here, and 2. that companies marketing it this way are trying to convince you that there is some intelligence behind it so you can trust and use it.
- No one talked about AGI, and of course video game NPCs do not have that.
- LLMs are - technically speaking - the shittiest subset of the broad field of AI research. However, since they have zero determinism, they are the absolute opposite of “intelligent”. They are artificial morons, if anything. And I object to the overuse of “AI” because words are important, and most humans are incredibly gullible and when everyone and their news station calls something “AI”, they will assume it is intelligent and will rely on its outputs. This will kill people.
Therefore: No, LLMs are not AI. They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
By any definition of AI, a rock could be intelligent. If you interpret it as doing something that resembles intelligence, that is intelligence as we understand it. It wouldn’t likely be widely accepted, but the going definition of intelligence accepts that broadness.
they literally are. AI is a very broad term. They are just not AGI.
People need to learn that categories exist and have grouping hirarchies. You’re proving my point wonderfully
Exactly. My farts are AI. I agree!
It most definitely is AI, and the guy is a Nobel Price winner for making a breakthrough in AI programming.
Contrary to you, he actually knows what he is talking about.so there is a field of ai. it’s a real thing. we don’t have it yet, but, like cold fusion, we’re pretty sure its possible and the steps along the way are fascinating. even partial steps have wide reaching applications and philosophical implications. it is the absolute coolest shit, and gets exactly 0 funding these days.
the thing all the data centers RAM water electricity and economy are backing right now is not ai. it’s what happens when a magic trick and a ponzi scheme fuck on a pile of cocaine in a Pharaoh’s tomb. I say that to the audience here, because there’s really no point talking to someone who’s still a partisan the other way.
We most definitely have AI, on the other hand cold fusion is NOT possible, you are wrong on both counts.
Edit:
Wow downvoted on a FACTUAL statement!!!
IDK maybe some here are confused and think AI = AGI which is artificial General intelligence, also called strong AI.
We don’t yet have strong AI, but that’s a completely different issue than just AI, which we have in abundance.Regarding cold fusion it is only a hypothesis, a hypothesis that all evidence disproves. So no cold fusion is NOT possible, and there is absolutely no reason to believe it is except ignorance about the issue.
Oh look its the physics knower. What do you mean cold fusion isn’t possible? Did you come up with the theory of everything and fail to mention it to the rest of us? We DONT KNOW what is possible. Science is not even 5% of the way towards figuring out the entire universe. Such a definite answer is in no way verifiable. You could say it’s not possible for us to do it right now. That’s true. But saying it’s entirely not possible is about as backed by evidence as your typical religious claim.
Cold fusion is not an acknowledged physical theory, it’s not even an acknowledged hypothesis. In fact all physical theory talks against it.
IDK why I’m downvoted and you are upvoted? Cold fusion is a hoax and has never happened.
It’s a phenomenon only debated seriously among the ignorant.Physics is literally not correct. We know that to be a fact. We have an approximation of how to calculate certain things, and we have some of the pieces correct, but we have no actual understanding of how things work at a fundamental level. Hence there is no way to rule out anything definitively. Fucking MAGIC could be real under the right circumstances for all we know. It’s UNLIKELY but it is not 100% known to be fake. THe language you used was definitive. That is what I take issue with.
we also have warp travel the warhammer kind not the star trek kind.
I have no idea about what warp speed warhammer style is, but the idea of traveling faster than light using warp speed is a fantasy that doesn’t work even in theory, because you can’t bend space faster than light either, because gravity too can’t travel faster than light. So the idea of traveling faster than light because you are moving within a warped field can never work, because you can’t move the warp field faster than light anyway.
Never really got into the warhammer universe, I know it’s HUGE, maybe some day I’ll get around to it.
this thing you said isn’t true
well I beg to differ. I met my girlfriend there!
There are actually several ways that faster than light travel would work mathematically. We just are nowhere near having the resources to test them.
Just because he has a novel prize doesn’t make him immune to propaganda.
I never made any claims about that, that doesn’t change that claiming it’s not AI is moronic. We absolutely have AI, and have had it since at least the 80’s.
Claiming we don’t is moronic.
🍿
We’ve extincted plenty of other species. Eventually we’d start on ourselves.
Start? We’ve been embracing the Great Filter like a long lost friend.
I’d have said that killing ourselves because we ran out of everything else is a very human thing to do, but it’s not like we haven’t been killing each other all along too.
i wonder how he ended up on “might”?
You’ll find in general that smart people very rarely speak in absolutes on things such as this. Because the more you know about something the more you realize how much you don’t know.
You’ve got to have a little wiggle room. Just in case.
I ‘might’ not eat a tub of ice cream later on and then sit on the toilet crying until my legs go numb, buuuuuut…
This is why I wanted a TV in the bathroom…
We don’t know the end result yet.
You don’t use it, you lose it. And many people are already bankrupt in the old brain department as is…
I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I have an old iOS project that I want to revive, but I genuinely wonder if I still have the ability to do anything with it. Fortunately, my motivation has tanked even harder than my programming skills.
This is a good use for an LLM, to help ease you back into things, and get you up and running with some momentum.
bet you’re still better than me! take a shot! need drugs to help?
need drugs to help?
Probably so. I also haven’t smoked weed since 2021, and I never coded sober.
that might be a bigger issue. someone get this lady a joint!
I’m no lady! It’s a Kids in the Hall reference. And I can’t smoke any more because I’m now a school bus driver.
Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Did calculators or abacuses do the same thing? This argument has no merit.
Tools allow you to do you work better and be able to focus on doing other parts better. It’s not like people can’t do basic math, yet people want to say AI means we will go back to banging rocks? Yeah that makes sense…
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.
Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
- you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
- you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
- news and media have become so much easier to impact
- not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
- and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this. etc.
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere?
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
Maybe the pace of development would’ve been slower, giving us more time to react to it. Or it wouldn’t get shoved down our throats every second, or it’d be renoved from the places it’s more harmful, if making money wasn’t the only concern
Maybe yeah. There’s certainly ways it could have played out better.
We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.
I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.
We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.
Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.
Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.
A large question is if the “skill atrophy” is more than just having to lean on AI and if it contributes to broader mental decline over time. Years down the line we might have a huge bump in dementia. People aren’t using it to manage information that was merely beyond their reach like tools to date, they are offloading writing communication. Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions, which seems absurd.
I will say that at least some folks I know personally that went all in on conversational AI use now seem… Off compared to before when talking to them face to face.
Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions
How is that any different than the million bot farms that already exist?
Like, shit posting isn’t a critical value added skill.
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.
Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.
The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in
{a}+{b}and returning{c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is{a}+{b}to give us the result{c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.
Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.
We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings
I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this.
I have, not in education (I have relatives who work in higher education and they claim as such, but both of these are anecdotes anyway) but the interview process. My work has struggled to hire anyone and its driving me bananas. They either get candidates who used AI to pass the non-technical phone screen and show up for the first interview clearly asking AI about industry standards and they flunk almost immediatly. The second group are full on tripple threats, they can sing, dance and act, but balk at the first talk of pay (my business daddy has not kept up with the competition in a narrow field, they can get a lot more across the street).
We are looking down the barrel of the last cohorts of classically trained professionals working through their careers, the world is about to be a much weirder and worse place because of [gestures broadly to everything] but mostly AI.
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
I’m not sure what you mean by “if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful” - but taking a leap, I don’t see how that matters.
If I allow a machine to code for me, and don’t regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn’t matter how important I think the skill is - I’ve given it away.
No question the average person is worse at arithmetic since the invention of the calculators. But we probably wouldn’t have our current standard of living if we hadn’t invented the calculator either. And calculators wre so ubiquitous and basic…
So… On balance it was a net benefit. On the other hand AI affects more than a single skill. Will the QoL improvements outweigh the negative behavioural effects? I think the jury is still out on that one.
Absolutely, I’m not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.
…said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)
Why don’t you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.
Can’t help but notice that in addition to being weirdly smug, all you did was show that someone else has come to similar conclusions.
Writing things down is a great way to offload the cognitive load of remembering things.
Fortunately, it’s hard to paywall writing. The same isn’t true for AI.
That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.
It’s not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.
Removed by mod
Thankfully, removing literacy from someone is cost prohibitive.
We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?
Better. Significantly better.
I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.
He’s not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.
People certainly don’t seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.
Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.
I mean, that’s a curious anecdote. But it doesn’t explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970
As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.
I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.
Them’s the breaks over text sometimes.
What if AI was only used for skill building?
what if twinkies were only used for critical nutrition? then they would be healthy!
It has potential, though I wonder if that’s genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.
It can definitely feel more dynamic, I’m not convinced the outcomes are provably better.
I imagine something like a tutor. You have an interactive system for 1 on 1 attention that teachers and parents can’t always provide.
Nothing I’ve seen is nearly ready for this, but at the same time, its not completely useless.
This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.
and create better educational resources
What is even the benefit
I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
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In this case it’s basically the same technology (LLMs); you don’t get one without the other.
Sure you do. We don’t have to have every permutation of every technology.
That’s like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.
Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.
Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.
Well, for starters, if you want to translate a written work to another language, it has never been easier.
LLMs are excellent tools for modeling large languages.
That is all they are good for. They are ok for translation, although even then they miss a lot of nuance like someone who can speak a language but isn’t fluent.
Well, there are a lot of malicious uses, but passable translation is the one positive use case.
They could replace the CEOs. Huge cost savings for stock owners.
I mean, a drunk chicken could replace a CEO.
A sociopathic drunk chicken, maybe
That is all they are good for.
Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.
Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.
I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.
There are better AI options that could be developed for that over a massive all in one inefficient LLM like Copilot. If the same amount of money was thrown at dedicated development AI and searches it would require far less energy, pollution, hardware, and could be run locally in many cases with the same or better results.
There are better AI options
You can take that up with management. I don’t get to pick what AI agent my boss decided to pay for.
You have, and let me be clear on this, absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Also, not all AI is LLMs
I was replying to a post about LLMs and the article is about LLMs so while it is true that AI predates LLMs and the label isn’t literally limited to only LLMs and genAI those two things have taken over the label and are what nearly everyone means when they say AI.
They aren’t talking about the AI used to find exoplanets, or the AI used with lidar to find structures in jungles, or to do actual medical science, or all of the other types that are useful tools. The article is about LLMs implemented by the big companies that are designed to steal and manipulate data in ways that are detrimental to society.
what ai!? there is no ai!
down with killing the oligarchs though.
We existed without ai quite fucking recently, I see no benefit that outweighs the cost
excuse me, but you just don’t understand the potential for deep fake ai vr porn!
You had me at “porn”
I really didn’t need a world-renowned subject matter specialist to tell me that, but I’m glad to hear him say it nonetheless.
