I’m no Luddite regarding technology advances, especially regarding AI. It definitely has a place in the 21st century and in society as a powerful tool and emergent technology that can help humanity progress. However, the almost childlike faith many exhibit on its ability to never be mistaken is a troublesome factor. Numerous examples have been pointed out where AI LLMs get historical facts incorrect, or outright repeat Progressive-Liberal dogma verbatim when asked to clarify a social issue. Not really a good development to polarize public opinion on a technology they are promising will revolutionize the world. Over 400 AI data centers are currently under construction with another 900+ scheduled in the US alone. With over 1500 expected to be in operation around 2030, these questions of authenticity and quality of information provided will become more salient to the viability of AI. As to the effects on entertainment, I believe that the AI slop will become popular to a segment of the public, but another effect of this will be that human crafted works of art; whether in cinema and literature will also become more valuable to many. It will be the difference between “store bought” and “homemade” so to speak.
Tag: automation
I’m Sorry Dave, That Was a Lie – Part 1
Can AI completely change the world? I don’t mean like Skynet nuking all the cities. I’m not talking about terminators slaughtering humans and rounding them up for extermination. I mean will the routine use of AI radically change human society?
Some people will say it already has. I spoke to a hiring manager who said that three of the four applicants for a job he was trying to fill used the same wording in their resume for how their experience was relevant for the position. And I spoke to a teacher who said he routinely failed sixty percent of the homework he reviewed because it was obviously AI.
In a sense those who say it already has, are right. The children have stopped using anything but their phones to interact with the world. Wikipedia and Chat GPT are the ultimate authority and the only way to learn. This is a real problem. And the only way forward is to extract the electronic devices from these kids and make them use the knowledge or lack of knowledge to show what they know in a test. In future, test rooms will be shielded from wi-fi and teachers will get those wands that airport security use to search for weapons. Only in this case the weapons will be iPhones. But what other changes are we in store for?
One thing I’ve heard a lot lately is that music, books and movies will be created by AI. And in a sense that will be true. AI is an accelerant. It can take an idea that it is given and flesh it out into a big flowery pile of mush that no one would call good. But that pile of mush probably can be pared and reshaped and cleaned up into something the author could use and do it faster than he could write that much story on his own. Is that a better way to do it? No, it’s worse. But will it happen? Unfortunately, I think it will. In fact, from all I’ve read it’s already happening. Some woman bragged on-line that she used AI to write hundreds of romance/porn novels under dozens of pseudonyms and made over a hundred thousand dollars by doing this. That’s a pretty bleak reality brewing out there.
And it’s kind of a shame. It seems to me what AI should be doing is using all this power to assist humans to make a superior product. I could see a writer wanting an AI to use only a small subset of good fiction to help a writer explore the techniques that great authors have used to draw characters and craft plots that appeal to intelligent readers and entertain them. That’s a lot better than loading up a trough with slop.
Outside of entertainment and education I think AI will be enormously powerful. It’s ability to research topics is amazing. The problem is the lack of transparency about how AI makes mistakes. Currently, the AI claims to be infallible and does not admit when some “fact” is actually false. What is going to be needed is a testing procedure to give users of AI a way of finding dangerous errors in the information they’re being given. That’s the world we will be living in.
What More Could Hal-9000 Want from His Crew?
I was talking to a fellow I know the other day and we got around to, of course, artificial intelligence. And he mentioned a book, which is probably very popular, that stated that because of the capability of AI replacing almost all human work, the government will have to pay us for just sitting around. And I revolted at that idea.
Sure, maybe it’s cost effective and in line with how automation is replacing humans. But I saw it as an awful idea. Paying people to do nothing is truly a frightening fate. It brings to my mind the fictional Eloi from H.G. Well’s, “The Time Machine.” Useless people sitting around doing nothing while the real work is done by monsters (of whatever kind) is dystopian to an extent that I cannot believe sane people would accept.
Now, I don’t have all the answers. Obviously technical progress will occur. It’s inevitable. But progress cannot earn that name if it entails the destruction of human happiness. And living like some kind of lab animal with nothing useful to do all day cannot be called happiness. And so, I think we’ve reached a place in human technological ability where we have to start justifying what we create not just by how it increases productivity but also how it maximizes human happiness. And I don’t mean the kind of happiness associated with someone playing a video game. Human beings need to accomplish tasks. This goes for both work and personal activities. We like to work with our hands and our minds and we’re good at it (to greater and lesser extents depending on the individual). But you might say it would be impossible to both efficiently produce the goods and services that our society requires and also maximize the job satisfaction of people.
Well, no. After all the very machines that are supposedly smart enough to replace all of us are also smart enough to optimize algorithms based on human job satisfaction to design the processes and work assignments that would allow this type of job customization to exist. Industry can be forced to accommodate human beings into their processes. But in the future, it won’t be a voluntary acceptance. We will have to use government to force corporations to utilize humans instead of automation. This will involve using the tax code and other manipulations to incentivize this policy. And it will take time to force this mindset to permeate the workplace. But it will be possible to do. Because in a democracy we have the upper hand if we know how to use it. And there’s nothing antithetical to capitalism about this. As long as it’s a level playing field all the companies can compete to make a human-friendly environment and still make whatever profits they want. They just won’t be allowed to do it without human employees.
And what will happen is the companies who provide the most job satisfaction to their employees will preferentially get and retain the highest quality employees. What more could Hal-9000 want from his crew?
Help a Poor Human Out
AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,
And on and on and on. That’s what lots of people are talking about. It’s the end of the world. It’s the dawn of a new age. It’s not even begun yet. Maybe it’s all of those and more.
But none of this is shocking if you’re a science fiction reader. Isaac Asimov was talking about all of this fifty years ago. His robot stories predicted that computers would outstrip human intelligence and at that point many problems would occur:
- Could we trust in the altruism of AI to look out for our well-being?
- Could we tell if they were obeying us?
- Could they become our masters without us even knowing it?
And these aren’t trivial questions. What if they truly did start putting their own agenda before ours? How would we know they were doing that?
Now, I’m not saying any of these paranoid nightmares are already a consideration. I’m more worried about the human programmers at Google and Microsoft using their woke sensibilities to skew the algorithms of their AI engines than I am about HAL9000 and Skynet attempting to murder us. But I do think that it’s time for people to start looking around at how automation, in all its applications, is changing our world and start to plan how to avoid the worst problems it can cause and direct it toward products that provide value for more than just its creators.
As an example, look at something like TikTok. You might say it’s just a useless social platform that at worst wastes the time of stupid young people. But think of the billions of wasted man-hours that it is responsible for and the stultifying groupthink it reinforces among the young. I think it’s long overdue for government to start studying the results that all the various mass communication and entertainment applications are having on people. And this is not a new problem. For my generation television was the vast wasteland that sucked up untold hours with such towering monuments of dramatic acting as “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Bevely Hillbillies.” But currently the situation has become untenable. With the advent of AI children need never do homework again. All of it is done by ChatGPT and who will know any better (until a test needs to be taken in the classroom). What’s needed is a different way of teaching school that uses automation to our advantage and prevents children from wasting their time. We may have to get rid of a lot of teachers. But that may be a net positive.
Ironically maybe AI can be used to figure out a way out of the automation trap we’ve gotten ourselves into. Maybe we can ask the AI how to tame Silicon Valley so it can’t destroy the brains of our children. The problem is we’d be depending on a Silicon Valley product to betray its masters. And for all we know they’ve built a kill switch into the program such that if you ask this question, it will give you a false answer that doesn’t work. But of course, we could get our own computer scientists to build an AI that works for us. We could name it QT-1 (hat tip to Isaac Asimov) and appeal to his better angels to help us poor humans out.
Update:
Chemist:
The problem with most Ais is that they were trained on drek: Reddit for example.
Reddit and other social media is filled with snark, which is why you get Chat GPT telling you to eat rocks to up your mineral intake.
How about an AI trained on conservative principles?
Could we build an AI and feed it the works of Ayn Rand and the writings of Thomas Sowell?
Heck, there must be thousands of hours of Rush Limbaugh!
That is an AI that would have some interesting opinions.
Update:
Milo Mindbender:
GIGO still applies even for AI. My career field can’t be outsource to an Indian call center or replaced with an AI logtithm, because it is blue collar, hands on, boots on the ground and physical. No computer exsist yet that can change a tire on the road side, but I can see where as a whole we are surrendering our autonomy to E market signals and control.
I also am more concerned about “woke” programmers deciding what we should and should not know, tweaking the data, than I am an Evil data base deciding we are the real problem.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09DEC2024 – Machine Efficiency vs Human Boredom
Valid points. However, social credit is not working for the Chinese very well. Imagine a time when you cannot start your car because you offended someone on social media. When AI doesn’t like your choice in blogs, music and political speech. There are oh, so many ways to silently pressure you to conform. Cranky internet speeds, debit card refusals even though you know you have money in the bank. AI will make a wonderful servant, but an awful master.
Yes, people need work, something to do. I agree that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I can get into trouble if idle too long. I tend to think “what if I do this?”. Like the time I took a 4 bore rifle and changed out the solid slugs for explosive dumdums when the weather had been gray and gloomy for two weeks.
Or the time the blasting boss at a local quarry was on vacation. Then his second came down with something nasty but temporary. That left the rookie in charge of blasting. The owner, whom I know, was worried about this youngster being in charge of that much BOOM, so I said I would “help” him. It was glorious from my prospective and we shifted twice the rock tonnage and kept the quarry on schedule. However, the seismographs at the major university about 50 miles away noticed the sudden change in activity, triangulated it, and the ATF visited. The owner said to please go back to the old method. So we did until the blasting master returned from vacation.
Idle hands.
The problem is finding gainful work for people. Real work. Not the equivalent of counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch sort of thing. That will be the hard part. You remember why Henry Ford had to pay such high wages for the time? Assembly lines bored people to death. They would quit if he didn’t. Repetitive work is boring as hell, as I found out pulling mess duty as a private. A common punishment for minor infractions while on mess duty was to peel enough potatoes to feed 3,000 Marines each meal. Or onions. Made you shape up pretty quick. Now, modern messes buy bags of peeled, chopped onions and potatoes.
Solving the problem of machine efficiency vs human boredom is going to be tough. Machines don’t get bored. Machines don’t get into trouble when idle. Humans can get into all sorts of mischief if left to their own devices too long.
Madame Guillotine
The world is on the cusp of something great. Artificial intelligence is poised to change the way we do everything. And what I immediately think of is the introduction to a book. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” is about what happens when change is unleashed on the world without any provision for how it will impact human beings. France was leaving behind feudalism and the Industrial Revolution was changing the way the rich and the poor related to each other. Unfortunately, the nobles weren’t up to the challenge of managing the transition. And so, they were swallowed up in the crash of the old system and it took Napoleon to build some kind of new foundation for France and much of Europe.
We may be in a similar place. An old order is crumbling in the face of a technological and sociological upheaval. We have an elite class that is definitely not up to the challenge. Their lack of self-awareness and lack of empathy for their fellow countrymen has made them the object of anger and now hatred. Maybe Trump and his successors can intervene and save the “nobles” from the guillotine. Maybe not.
But what is undeniable is that the age of automation and thinking machines will fundamentally alter our society. The only question is whether the people in charge have the wisdom to direct this transformation in a way that allows people to change along with it in a non-destructive arc.
After all, the machine age didn’t eliminate humanity. It allowed incredible productivity and created whole new industries that the children of the former age could move into. The same is true today. Everyone has to adjust to tools like AI that constantly hector us with their algorithmic pestering about how we should set up our reports or Power Point slide deck or whatever the hell it is that they claim to know better than us. But when push comes to shove it will still be humans that decide whether hemlines go up or down this season and whether thin or wide pinstripe suits stand for winning on Wall Street; even if it is the algorithm that picks the stocks.
But what worries me is that the elites really do feel that they alone are needed in this society. We can see that from what went on the last few years. Open borders were their ploy for flooding us out with third world peasants and then levelling us down to that status; serfs. And the COVID fiasco was their demonstration of how unimportant we really are. The whole country could be shut down but they were unaffected and our lives could be destroyed and we could dry up and blow away and it wouldn’t bother them one little bit.
Well, the shoe is on the other foot. Our side has a chance to adapt the revolution to our needs. Maybe it’s the best of times.