The technology is here. It will not be swept away in a great flood that cleanses the earth. There are people who are doing their best to understand that reality and inform you about it out of the goodness of their neuroses. You might as well listen to them.
I do think it is your moral responsibility to understand what AI is if you are going to participate in public debate about AI, because it's your moral responsibility to have some accurate understanding about whatever it is you are discoursing about in general. This appears to be a minority position.
I think this is true but also is the wrong framing. It is not your moral responsibility to do the work to find better uses given the status quo. It is to your *advantage* to do the work to find better uses given the status quo. That's a decision between you and your paymasters.
first, assume all masculinity toxic
I am going to make all of you read Xenocide.
I had forgotten!
A simple line graph with a white background. The horizontal axis is labeled “Difficulty” and runs from 1 to 5. The vertical axis is labeled “Danger” and also runs from 1 to 5. A dark blue line labeled “AI” starts at the top left at Danger 5, Difficulty 1, and slopes downward to Danger 1, Difficulty 5. An orange line labeled “Excel” starts at the bottom left at Danger 1, Difficulty 1, and slopes upward to Danger 5, Difficulty 5. The two lines cross at approximately Difficulty 3 and Danger 3. Alt-text provided by Microsoft Copilot
Here's my argument in chart form. (General purpose LLM-driven models with web search) AI gets you into the most trouble when you are at the most naive, while Excel just makes entering dates very annoying. We need to make it more like Excel.
Excel is a Turing-complete programming language and can get you into so much trouble as a result. The vast majority of people who ever use Excel do not get near that functionality and instead use it as a slightly spicy calculator.
I've talked about how AI should be in a research/FOSS backwater or at least should have been until very recently. And I stand by that, even though I also think that lots of people can use general-use AI models to good effect. What we need is the Excel model.
"General-purpose generative AI is a tool that takes practice to use" has become my niche of the discourse which is very funny because it would be an article title in the Journal of Unsurprising Results.
Declare a continent to be your intellectual inferior and then display the critical thinking skills of a wombat. 🙄
IME a general purpose AI model is best when you can use project folders system prompts and skills to customize it and your workflow. Unfortunately we, and our corporate overlords, have been sold it as an out of the box experience.
Right?!
My extremely spicy take is that more PhDs should work in industry but we shouldn't call any of them Doctor.
(I'm not convinced we should call doctors "Doctor").
Leaving aside the idea itself, for all that UBI is discussed among AI evangelists one rarely sees it explicitly said that it would come from directly taxing AI companies themselves
“Oh it will come from the hugely increased social surplus that we will inevitably generate [i.e. OPM]”
Okay what's your point
You can, and people did start slicing and dicing in contextualizing and complaining about how we shouldn't care so much and it's only because Muslims were doing it or whatever. It might even be true but it doesn't matter compared to a roving army exterminating people.
ISIS (or Daesh if you prefer) killed raped and pillaged a lot. A lot. It was horrific. But it still made news when they went out of their way to blow up historical places and holy sites and art because it signaled they were intent on total extermination of the other.
1. Emotional reactions do not follow moral logic they are emotional reactions. I would respond stronger to the Eiffel Tower being destroyed than the *spins wheel* Berlin TV tower because like other Americans I love Lafayette and watch disaster movies.
2. Blowing up holy things is a bad sign.
We've been through this before with ISIS blowing up holy places and you must resist the contextualization fairy.
Growing humans to adulthood is a cognitively challenging task!
Right we would notice if an entire country of 20M people were that cognitively impaired *on average* and I'm pretty sure the population number would be going the other way.
IQ 70 is two standard deviations below the mean. If it were true that 20 million people or so were testing two standard deviations below the mean *on average* you would know your test is defective.
I mean I think human reasoning (as observed) is often not particularly intelligent.
She's a very beautiful woman but I think the hottest she's ever been was in those movies. Just a very good looking cast looking their best.
Not quite my first celebrity crush but certainly up there.
But I don't want to do the dishes
We all have to live with the neuroses we have, try not to flare up the neuroses of others
Depression is a liar.
Under the US legal system you are allowed to disagree with a jury's findings and say so out loud for example I can say I believe OJ Simpson is a murderer and he has no claim against me as a result.