I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

13 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords”

1. Arrogant Incompetence.
   Tulip Futures.
   South Seas land.
   Bre-x.
   Bit coin.
   Monorail monorail monorail..

2. It’s dumber than anyone is saying. All you need to do is use it, and you’ll know.

   Leading me to think that the people making decisions in Big Industry and Big Finance have -really- narrow lanes of expertise.

   Talk to any software engineer who is at least marginally smarter than a 12 year old script-kiddie, say the words “large language model” and watch them laugh. They’ll laugh.

   This is not to say that there are not some things that LLMs are good at. They’re quick at finding manuals for obscure machines and audio gear, much more efficient than scrolling through search results past 40 fake manual sites for the genuine SM-58 Microphone manual. So anything like that, better than the unassisted human eyeball.

   Bottom line, LLMs are NOT “intelligent” in any way, and never will be. They predict the next word in a string based on their training data. That’s all they do. Some of them do it pretty well, and they can simulate intelligence for a minute or two, but eventually you can tell you’re talking to a Mechanical Turk.

   Sometimes literally, as Kate says in another post, evidence is mounting that “AI” is actually a bunch of dudes in a building in India, typing away at your search queries. Much like an OnlyFans girl’s message board.

   That’s why I restrict my use of ChatGPT etc. to searching for manuals and similar things. I don’t really care if Prakesh in Mumbai knows I have an unwholesome interest in the “Fostex Laboratory Series 300 Power Amp” (I snatched one on blowout sale at Long & McQuade’s yesterday for a hundred bucks! Go me!!!!) I might be given cause for concern if my (entirely platonic!) interest in “Aimeee427 with the big bootay” were noised about publicly. ~:D

   1. I use AI for one thing at work, but it’s helpful not world changing.

      I have to sit through a lot of web conference meetings. It’s easy to zone out or lose focus on what was said in a meeting when people are droning on or if it is the first of three consecutive calls.

      Get people used to the idea you use the record function in the web conferencing app. The app can give you a transcript of the recording.

      Paste the transcript into an AI application and ask it to give you a bullet point summary of what we discussed in the meeting followed by a list of the action items generated by the meeting and the person responsible for each.

      Big timesaver and organizational tool, and allows me to multitask during calls where I am not a presenter.

3. By the way, I speculate that this is all coming to light right now because we’ve reached the point in the hype-cycle where guys are making money speculating in shorts. This is my theory for today.

   1. Yes.

   2. Well, let us know when they start to make money in long pants.

4. If Google et al. had spent the last ten years improving their search engines instead of turning into total whores for ad revenue LLM’s would not be a thing.

5. Hopefully they build tons of nuclear plants BEFORE they go bankrupt.

   Slow down the Liberals/Climate Crazies who really, really, really want Dumbass Canadians to freeze in the dark.

   Canadians, as usual, are being liberally accommodative.

6. Also, is there a more punchable face on the planet than Sam Altman’s? Maybe I should ask a chat bot. And then he starts talking.

   1. A more punchable face than Sam Altman’s?

      Justin Trudeau’s
      (Which ever colour it is).

7. There’s no increase in productivity over the last three years … because all the efficiencies of Ai have been cancelled out by the latest generation of lazy lay-abouts whose productivity craters year over year.

8. the point l am now making is the term AI, ‘artificial’ intelligence is MOST apt.
   concommitant to that l realize there is *something* biological about intelligence if we include sentience. self awareness aspect of smarts. machines lack the molecular level ‘whatever’ that is.
   l then make the analogy, ‘artificial’ meaning FAKE. its like a FAKE wedding cake made out of styrofoam and coloured plaster to hold up under the studio lights for the ad pic.

   that level ‘fake’. they are promoting FAKE intelligence. ie its NOT THE REAL THING FAR FROM IT.

9. Ai is a cool toy, but to get any real use out of it you have to learn how to use it better.

   I have one friend who says AI has made his job easier. He uses it to generate reports that he can edit rather than writing them from scratch. But, he knows he has to carefully check its output or it will make stuff up. But he says that it makes a week long task into a 2 day task.