Corvos
4d ago
The marketing for these things has been terrible from the start, I agree. Solving stupid 'problems' in stupid ways, stoking needless terror and antagonism...
And so unnecessary, too. These things percolated perfectly well with no marketing budget whatsoever.
Corvos
4d ago
In most cases one just gets increased convenience with evident downsides as well.
Just speaking from experience, the increased convenience is a really big thing. I'm having trouble with my employer in a way that's very time-sensitive, and being able to check their work while my lawyer was away on summer holiday was a life saver. I cannot stress enough how much it helped me.
I'm not opposed to this in theory but this feels like the wrong time: you can't do a cost-benefit analysis when neither the costs nor the benefits are readily apparent.
More generally... the conversation around AI feels like a Culture War conversation between lovers and haters squabbling over the pool of haven't-trieds. Both sides seem to have very strong confirmation biases; I'm a member of the lover faction myself and the 'I downloaded it, it told me a square has six sides, I deleted it' stories that haters tell me sound like they come from a different world which is a pretty good indicator that we're not operating on good epistemics here. If we're all operating on Conflict Theory then I don't think a big public discussion would produce very good results.
Corvos
4d ago
a significant fraction of the time it's literally on the level of "Please design me a rectangle." "Ok, here's that triangle you asked for."
I will say I used free GPT for a couple of years and never got this. But also:
the free version on mobile at least doesn't ask follow-up questions
How hard is it to put “please ask any relevant follow-up questions” in your prompt? This isn’t wizardry. We were doing this is 2023. Yes, you have to put in a modicum of effort.
And if you have an ounce of curiosity in you then you should really ask it ‘what is a QR code and how does it work’ when you say you want a QR code on your flier!
very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
Partly it's happening, just slower than you think and concentrated on business-to-business because these days building software for users has very high expectations for ease of use and frankly it's not worth it.
But the main issue is regulation and incumbents sitting on top of the bottlenecks. Want an app on your phone to point out you've missed an email that's urgent? Tough, only Apple gets to see your emails. Want it to be able to point out when you're doomscrolling? Tough, Apple doesn't let apps see what you're doing. Want your phone to take care of some trivial tasks without you? Tough, Apple definitely doesn't allow apps to use other apps. There's good security reasons for this but it means massive swathes of AI use cases can literally only be looked at by Apple and Google, who are slow-moving and mostly uninterested because they already own the market.
And this extends all over the place. Want to help people with something medical? I hope you've got a twenty person compliance team and you're friends with the regulators, and that's before you have a clue if your putative product will be popular or profitable. Similar for legal, similar for finance.
In short, the number of people who can do interesting things that you @OliveTapenade might notice in your personal life are limited to about 1-10 companies, who mostly have other priorities.
So far the primary use case for them is coding, right?
I also think this is too narrow. I've had a dispute with my employer and having something that can not only go through thirty pages of legal documents immediately and spot traps but also provide a legal fix so I don't have to rely purely on their drafting has been incredibly useful.
In 1980 you could say the same about the PC. When I was growing up, you could say the same about the internet. Lots of people's only interaction with the internet these days is Youtube and Facebook, because you need compelling content and incredible simplicity to interest the lower-than-average user, but that's enough for them to care about it now. Took ages.
Not that I ever saw. Reading about cool battles, yes. What are you thinking of?
Corvos
8d ago
Relevantly, literally no Argentinians have ever set foot on the Falklands. They were uninhabited before the British arrived.
Corvos
10d ago
Understand that there are broadly two types of programmer: the people who like making computer do things, and the people who like writing code because they enjoy logic puzzles and symbol manipulation. For the former (myself included), AI is a godsend. For the latter, it's an apocalypse.
Corvos
10d ago
I'm not sure I agree with the point it makes, but that's a really cool analogy.
When even the Chinese Communist Party says, “whoah, there, you’re creepin’ a bit”, I’m not sure that this is an unsparing look at how life really is as opposed to the fantasy of a rather nasty person who likes the aesthetic of power.
Corvos
13d ago
Oh, no, I think they have more message discipline because they are old movements with an org chart. But I think the factional dynamics behind the scenes are pretty similar.
Corvos
13d ago
Imagine if Greenpeace was infiltrated by human-extinction advocates holding "KILL ALL HUMANS" signs at rallies. Imagine if the NAACP had a vocal contingent calling for race war, and the organization's response was to shrug and say "big tent, you know?"
I’m genuinely not trying to be sarcastic when I say this doesn’t seem like something I have to imagine? The existence of hardline misanthropic sentiments in environmentalism and hardline race war in black advocacy have just been an understood part of the landscape for decades. Look at the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam!
Corvos
13d ago
rich parents secretly / quietly using CRISPR to try to give advantages to their future children? Definitely happening.
Is this an intuition or something you’ve seen? Would be very interesting if it were the latter but my impression is that the wealthy tend to be risk-averse.
Corvos
14d ago
None, sorry. Just an impression. I thought that until 25 or so, and I assumed that if I (knowing quite a lot about that sort of thing) took that long to get corrected, most people must still believe it.
Corvos
14d ago
I don't know, but what they wanted to do was split between the trite (interpret signals in the motor nerves for making prosthetics) and the ridiculous (interpret brain activity not related to the early sensory cortex or the motor cortex). So their achievements would either be fairly unobtrusive or impossible. The most likely outcome is a SpaceX-like commoditisation of prosthetics through making the technology cheaper to manufacture and easy to use, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Corvos
14d ago
The majority of people think cloning failed. Specifically, that Dolly died early from early-onset arthritis because the cloned DNA was 'old'. It's not true but it's very widely believed.
We could well be, I think some of the claims made are silly.
This is my hope! My concern is people turning it into a nuclear-power situation, where a perfectly good thing is loaded down with so much taboo and fear and regulation that it's no longer accessible even when everybody calms down.
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