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I generally don't think of researchers as psychopaths though I'm sure a small number are. On the whole, I would think that they are more motivated by a thirst f

I generally don't think of researchers as psychopaths though I'm sure a small number are. On the whole, I would think that they are more motivated by a thirst for knowledge and wanting to make something cool and gain social approval from other smart people. I'm more referring to the people at the top who make the decisions about the direction of AI innovation and use AI as an excuse for receiving tons of funding from the government (or from industry) that they don't deserve and could be better allocated to more productive things which will actually help people instead of trying to control people. Controlling people does not help them. AI tech related to productive industries like farming, construction, etc... That's great. But clearly that's not the kind of AI which Facebook is working on (there may be general overlap, but the goal is wrong).

coddle-hark 6y ago
None of this has anything to do with AI. It’s just a barely tangential critique of... society? Capitalism? Either way it has nothing to do with the OP.
scottlocklin 6y ago
Man you didn't spend much time in academia. The number of psychopaths I encountered in academia quite easily exceeded those in Business, and I've been in business a lot longer. Maybe I was just unlucky/lucky; don't know. Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning." The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real. 1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union. 2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day. 3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.

coddle-hark 6y ago

None of this has anything to do with AI. It’s just a barely tangential critique of... society? Capitalism? Either way it has nothing to do with the OP.

scottlocklin 6y ago

Man you didn't spend much time in academia. The number of psychopaths I encountered in academia quite easily exceeded those in Business, and I've been in business a lot longer. Maybe I was just unlucky/lucky; don't know. Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning." The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real. 1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union. 2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day. 3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.