The Age of AI has begun

I guess one of my own issues with AI, is seeing how the tools we already have, have been twisted by greedy, ruthless people (many of whom are on this very venue).<p>I was one of the people that started off in tech with dreams of a digital Nirvana. I ignored the &quot;negative naysayers,&quot; and sallied forth, with an open heart, and hope for the future.<p>I&#x27;m really quite disappointed in what we&#x27;ve done with these marvelous tools. As I&#x27;ve gotten older, wiser, and a lot more cynical, I can tell you that, if I had known, then, about human nature, what I know now, it would have been entirely predictable.<p>I think we&#x27;ll be seeing AI-driven scammers, calling and messaging us, almost incessantly, I think we&#x27;ll be seeing AI-generated political manipulation, like fake videos and audio, of politicians and public figures, I think we&#x27;ll be seeing AI-driven promotional campaigns, and almost undetectably subtle media manipulation, like corporations seeding news stories with their talking points. I also think that we&#x27;ll be seeing AI-driven workplaces, where it will be hard to be simply human, and AI-driven surveillance, by authoritarian regimes (and people right here, will happily sell it to them).<p>I want to believe that we&#x27;ll do good, but bad pays so well, and there&#x27;s outright scorn for doing stuff for any reason other than pure, personal profit.

&gt; In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.<p>&gt; The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface<p>&gt; The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI<p>I guess it&#x27;s not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it&#x27;s interesting he never mentions &quot;the internet&quot; in this list.

Considering everything, it sounds more like another big wegde hammered into the divide. This will just make the rich richer, because now they can even save on artists, writers and other &quot;expenses&quot;, all of which they can just add to their bonus now. All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer.<p>Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did not get contract extensions because of AI, stock photo sites that are just flooded with AI content, and managers clearly using gpt to write half their mails.

<i>I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.</i><p>But he fails to mention in the risks how AI can also be a cause of increase for some of the world&#x27;s worst inequalities due to failure to have representative datasets, or simply by creating an ever increasing technological gap between classes(just 2 off the top of my head).

&gt; The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example.<p>Every sci-fi movie show any of those jobs as replaced by AI (or robots). Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning).<p>Those jobs will be replaced, not because there is a human that will be replaced, but because there is no human doing them. There are plenty of people in need of education, caring or just loneliness.

I like Bill Gates - out of the major iconic tech personas, he is one of the most interesting to me. Yes he kind of didn&#x27;t see internet or phones coming, so it&#x27;s not like he is an oracle, but he is right on many issues too. I think he is right on this one as well.<p>The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training &quot;medical AIs&quot; that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly, sounds madness to tell someone to rely on a LLM for medical advice today, although I can kind of imagine it happening over time as we get better at taming them.

I just had my first assistance from ChatGPT today, courtesy of a &quot;junior&quot; (I would prefer &quot;less-experienced&quot;) engineer. He wanted to click a web button as part of his work on improving our steam engine (ok, calibration system) so I worked out the URL for the button and the appropriate curl incantation to trigger it. Gave him the URL and suggest he twiddled some python to do it.<p>About an hour later he came back, told me he&#x27;d asked ChatGPT to write the code for him and yes, it did work.<p>Anyway, thing is it really made me think about how much of the grunt&#x2F;support work can potentially be offloaded like this; in this case it really did save us both some time.<p>On the other hand, when I&#x27;ve played with it before, it got stuff really badly wrong (ever tried ego-surfing with it?).

&gt;I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.<p>huh, closeAI is certainly not helping at this moment in time.

I thought this was a pretty good post, but I&#x27;m still pretty shocked that people as intelligent as Gates don&#x27;t spend more time on the potential downsides. To be clear, he <i>does</i> highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just &quot;handwavy&quot; in my opinion.<p>What is most baffling to me is that the <i>highlight</i> of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all honesty I see the exact opposite being more likely. Our current economic systems just fundamentally can&#x27;t deal with ever larger swaths of the population being unable to compete with AI. And despite all the answers I&#x27;ve seen of &quot;well, duh, that&#x27;s because our current economic systems are so broken!&quot;, I have yet to see any sort of plausible answer that addresses how we get from our current version of capitalism to something else where all the spoils just don&#x27;t go to the few people that control the strongest AI implementations (that doesn&#x27;t involve massive amounts of strife and despair).<p>Perhaps technologists, even ones as smart as Gates, are just too siloed in their worldview of technology being an ever increasing force for good. I actually find this particularly surprising from Gates, given how he&#x27;s seen first hand that large swaths of the world blame him for the pandemic, or for wanting to vaccinate us with &quot;microchips&quot;, due to the power of propaganda through social media.

It looks like AI is having self-driving hype moment. It works neatly on simple roads while you keep your hands on the steering wheel and watch the car. There are wowzers but the whole Internet feels like ChatGPT is about to disrupt the very fabric of the Universe.<p>Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.

&gt; AGI doesn’t exist yet<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure about that!<p>This &quot;ground truth&quot; model doing the rounds seems to be outperforming all other models in their respective papers!<p>;p

Or it&#x27;s the fall before the next AI Winter.

Oh <i>please</i>.<p>This is such a trope at this point.<p>We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was,<p>&gt; That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing.<p>It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got the gist of the number right in the first half of its response, and it even cites essentially the right source, the claim it says the citation backs … is not backed by the citation. It then goes on to equate it to something that it isn&#x27;t related to.<p>It&#x27;s words, strung together: i.e., bullshit. The higher-level reasoning (like that the math needs to work out, or the citation should actually have the cited claim) are utterly absent, and will never be present in these models no matter how much data you train them on.<p>The response is at <i>best</i> wrong, and at worst, <i>fools someone into believing that it knows what it is talking about.</i><p>But yeah, this is going to replace me.<p>The actual article is … pretty long-winded, and really lacks specific, concrete examples as to how AI will <i>actually</i> move a needle somewhere. Take this chunk,<p>&gt; <i>Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement.</i><p>(Wikipedia <i>hasn&#x27;t had a meaningful effect?!</i> [citation needed] there. Wikipedia affected my own achievements, and it has been a <i>while</i> since I was in school. I can only think that such a high quality encyclopedia is of immense value to students, particularly if you&#x27;re not lucky enough … old enough? … to have an <i>actual</i> encyclopedia — even the use of the word actual here exposes how much effect Wikipedia has had!)<p>&gt; <i>But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.</i><p>We&#x27;ve been saying this about ads for decades. The last ad I remember seeing was &quot;The Mandela Effect: In Queen&#x27;s &#x27;We Are The Champtions <i>(sic)</i>&#x27; He Doesn&#x27;t Say &#x27;…Of The World&#x27;&quot; (<i>(sic: the ad title is factually inaccurate)</i> ; … this is no more related to my interests than any of the many Taboola and Taboola-like junk ads at the bottom of half the Internet now. I have no idea where that ad ponzi scheme even <i>ends.</i>)<p>&gt; <i>There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments.</i><p>And we&#x27;re 3 paras in with very little meat here: the only example is &quot;comments on student papers&quot;. Given the inability to reason … no, I don&#x27;t think AI will be evaluating papers anytime soon. (The whole passage … if not the article … feels like a human vaguely touched up the output from GPT.)<p>And the entire idea of trying to help poor unfortunate souls in desperate places with AI feels very much like God vomit from a Cory Doctorow tale.

Unlike Bill Gates, I believe that this AI is the most revolutionary technology in human history, but at the same time, I am also concerned about its impact. The potential for AI to automate a significant number of jobs in a short period of time is alarming and unprecedented. It is ironic that the jobs we once believed to be the most difficult for AI to replace, such as those requiring high levels of human intelligence and creativity, are now at risk of being taken over.

&quot;will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:&gt; prompt&quot;. Isn&#x27;t it &quot;C:\&gt;&quot;? Did bill really write this post? :-)

I like to think its more the age of the Genuine Personal Digital Assistant has begun. The LLMs are great at assisting you to do your job but they wont take over yet.

The comments here are particularly disappointing. Relitigating old Microsoft debates (all the way down to adolescent insults — instead of Micro$oft we have (c)opywrong), blaming Microsoft for global inequality (!), multiple references to AI being “bullshit” because a model didn’t perform up to snuff on a particular task on a particular try.<p>HN used to (this is a new account, but I am not new to HN) embrace technology, optimism, and the intersection of the two. Now it’s a race to see who can demonstrate their bona fides by sneering enough or affecting enough disillusionment. It’s really disappointing! And yes, I realize I’m not being the change I want to see, but it is so disheartening to see so many grumpy people racing to tear others down.

My primary concern with recent advances in AI is the imbalance it will create. Most optimistic views on AI come from people already employed by the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.), and one their main arguments is that while they acknowledge AI will displace numerous jobs, it will also generate superior ones. However, the main problem arises when these &quot;better&quot; jobs replace the lost ones, but are performed by fewer individuals. One developer will be capable of accomplishing the work of at least three, and the same applies to lawyers, analysts, and so on.

&gt; I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology.<p>Of course, the LLM <i>is</i> just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks <i>as well as</i> thousands or millions of test samples.<p>It&#x27;s certainly possible to formulate a biology question that a decent student would be able to answer easily, but LLM would be helpless at (by carefully choosing heterodox wording &amp; structure).<p>The Age of Bullshit continues unabated.

UBI, UBI, UBI ! Then who’s going to clean the toilet? yes that’s exactly what needs to happen right now. Less supply of workforce, high demand for automation. Less carbon footprint, long term. Whoever has better Ai will win any major future global conflict. They will be fought by drones and robot spiders. I feel like every piece of puzzle is coming together. Look around. Everyone’s getting old. No babies being born. Yes we are at THAT point.

&gt; Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year.<p>One great first step <i>Open</i>AI can take towards this is by actually making their models open. As long as the models are intentionally kept back and intentionally profited from by already wealthy private citizens, inequality will grow, not shrink.<p>Not to mention that people in poor countries (which as Gates cites as the &quot;hotspots&quot; for inequality in health) won&#x27;t be able to use some HTTP API based in US&#x2F;SF. Not just that latency will kill requests, some of the places don&#x27;t even have internet connectivity. How is OpenAI supposed to help those communities if the &quot;inequality fighter GPT-4&quot; is gate-kept behind a centralized HTTP API?

I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it&#x27;s doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.

A few paragraphs in, we get this:<p>&gt; The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example.<p>First, he&#x27;s already shown how teaching jobs can be easily eliminated by AI, just a few paragraphs above. And &#x27;caring for patients&#x27; and &#x27;supporting the elderly&#x27; sound sort ok, until you realize that these joblines are all sharply constrained by available funding. Further competition will drive wages down further. Not to mention that an out-of-work software engineer would probably make a terrible nurse, even if working under the watchful eye of HospitalAI or whatever.<p>Moreover, these are all already underfunded pink-collar jobs -- which means you&#x27;re going to have a lot of men that, for reasons of identity or machismo or inclination or what-have-you, simply don&#x27;t want to do. We already have a crisis in college &amp; career performance with men, especially young men. Telling them that they will be helping dress their grandparents for $16&#x2F;h, with zero opportunity to advance, is probably not going to go down great.<p>Statistically, this is precisely the demographic most inclined to cause political unrest. Further declines in opportunity will therefore probably lead to a rise in, for example, far-right militias, QAnon-like phenomena, and attempted coups.<p>[aside: Jan 6 will probably be seen as a &#x27;Columbine moment&#x27; -- a singular event that spawned countless imitations, to which we will become so inured that they will become part of the fabric of the evening news.(Perhaps the Onion will make an article for coups that it recycles every coup.)]<p>So, once again, we have an AI-celebratory article that sounds <i>great</i> until you press it on the question of: what will we be doing with our time, and how will any of us make a living doing it?<p>Billg has no coherent idea.<p>Socioeconomically, we&#x27;re the proverbial racetrack greyhound that caught the mechanical rabbit. The game is over, the greyhound is confused, and everybody is checking their losses, wondering if there will be another race any time soon.<p>EDIT: light revision for clarity (broke out the paragraph beginning &#x27;Jan 6&#x27; as an aside, removed the word &#x27;ever&#x27; in front of &#x27;any time soon&#x27;, and cut redundant&#x2F;reiterative first paragraph) at 13:32PDT Mar 21

AI when it becomes powerful enough will be used as tool by the world leaders; the same as the atom bomb was used as a weapon to end WW2 by beating the advisory into the ground. This is the same repeating story throughout written history why should it change now because Mr. Gates and some other philanthropists are optimists about human nature.

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I’m more inclined to call it the Age of Disinformation

given all the world&#x27;s pain and suffering that has been caused by the GUI, i fear AI for the first time...

&gt; Risks and problems with AI<p>One of the biggest risks right now is viruses created by transformers trained on known viruses and anti-virus binaries and databases.<p>Humans created relatively simple viruses which took down hospitals, etc.. Transformer can make new &quot;super&quot; viruses and keep fighting the anti-viruses&#x2F;firewalls in real-time with high-quality custom attacks.

Is it a breakthrough in AI or affordable hardware?

&gt; it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more<p>Privacy is the least talked about aspect of our current AI systems from what I&#x27;ve gathered. Perhaps we&#x27;re sleepwalking into yet another surveillance capitalism nightmare and handing over data blindly to these systems, where they learn our preferences, private thoughts, habits, etc (And store all that forever).<p>Anyone reluctant to &#x27;feed the beast&#x27; as it were, and starve these AI systems of personal data that could be potentially weaponized at a future date for nefarious purposes?

Title did remind me of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;R1x4JkZTfPs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;R1x4JkZTfPs</a>

AI is little better today than in the early 1990&#x27;s, mostly it&#x27;s a barn broadside hitting dung fest.

Bill also said most meetings would be happening in the metaverse in two years

What would Daddy Marx say?

It’s the other way around: tests and materials which we believed made humans distinctive from AI and our “models” of human measurement or standardized tests, seem to fail when examined seriously. They are purported somewhat to prevent computer cheating because we enforce conditions that allow us to claim the results are accurate.<p>Clearly that is not the case, and the tests or measurements themselves lack much or all value.<p>What most people believe makes someone’s opinion valuable (economic production, social wanking, allowing and enforcing inequality) is ironically what prevents most of these people from being in a room with actually intelligent people.<p>Take the case of Grigori Perelman: mathematical genius who created insights into fractal geometry and chaos mathematics who now contributes nothing but his personal disgust at the state of the world and how willing people are to cheat and steal.<p>Bill Gates has made a lot of money, but he has never made any deep insights or valuable contributions. He can make more money but history will bury the man because he is nothing more than someone who became an exalted dung beetle of wealth. Mindless, brainless, and stacking that shit.<p>I find this article in the same vein: mostly some shitty business crap that will extol it’s fecal values to the investors and businessmen who are now immune to their own <i>stink</i>.