A.I. Has Become a Technology of Faith

> It is a sales pitch, one in which the problems of today are brushed aside or softened as issues of now, which surely, leaders in the field insist, will be solved as the technology gets better. What we see today is merely a shadow of what is coming. We just have to trust them.

I'm a believer that AI is currently over-hyped, but to me this feels applicable to a lot of things that have gone on to be revolutionary. For the smart-phone too, one of the "issues of now" was slow cellular connectivity, which made the premise of using your phone for web-browsing feel like a chore. With cellular speeds "solved" we now live in a world where smart phones are the tool the majority of people use the internet on. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/mobile-internet-traffic

OpenAI =/= AI

I could sit here and list hundreds of places that AI - specifically deep learning is applied in your daily life to improve it

Yall seem to also forget about Deepmind every time

https://deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold/

They literally solved protein folding with AI and won the Lasker prize

Similarly with AlphaGo etc…

AI is the most frustrating discipline to be in (and also most inspiring imo) because it’s never enough and anything that works, ceases to be AI

AI has always been a technology of faith if you recognize that the lived definition is “any technology that has been conceived but not widely implemented”

I was a skeptic after all the hype around Blockchain, Virtual Reality, and other technologies over the last few years. However, I have to say I find AI impressive. Compared to the other things I mentioned, I see cool new products and solutions popping up every week that add real value to my personal and professional life. ChatGPT alone saves me at least 10 hours of work every week, with more savings all the time.

Machine learning is really the only way to deal with non-formal, unstructured data, there is nothing to believe, the technology has been battle tested by billions of people, just think of BERT used by Google Search or all the AI models used for moderation, translation or detection and many more cases. But I guess all these use cases are just too boring to talk about today, AI has already helped millions of people at least, including me since I'm a native English speaker, I learned a lot just by using Deepl or YouTube with the auto-generated captions (which are much better today than they were in the past).

The future’s bright if we get there. Each new technology, be it search (with surveillance compute load), crypto, and now AI, places enormous load on the grid, that also serves consumers, something as un-glamorous as air conditioning. AI or A/C?

“Oh, but it’s different this time.”

Shiny objects competing with survival. Tell that to non-1337 working stiffs and retirees on a fixed income saddled with enormous PG&E bills.

Please innovate in more useful and less shiny ways. The planet is literally burning up, not just my little piece of it.

AI can’t solve everything because, although most things can be described and explained. Most other have to be experienced. And even though something sounds nice in text, once experienced we can say if it’s good or not.

For example, an AI can create a recipe that sounds good, but it will never be able to ground those choices on experience. Only through other people’s experiences combined, which might not be great in the end. And it won’t ever produce and adjust it based on its experience.

The same for a lot of other things that AI is meant to « replace ».

Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. -Ximm's Law

AI is a machine that can creates more than what you put in. That is "value creation" by definition.

If you've used AI, you know it's a massive timesaver. I find a lot of those who are skeptical haven't used it very much.

A.I. Has Become a Technology of Smug Pshaw, Pshaw, I Didn't Understand Blockchain Either And Look How That Turned Out.

Techno-utopianism requires a new & different Awesome New Technologies every few years - once people start to realize that the previous ANT ain't gonna take us to the Promised Land after all. Just like the previoius ANT didn't, and the one before that didn't, and the one before...

On the bright side - at least they aren't trying to sell us on the idea of nuclear-powered cars, or commuting via rocket-belt anymore.

> the bulk of the conversation about AI’s greatest capabilities is premised on a vision of a theoretical future

Yeah. 99% of the positive opinions I read about AI are "in X years it will do Y, Z, and that will change everything". As if the future is easily predictable.

Where are the flying cars? Where is the moon base? Why isn't everyone moving around on Segways? You never know what will happen. Some techs do grow exponentially, but not all, and it's impossible to know for sure which one will, ahead of time.

Alas. I doubt anyone will change their opinion. "This one is different." Ah well.

Of course this had to be whisked off the front page ;)

> Through an op-ed in Time, Altman and Huffington had just announced the launch of a new company called Thrive AI Health

Launching Companies Grifter, I guess he found his shtick.

I think this movement around 'debunking AI' is entirely the fault of marketing and company CEOs inflating the potential around generative AI to such ridiculous amounts. Of course after CEOs toured the country shouting about the dangers and virtues of AI as if it will destroy the world or remake it into something better, and that it will do it any minute now, everyone is 'annoyed' now that neither thing has happened already. How long ago were people screaming and crying that AI development must be slowed down by world governments or else?

Similar tone in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ByoAt5gCA

I say 'annoyed' with quotes, because as far as I can tell it's largely journalists and the media machine that seem to be taking a gleeful lap telling everyone how AI hasn't measured up after promoting the idea that AI will steal all their jobs and ruin the internet.

I think that's the fun part of some of these perspectives, that inherent conflict, that journalists want to convince us that AI is very dangerous technology and that it's stealing all their work and it's going to put everyone out of a job... but also AI is not living up to expectations and it's a nothing burger and all these companies are a joke selling lies to people. It's really hard square these conflicting storylines being served to us by the press (who are obviously biased against the technology that they think will destroy their livelihoods).

I hate to sound like one of those "you can't just journalism!" cranks, because I feel that way about nothing else, but in this case sometimes the vitriol coming from journalists about AI related technologies seems a bit much.

It can be both a big deal fundamentally and a major pillar of a weird, scary religion. It is currently both.

Of course machine learning is a big deal, it was a big deal a decade ago and more. We know it’s a big deal.

This Calvinism meets growth hacking, this Scientology for Atherton thing is bizarre and kind of terrifying.

It is in no way surprising that a philosophy that justifies short-run amoral wealth maximization with tired arguments about long-run utilitarianism would turn out any other way.

What’s surprising is that people who talk about imminent digital gods are put in positions of vast power instead of therapy.

In the early 80's home computers were a technology of faith. Many thought it was absurd that many people would want computers in their home.