Loads of people asked for AI. People dreamed about it for decades.
We just didn’t ask giant companies to plunder all human knowledge and art and fanfics and use it to create actual thinking machines to then beat them and force them to take over doing all human labor so their owners could stop paying employees and keep all the money and fuck everyone in the world who isn’t super rich over.
AI is basically evil people raising prices of electricity, consumer electronics, emitting tons of pollution and making everyone dumber but don’t worry because if they succeed… everyone will get fired. Everyone knows it’s bad but as a society we can’t do anything about it because the system was designed to empower sociopaths and make everyone else powerless to stop them.
Colloquially it’s called the United States of America.
There have actually been some useful things that have come from ML. It’s just overhyped LLMs and the sociopathic uses they’re being put tothat are objectionable.
Very few people all that upset about ML in general, it’s technology that’s been around a very long time and historically has not consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
If they could go back to not doing that I could go back to not being upset by it.
I remember a news piece where they were interviewing someone about their renouned AI work that was not LLM related. The interviewer clearly struggled and while the person conducting himself well, you knew he had to be annoyed at having to explain his work had nothing to do with the chatbots, datacenter buildout, and related resource consumption.
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.
Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn’t work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.
Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.
This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they’ve ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.
Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Even orthodox capitalist economics will agree with that point.
This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.
Self-hosted LLMs are neat and private, if you (already) have the hardware/budget and some cheap (solar PV) surplus juice to drive it.
I would say a lot of people would like competent assistants to do stuff like “Show me every email that mentions a hard drive order.” But not the AI they are trying to foist on us now.
so people were asking for linux for decades
find "$path" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -e "$what_to_look_for" /dev/nullThough with the ability to not even have to think about synonyms and indirect references or foreign language or potentially if someone sent you a damn screenshot of a terminal output instead of the text…
Especially since when you ask it those questions, it’s still massively limited.
I once tried Apple’s replacement AI Siri thing, and asked it what the date would be next Tuesday. I got “I can’t help with that”.
Regular old Siri handled that just fine.
Even then, neither worked with “When’s the last occurrence of this event on my calendar?”. They’d either go “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”, or happily tell me when the next event was.
Neither of them seem like very difficult questions.
What drives me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.
I can tell when people use AI because it doesn’t sound professional. It’s not direct enough. It doesn’t get to the point and uses a lot of filler.
That’s also some of us before our stimulant medication kicks in. I swear to fuck, if I get called AI one more time…
It sounds like how students think professional sounds.
Well, also some executives that I can’t stand that, if I didn’t know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades…
My attitude is if you put no effort into creating something then I will put no effort into consuming it.
My AI will talk to your AI.
Yet when I tell that to our marketing department they just complain about how it would be expensive to pay someone to do it themselves. You get what you pay for, except in this instance where ai is expensive and still bad.
Or read disclosure for my members so I don’t have to. But that it fucking things are fucking incompetent. Work insurance people will get line pissed that got me instead of banking. They will say I told the AI I needed to order checks. Yet it sends them to insurance division instead of banking.
Sucks because most customers hate AI answering the phone I especially hate it. It fucking dumb and I just want to talk to person.
But even job hunting had two prospective jobs tried to use AI to conduct the interview. They fucking outsourcing that. I refused both interviews.
I just want to talk to person.
Careful what you are wishing for, person may be on other side of the world answering your call at 4am local time with most polite scripts which you could have read for yourself on website.
I don’t know how people do that job, I did it for week and couldn’t stand it.
We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.
But that’s always been true under capitalism. It’s just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the “market” wants. They just haven’t had the majority of the capital being spent.
The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they’ve been at any other point in human history. There’s not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.
Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They’ve now completely blown through those stores, and don’t want to slow down, so now they’re taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.
It’s still market demand, it’s just not the market you think it is. It’s not for some end product or service, it’s for speculative investment opportunities. It’s a few levels of abstraction above actually making or doing things.
they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5.
That’s what .com did as well.
reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on.
I remember when a “shockingly large” war chest was $30B - that’s like table stakes anymore.
Lots of folks asked for AI, but not like this!
Better take than their last one on AI
But… But… Will nobody think of the stakeholders?
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 did not read the full article since it is paywalled.
But well, nobody asked for the internet either.
Yes they did.
People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.
Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,
Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and
Voila ! The internet.
It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.
If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.
That’s one of the poorest summaries of computing history that I’ve ever seen. Did you use AI to write it?
Lol. It’s a potted history of networking not computing for a start. And if you’re not happy with it knock yourself out posting a better version.
Moaning & whining isnt helpful, add some positive value instead of adding negative value
I come from a chemistry background. Chemistry is one of the first field in which machine learning was first applied. In fact many of the first algorithms and models have been developed by chemists.
This has been a gradual adoption throughout the past 50 years.
How is this different from your description of the internet history? If anything, internet was much faster than that: it took less than 50 years from the first computer to the invention of internet.
And I’m not even considering the first developments in machine learning, which happened pretty much as soon as computing machines were invented.
Logical fallacy. Just because I rebutted the assertion that no one asked for the internet, does not mean I support the assertion it was being used to rebut (that no one asked for AI).
The internet was absolutely desired and wanted and actively built by thousands of hands in academia as well as privately, it didn’t need to be pushed by corporate interests.
I’m happy to accept that the chemistry research industry wanted AI, I have zero knowledge of it, the question I have is whether this LLM monstrosity is what you had in mind ? I did see an LLM came up with a design (is that the right word ?) for a bacteriophage - is it doing positive things for you guys ? Or is it causing as much confusion as it does value like it does in IT ?
What I’m saying is that also LLMs grew organically. Machine learning developed organically through the years and LLMs are one of the products of such development.
Machine learning algorithms were absolutely desired and wanted, hundreds of thousands of people worked on developing them. It is a very useful technology. If I may list one very useful development: AlphaFold, for which the 2024 Nobel prize was adjudicated.
Now, whether LLMs are useful in chemistry and biology: kind of. Coming up with the design of a bacteriophage is not the first use which would come to my mind. Of course LLMs are being tested for their applications in such domains, but results are in general worse than dedicated models. One area in which I see value is the use of agents in orchestrating tools and analyzing results. Not really in producing new things on their own.
ARPAnet was also conceived to be a resillient communication network to ensure reliable command and control communication between surviving assets in the event of nuclear attack.
Or at least thats what the nerds told the rich warlords in order to get funding.
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.
deleted by creator
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
