Everything new is old again.
We’re in a situation similar to the dotcom bust of 2000. The internet is definitely transformative, but real change takes time—it doesn’t happen overnight. The internet didn’t really take off until smartphones became affordable and people could access it from anywhere. I mean pets.com reached $400 million valuation while selling products at about ~60% loss. The only reason pets.com reached this valuation was the internet trend stick that was slapped onto it. Exactly what we are seeing with the AI bumper sticker companies are slapping onto their company.
Look at the # companies saying AI in earning calls. Just following the herd and using buzzwords to generate stock interest.
h/t Melinda Romanoff
In general, when politicians and senior management in gov’t/bureaucracies/industry start touting something it is going to fail. If stock analysts really start pushing something, it is going to fail hard.
AI is a bomb waiting to go off. No, not terminator style. More and more people who don’t understand it are going to sell lots of AI based snakeoil. It isn’t even AI, it is machine learning (ML). It cannot do most of the things stated of it, but neither the ML nor the operator understand this.
The classic example is the six legged elephant (comment often on in social media). Basically, data scrapers comb the net for data to feed the Machine learning algorithm, they treat this as true data to train the algorithm. THen various ML algorithms starting generating what they think is an elephant, and this gets output to the web, often with errors since, hey, the ML doesn’t really know what an elephant is, it just associated some data points.
So, another ML comes along and uses ML generated content as part of its training set, and so on and so on. Pretty soon, 6 legged elephants start appearing all over.
That is just one example. This is happenign all over. ML can only work for specifica application where the training data is sufficient, robust, accurate for training and the ML asked only to produce relevant output based on that data. Even then, it will produce garbage and humans are required to confirm. An ML will not admit it is wrong or misleading.
Now, let’s talk about where all this unicorn electrical power is going to come from to power all these AI farms…..even more magic is needed.
Well said Frenchie. AI or ML has the potential to make smart, productive people more productive by automating away menial tasks.
I don’t see much potential beyond that for a very long time.
The real danger in AI is that many people are about to discover just how many tasks out there are menial.
Not to worry. We will all own nothing and have loads of happy time to do our “art”
Oh, you’re a menial right!
There’s nothing “Intelligent” about AI.
A Natural Language Parser figures out what you are asking and passes the nouns and verbs to a script written by a human who bid on its creation and was paid a few dollars for making it.
It doesn’t self learn, it can’t rewrite or update itself. There’s no Skynet danger here, it certainly can’t “learn” anything.
The real danger is the technology being used to generate recordings of conversations and video of actions that never happened. If you’re looking and listening really closely you can pick them out but we’re talking about a population the majority of still believe “Trump said drink bleach.”
The “real” danger is that people will believe in AI. They will believe what AI tells them and the people controlling the AI technology will use that belief to transform society. And not for our benefit.
“The internet didn’t really take off until smartphones became affordable and people could access it from anywhere. ”
Five years I’ve been beating this drum, and no one pays attention. The “WISP” – wireless internet smart phone – is the single most powerful media device in the history of mankind, and in typical fashion, 99% of us are totally unaware of its effects. As famed Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted back in 1964, the usual response to a new medium is a form of “somnabulism”, or sleep walking, as we are routinely hypnotized by the encompassing nature of the new medium.
We saw this when the WISP first came out – people were walking directly into traffic and DYING because they were so engrossed by their phones. We all know now that texting and driving is even more dangerous than drinking and driving; your attention span is even *more* compromised by it, even though you’re stone cold sober. But most people – including most here – will deny they are affected by their WISPs.
The WISP has a number of deleterious effects – along with a million salutary ones – but by far the most significant one is its effect on our memories. 20 years ago, I knew fifty phone numbers off by heart. Today, I might remember three or four. As Orwell noted in *1984*, ‘he who controls the past, controls the present’. Well, when the *people can’t remember a damn thing*, they have no idea of the past, and thus are very easily controlled. And we see that today – the public is being worked over to accept the new ‘deadly’ bird flu, the need to escalate in both Gaza and Ukraine, and the ‘need’ to have an overwhelming number of culturally different invaders – er, sorry, ‘migrants’ – bringing in alien values and cultures so that the social cohesion among those who’ve lived in Canada all their lives is broken and discarded.
Another feature of the WISP is it’s a *resonant* medium. Like any resonate circuit, it accepts energy close to its resonant frequency, and *rejects* energy that is not. We are all familiar with this concept – when you tune in to KABC on your radio, you want all the energy KABC is broadcasting, and none of the energy from KXYZ next door. A radio is just a tunable resonating circuit. And we have all ‘tuned’ our WISPs into our unique and particular resonances.
The fact you are here instead of the CBC, MSNBC, or CNN shows that you resonate at least in part at what I will call the ‘individual’ frequency. Those who gather at MSM watering holes are more receptive to energy from the ‘collective’ frequency. The polarization we see between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ in the US is the most obvious manifestation of this, but once you are aware of it, it’s hard not to see it almost everywhere.
There’s a battle coming between the individuals and the collectivists. The latter, of course, are fascists in queer clothing, manipulated by psychopaths like Gates and Bezos and Fauci (at least the first two of which have constructed elaborate bunkers to ride out the storm). There will be no discussions or palavers or reconciliations. There will be blood.