hckrnws
Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
(businessinsider.com)
640
540
by signa11
by signa11
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
But... he did have the benefit of two strong examples of what NOT to do along with several days to think about it. It's to his credit that he understood and acted on it.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
> 74% of students who answered feel their future in this industry is at risk. The top fears were no entry level jobs, laid off seniors competing for the same jobs they're going for, and AI displacement.
There is so much anxiety for the future of society and it's a real shame this seems to be going on ignored.
[dead]
[dead]
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
Right... which they aren't going to be helped by continuing to find external causes or external enemies which are keeping them down instead of focusing on what they can control and what they can do to make money or make careers.
It's nice and it feels good to say these things, but it's not going to get those same students a job or help them build the next startup. Of course those students matter, and they should feel as such, but if they take away the wrong lesson here than Mr. Wozniak is doing them a disservice. Populism is incredibly dangerous.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
The kind of rhetoric where you twist what people said or agreed with into something else so that you can mock them ... is the dangerous populism.
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".
There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
A good example of a problem in the video is she makes the strong claim (multiple times) that America was founded on anti-intellectualism. Even stronger, that it's the only one. She jumps from saying it was ingrained in the culture before the constitution, then talks about the founding fathers, and moves straight to "early 19th century" with the discussion of Jackson. Jackson was president from 1829-1837. She's playing a bit fast and loose with the timelines here. Importantly, by the 8 minute mark she's done supporting the claim but there's no strong evidence. Then she launches into more with the education system but it feels weird that she's stressing things like sitting in rows. Europe has... classrooms too.
That isn't to say that everything she says is hogwash. But I don't exactly buy that this was all planned and coordinated. There's much better explanations than a deep state. As George Carlin put it, you don't need a deep state when everyone in power goes to the same schools and hangs in the same social circles; they end up thinking alike. Bubbles, not coordinated action. This also adequately explains the dysfunction across the US education system where different regions have different styles and curriculum. It would sound silly to say that Europe was designed for dysfunction with France having a different curriculum than Germany. The US was highly federated and became more centralized. That fracturization perpetuated through to today. It's also easier to buy this explanation given the premise of dysfunction and lack of critical thinking.
The reality of it all is much more complex than she explains. Maybe she left that because it's hard to convey in a video and is less engaging (which would undermine what she's trying to teach). Or maybe she didn't do enough research (she is a self described polyglot. Though she also criticized polyglots).
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.
(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")
[dead]
FWIW, I found:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
An interesting listen on this world (which I assume goes way beyond Epstein (sans sex trafficking) in elite circles) of favors, status seeking and influence peddling between cultural, academic, political and financial elites.
There are graphic descriptions in Virginia Giuffre’s diary entries as well.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000221...
Y’all are welcome to offer a counterpoint, and yet…
I don't know about mentioning that one.
Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love
https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
[deleted]
[deleted]
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
[deleted]
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.
To quote Adam Grant, "Procrastination is an emotional management problem not a time management problem"
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
[dead]
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
He's putting money where his mouth is.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?
Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.
The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.
The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
[deleted]
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
I live and work in Europe.
We have internet here.
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
[dead]
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
What jobs? The job market is anemic AND these students are literally being told that jobs as we know them are soon to be a thing of the past. At the same time, no one is explaining how they are supposed to pay off debt or put food on the table outside of vague hand waves UBI or AI creating vast prosperity.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/23/altman-you-t...
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?
Altman is closer to a storybook evil CEO than he is to an average "AI cheerleader".
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
Do you expect the enlightenment project to be resumed and finished in a year? Or do you imply some religion-based worldview where the value is derived from God, flesh, nature?
No sir, grim times are coming. We can only hope that the current AI wave bites more than it can swallow.
Our joy and suffering depends on our ability to fulfil our basic needs like shelter and food, and in current socioeconomic environment that ability intimately depends on the ability to create wealth, which in turn depends on our ability to provide value to others.
I can see both being undermined. What public policies reflecting this do you envision?
In the moral sense, sure.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
Tell that to my landlord.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
My value definitely depends on my practical utility. Everyone is capable of joy and suffering. A chicken is capable of joy and suffering.
Tell me this: in a hypothetical situation where you are going to end up on an uninhabited island and you can choose one person to go with you, who would you peek? An elderly disabled one or a person that has necessary skills to survive? Maybe utility matters?
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
That does not matter when discussing its practicality; or whether they will cause drivers to lose jobs.
Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
Are we already questioning the value of a human brain because of Large Language Models? Glorified search over a vector space? This is actual psychosis
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
[dead]
[deleted]
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
Thankfully the people responsible have already prepared a golden parachute to land safely to destroy something else.
What the actual quack, are we being really serious? What is even happening at this point and what have I even just read. This might be worse than burning money in a fire pit.
The sad part is the perverse incentives have made it so that these datacenters and gpu's and ram prices and energy costs are going up in price for this...
Why are people tokenmaxxing? Why are these companies literally burning (actually worse) of their money and their investors money? AI psychosis, what exact reason is the cause behind such things?
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good."
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
Not unlike trying to cajole a probabilistic text generator into writing code that isn't atrocious. And failing.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
[deleted]
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
[deleted]
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757
2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586
2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.
And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them.
I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game.
But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook.
If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.
In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.
I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too.
I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts.
But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel.
Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews.
I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites.
Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster.
There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.
Live by the terrorist state of Hamas, die by the army of the Israeli democracy. Israel, where women, gays, arabs, christians, jews, atheists live side by side. And have the same rights as straight men.
Open your eyes, you stupid bastards, to what Hamas has made Gaza into.
[dead]
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
401k has never been better though. College grads don't have one yet so I can see why they're grumpy.
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
Just as I was wondering what to have for lunch.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials)
You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
This is the whole paragraph:
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.
Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Give it a bit more effort next time.
I really do not think there is a point to argue here.
Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
Yes, I can tell.
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.
Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.
Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".
In the context of the internet forum, that was an appropriate video to post.
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
I'm always blown away by people who need religion to tell right from wrong.
Like "don't use goto". That's religion.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?
They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?
Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.
[dead]
> Maybe you have to still be alive to matter?
But another part is that someone's work is distinct from their other actions. It's definitely a tough situation and confusing line to draw. Michael Jackson without a doubt made great music. But that doesn't make up for his Epstein-esk escapades. Being dead at least creates some distance as he's not directly benefiting from the revenue streams, which is part of what empowered and even encouraged that behavior (power seems to do more than just corrupt).
> What exactly are the rules here?
We're all confused. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It gets us to talk and figure it out. I certainly don't know what to do, but I'll at least recognize it isn't trivial. And I'll at least recognize that we're talking about men, not gods
> Can we move on?
Indeed, I'd like to propose we collectively meta 'move on' from always being required to restate the well-known moral, ethical, political, legal or inter-personal lapses of every notable artist, athlete, entertainer, scientist, writer, etc anytime they are mentioned, even in passing. Crazy... I know.
As you note, history is chock full of shitheads. If one looks carefully, it's certainly the vast majority of anyone very notable. So it would be far more efficient to assume they're all shitheads and instead only make special note of celebrating the rare outliers who weren't awful. If we all just assume the probable awfulness and take it as given, that would make it possible to mention whatever thing someone may have done that one year, in that one narrow professional domain, that may have been notable or slightly good - without evoking all the stupidest, worst mistakes and personal failures of their entire lives. Most humans have, at their worst moments, done some awful stupid shit they regret. But most of us are lucky enough to not also do something notable enough to have our lives and characters examined by the Internet.d
There is only ONE notable person who was a very well-known celebrity for many decades who actually WAS as close to a perfect fucking human as it gets: Mr. Fred Rogers. Please, please do not take this as a challenge to go digging through his high school yearbooks to find some stupidly offensive joke he made. I still need just ONE truly good person.
So let's all just agree that, aside from Fred Rogers, >90% of everyone else we've ever heard of was probably awful, stupid or terrible, at least at some points, on some things, to some people - even Mother Theresa (who didn't quite live long enough to avoid it). Some of their misdeeds became known in their own time (or they were lucky enough to die early, like JKF who escaped his Weinstein-esque treatment of Marylin and other women), and others were 'recontextualized' post mortem. For every other notable person still in the 'unaccused' column, it's a race between whether they are outed or forgotten first.
[deleted]
There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
There are so many examples of this. Removing small friction points that significantly make me happier and my life better. It means I have time to go grab a beer with friends instead of driving. The lightbulb was a recent example so it was fresh in my mind.
Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
Here's the link to the leaflet: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOdBRJlPe6/
Sure the AI comment brought a bit more boos, but he would be booed regardless of what he said.
Here is a link to uncut version of his speech:
Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.
[deleted]
And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.
Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.
>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.
> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?
In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.
The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money.
But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at least listen because it's a pattern rather than just luck.
>and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them
So is Taylor Swift, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from her.
When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver successful products repeatedly, like Erich Schmidt or Steve Jobs, not one trick ponies like Woz who managed to get lucky once in a completely different era, then coast the next 50+ years on past glory giving speeches.
Again, I really like Woz as a person, he's my spirit animal, but that doesn't mean he's correct and in tune on the status of the tech market, the challenges people and entrepreneurs will face today. His experience being a HW tinkerer in his garage in the 1970's isn't relevant anymore today. The world has changed massively since then.
A more modern day woz would be Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Love him or hate him he's more up to date on what the industry rewards today if you want to be a garage tinkerer made billionaire entrepreneur founder than Woz.
History tends to shows the pragmatists wiping out the luddites out of the gene pool/business market, but you are free to make your choice the way you see fit, nobody is forcing you to follow anyone.
[deleted]
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
> there should be no question about their worth as a person
Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
> Otherwise you get effects like;
> * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
> * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
Top of the line AI without educated, healthy, economically-stable children means no future for the country or our society.
The United States is falling behind in both.
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
This is literally how it went for me.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
They'd be out of company after a week
I really wish this were true.
Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
The reason we won't let AI run rampant is because it's anti-human. Even if AI can do everything, why would we allow it to? We don't have to do that, that's very much a choice.
We're at the point where we have humans advocating not only against other humans, but against themselves. If people are going to be out here arguing for self-destruction on the order of suicide, they might as well save us all the trouble and put a gun in their mouths. At least that way, humanity might have a few less pathetic losers who put computer programs before themselves.
Maybe that's harsh, but that's how I see it.
I have seen enough human incompetence that AI incompetence is beginning to look quite favorable. AI performance, at least, goes up generation to generation. If you've ever faced minimum wage workers, you know that they are, at best, consistently the same level of awful.
But if we move us faster than the goalposts, we can outrun them.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
If LLMs had shame, they'd surely not repeat mistakes (in the same context window) as much as they do.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)
$1m ARR in 30 days :)
...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.
You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
While it's technically ambiguous
The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.
[deleted]
Where is the impact on the real world? Where are the process improvements? Where are the efficiency gains? Why are prices going up, not down? If y'all are actually super-engineers now why aren't you actually making anything better? Hurry up and fix some shit already.
I'll tell you why: it's all bullshit. You aren't actually any more effective with AI than you were without it. You may feel that way, but it's delusional. I'd love to be proven wrong, you can do it by living up to the hype.
I'm confident that won't happen, though. The industry will continue to produce the same mediocre, enshittified slop it always has. It'll do it at approximately the same rate, achieving the same output per engineer, even if they make you do it via a chatbot middleman. AI has had this property for a long, long time before LLMs, before Deep Learning, while neural nets were in their infancy--before backprop even. It can do really impressive things, in the right context, but it is not a substitute for thought and work. You have to put in the effort--whether it's tuning an objective function or iteratively crafting and refining a prompt. All that was old is new again.
The difference now is that it's taken on some bizarre religious significance. These goddamn fucking acolytes running around praising the computer jesus because it speaks words and stuff!. Revolting.
If you really want to convince me, show me something better than that.
Attacking people for any reason is unacceptable. Including for being Jewish of course.
Assuming that they were truly attacked and not just disagreed with or something.
> In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish
Being Jewish or not (or any ethnicity) is irrelevant.
> and has visited Israel
Has lived in Israel.
> but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I can’t know what all people who criticize a celebrity has done. But the people I’ve seen has criticized him solely for his politics. Not for his ethnicity.
Yes, exactly for being a Zionist. Because that’s what he expresses. Not a light or milquetoast kind either. He might say that he wishes that Palestinians have a good life, blah blah. That’s irrelevant when he defends Israel’s actions and argues against the fact that Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel.
His wife served in the IDF and voluntarily, at her own request, moved from an office job in “Israel proper” to a more operative role in the West Bank because she was bored. And got to experience the excitement of being a ride-along on an armed raid in the West Bank.
And as opposed to his critics, I have seen antisemitic remarks from Ethan Klein from his time in Israel.
Defend any entity that harms children without accountability (Israeli government, Hamas) -- you've picked a side.
That's not conviction. That's tribalism.
And sure, let's litigate world affairs from a link aggregator. These aren't factions in a strategy game; they're people with guns doing horrid things to people who can't fight back, hiding behind whoever will defend them.
The killed, starved and sexually abused are actual humans. We're somehow expected to say one side is more justified in this? It's not Red vs Blue man. Gtfo.
> Defend any entity [...] The killed, starved [...]
Thousands upon thousands of pro-Palestinian have enough on their minds just lamenting the untold numbers of innocent civilians that Israel has murdered. They hardly have time to talk about Hamas, or whoever it is that you are both-siding, even if they wanted to.
Is this aimed at me?
[dead]
This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html
You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.
In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.
However, I will give credit to Bernie Sanders for admitting he opposes datacenters because he doesn't feel he can hit the root cause in time so at least he's honest about it. Meanwhile, the top 0.01% continues to enjoy its bespoke 5000 or so pages of the tax code and buying politicians for pennies on the dollar of revenue each one creates for them with no end in sight. But at least we all know now that the late Marvin Minsky got a happy ending from one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex workers. I wonder how many more members of the Harvard and MIT faculty did.
Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services?
Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.
I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.
There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.
> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...
For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.
If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit. Bring some logic into the discussion and stop fishing for points.
This is a discussion that started about preparing for the future and has spawned multiple[2], fluid threads[3] of conversation[4] that aren't quite in line with "predicting and preparing for the future", some even with their own throwaway responses unrelated to "the topic"[5]. Should we lambast the person who posted the Lisp joke, too?
This particular conversation chain is about how one measures success, which I've discussed with logic in a separate[0] response. Future success looks different for all of us, and there are a wide variety of ways for us to get wherever those goals are.
>If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit.
Oh, no snark was intended. OP asked a question on a public forum and started getting snarky themselves[1] towards people who shared their subjective response, and my intent was to point out that it's OK for us all to view success differently.
>... stop fishing for points
Is this not snark based on your own assumption that I care about meaningless internet upvotes?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235299
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235315
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234258
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234631
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
The LLM does not understand itself in any way.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.
Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).
Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.
Your views seem to be rather ... idealistic. This TED lecture[0] is only 18 minutes long and it offers rather a chilling perspective on any sensible reform.
And that's the thing isn't it: you're not actually against suffering, you're against suffering by the right people. Klein catches flak for being Jewish and insufficiently hostile, meanwhile the bar for the other side is apparently just... existing. That's not a principled position.
"Too busy grieving to talk about Hamas", that's exactly how some Israelis feel when they hide IDF soldiers from justice, and I condemn them for it too.
You've just described the problem and handed it to me as a defence. Pathetic.
I’ve judged him to be a Zionist based on what he says. Not hearsay. Curious, I’ve never implied that I merely “think” he believes something—I’ve seen and heard it with my own eyes. Oh well, must be a miscommunication or misunderstanding.
> Come back with receipts or don't bother.
Because you had receipts???
> And that's the thing isn't it: you're not actually against suffering, you're against suffering by the right people. Klein catches flak for being Jewish and insufficiently hostile, meanwhile the bar for the other side is apparently just... existing. That's not a principled position.
All madeup strawman bullshit.
> "Too busy grieving to talk about Hamas", that's exactly how some Israelis feel when they hide IDF soldiers from justice, and I condemn them for it too.
You’re misunderstanding. Many pro-Palestinians solely defend the innocent. They never defend Hamas or any combatants. And what do they get in return for standing up for the massacred innocent? A truckload of shit.
You've spent this entire thread arguing that judging people by their ethnicity rather than their actual positions is wrong. Then you decided Klein is a Zionist not because of what he said, but because of what you've decided someone like him must believe.
That's the definition of what you came here to argue against.
Pro-Palestinians who only defend innocents get abuse for it: yes, and that's wrong. Jews who do the same get the same treatment, and you've been defending that standard this whole conversation without seeming to notice.
Everyone in this conflict believes they're punching up. Israel, Hamas, everyone. It's the most self-assigned label in politics and it's why it can't be the moral standard.
You don't get to oppose racism selectively. That's not opposition to racism.
"When it comes to jobs, I'd rather listen to a business wizard from 2011 than a technical wizard from 1981" is hardly contentious, but if people liked hearing "AI has changed the world and you're all fucked", the students wouldn't have been booing in the first place.
Honestly, if you don't like what Eric Schmidt was saying, you should have a long hard think about whether unchecked capitalism is really as great as advertised.
You could choose to lock it in a virtual or physical basement with printout of the Common Crawl dataset and raise it like an LLM that learns language with zero real world grounding, in which case it may feel a bit like an LLM (but smarter - able to learn, etc), or you could let it interact with the real world and learn everything, including language, that way and be a lot more grounded.
It's hard to guess how the grounded version would feel to talk to vs the CommonCrawl one - I think it would mostly come down to how far we wanted to go in making the artificial brain have all the moving parts of a human one. In an odd way the more human we tried to make it, the more alien it might feel, but not for the "uncanny valley" reason you might imagine...
The thing with an LLM that makes it feel so human is that they are designed to 100% copy humans - their output is 100% driven by the training goal of trying to exactly match the samples in the training set. As soon as we start to try to build something more brain-like then it's behavior is going to be a lot less predictable - not just auto-regressive "auto-pilot speech", but driven by it's own internal thoughts, emotions, innate traits, etc - depending on how much of our brain we tried to copy in the artificial one. I expect it would feel a lot more organic, less robotic, to talk to, but at the same time perhaps less human since unlike the LLM it's not built just to mimic human speech.