Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it’s a “cognitive amplifier,” claims Satya Nadella.
in other words please help us, use our AI
AI isn’t at all reliable.
Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.
(This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)
Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.
You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).
This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “not be life threathening”, which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)
So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.
Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.
“bend the productivity curve” is such a beautiful way to say that they are running out of ideas on how to sell that damn thing.
It basically went from :
- it’s going to change EVERYTHING! Humanity as we know it is a thing of the past!
… to “bend the productivity curve”. It’s not how it “radically increase productivity” no it’s a lot more subtle than that, to the point that it can actually bend that curve down. What a shit show.
Eeh didn’t you pay attention in economy 101? If you generate more supply than demand that’s a you problem. The free market will take care.
Literally burning the planet with power demand from data centers but not even knowing what it could possibly be good for?
That’s eco-terrorism for lack of a better word.
Fuck you.
Just make copilot it’s own program that is uninstallable, remove it from everywhere else in the OS, and let it be. People who want it will use it, people who don’t want it won’t. Nobody would be pissed at Microsoft over AI if that is what they had done from the start.
No, it will be attached to every application, as well as the start menu, settings, notepad, paint, regedit, calculator and every other piece of windows you AI hating swine
we attached it to the clock in case you need it to get the time wrong.
Can we get AI on various libraries too and let it respond to API calls, I’m tired of these DLL responses being so predictable
Right, except that unlike Explorer or IE after that, it siphons everything it can to send it back to Redmond so even if one does not use it, it is STILL a problem.
heres something useful, REMOVE AI from all your products, and undo windows10/11 changes.
I bough a second hand laptop with windows 11 and it had Copilot pushing down my throat.
It’s now running Fedora just fine. And if I want I can spin up a local AI when I decide that I need it.
I see…
Fuck you.
To be honest, I did tried a couple of AI’s. But all I got where solutions that would never work on the stated hardware. Code full of errors and when fixed never functions as requested. On any non-technical questions it’s always agreeing and hardly (not at all actually) challenging any input you give it. So yeah, i’m done with it and waiting for the bubble to burst.
Delusional, created a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist to usurp the power away from citizens and concentrate it in the minority.
This is the opposite of the information revolution. This is the information capture. It will be sold back to the people it was taken from while being distorted by special interests.
Paper books are the way.
Software that respects your freedom is the way
That is why they burn them in the fictional story Fahrenheit 451.
“Mommy and daddy gubberment pls help, the CONSUMERS hate my product.”
The great cycle of AI hype
AI isn’t worth it.
I know something useful that can be done with AI in its current form. Toss it in the fucking garbage maybe.
On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.
On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.
Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.
But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?
Probably not.
So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?
And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change? Or uncover new unforseen dangers?
Did the inventors of UNIVAC ponder if its descendants would one day aid in curing terminal illness, or predicting intense weather, or realize how much it would evolve in the coming decades? Moore wouldn’t have even coined his iconic law for another 14 years.
What I don’t like…what I really don’t like…is that this phase of technological evolution is coinciding with rampant pro-capital/anti-social rhetoric and governance. I like that it’s forcing conversations around modernizing copyright law, licenses, etc…but I don’t like who is involved in those conversations.
LLMs are dead end tech which is only useful for people who want to do unethical shit. They’re good at lying, making up nonsense, sounding like humans, facilitating scams, and misleading people. No matter how much time and energy is spent developing them, that’s all they’ll ever be good at. They can get better at doing those things, but they’ll never be good at anything actually useful because of the fact that there is no internal logic going on in them. When it tells you the moon is made of various kinds of rock, the exact same thing is happening as when it tells you the moon is made of cheese and bread. It has no way of distinguishing between these two statements. All of its ‘ideas’ are vapor, an illusion, smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t “understand” anything it’s saying, all it does is generate text that looks like something someone who does understand language would say. There is no logic in the background and there cannot be.
(https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/83)early generation computers fueled a demand that was being supplied by rooms and rooms of human calculators calculating and checking each other’s works for scientists, engineers, businesses, and government agencies
(Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation picture)they would not have died out, because they were a necessary part of the evolution of technology at their time. more importantly, they were more accurate than their human calculators. computers don’t forget to carry a number to the next digit or flip them around. barring exceptionally rare cosmic radiation events. and their technological progression fueled an ever greater need until now when tech has entered post-scarcity when it comes to calculating power.
generative AI in contrast was an offering looking for a purpose. spare gigaflops no longer needed for tech people are trying to sell by building more and more hype for calculating power. sucks to be the one who invests into it, but that’s business. sometimes investment don’t work out. if microsoft can’t hype up a demand then it is unnecessary technology.
That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.
I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.
I guess this was right around the peak of the babyboom, so I think I know what they did. And for a while there, it was feasible for a typical family to do well on a single income.
That’d be nice. Maybe next time around we can get it so that families can do well on a single part-time income. Or more gender-equality for who stays home and who works. Hell, I think a lot of families would be happy to be able to do well on two full-time incomes now. But this is getting into the devaluation of human labor now, instead of the evolution of technology.
Many of the female “computers” became programmers. IT being a male profession is a later development, partly fueled by home computers being marketed as toys for boys. It’s also mostly a western phenomenon. In former soviet states MINT professions are much closer to a 50:50 split between women and men.
The oligarch class is again showing why we need to upset their cart.
