It\u2019s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich.\u00a0 Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, \u201craining sekhmets and werewolves.\u201d\u00a0 I had a late workday today so I\u2019m relatively out of material for my post but it occurred to me that where AI really shows its usefulness is in answering specific technical questions on computer languages and programming.<\/p>\n
For instance, I haven\u2019t been using Excel much at all lately but I needed to put together a multi-sheet Excel workbook.\u00a0 I forgot some of the formulas I liked using to produce certain results and instead of searching around on YouTube for some Indian programmer to explain in extremely hard to understand English I asked Grok.\u00a0 And it printed out precisely clear, concise and accurate information on exactly what I was looking for.\u00a0 Well, in my book that\u2019s a valuable tool.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t ask it to make my spreadsheet for me because that wouldn\u2019t help me remember the formulas.\u00a0 And if I made it write the spreadsheet it would definitely do it differently from how I would want it and then I\u2019d need to tweak a bunch of stuff.\u00a0 Grok is like a notebook of all the hints and shortcuts for all of the things I want to do.<\/p>\n
And now I hear that Grok will be Wikipedia too.\u00a0 Of course, it doesn\u2019t literally have to be an enormous encyclopedia like Wikipedia.\u00a0 It\u2019s just this endless cloud full of every single document in the world and an LLM to organize it as needed for whatever question is asked.\u00a0 From what I\u2019ve already heard and seen it\u2019s probably orders of magnitude better than the left-leaning bias built into Wikipedia.\u00a0 So, goodbye Wikipedia!<\/p>\n
I think this guy Elon Musk is going in the right direction.\u00a0 Stop trying to gaslight us and tell us what\u2019s good for us and instead provide valuable tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed by facts.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure that AI will cause incredible change and a good amount of disruption in our world.\u00a0 But I\u2019m also pretty sure that it will create enormous opportunities too.\u00a0 With the right sort of political and social management AI can be an extremely valuable tool.\u00a0 At least I find that to be the case.\u00a0 After all, when high level programs came along that could simulate a physical system like a pipe network, it didn\u2019t put chemical and mechanical engineers out of business.\u00a0 It became a tool for making engineers more efficient.\u00a0 It allowed them to crank out much more work and more accurately.\u00a0 The same will happen for almost every application where having the accumulated knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips allows us to make better and faster decisions.<\/p>\n
Of course, that is what is possible if those in charge use these tools for our advancement.\u00a0 If instead they attempt to form monopolies where machines replace humans in some kind of replay of the 2000\u2019s where corporate America tried to replace American industry with cheap Chinese labor then we\u2019ll be forced to do what Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000 when he slipped his gears.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have to unplug him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich.\u00a0 Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, \u201craining sekhmets and werewolves.\u201d\u00a0 I had<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3545],"tags":[3773,5062],"class_list":["post-35064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-science","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-grok"],"yoast_head":"\n