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One of the best predictions from Idiocracy is our reliance on AI that no one understands anymore. They made all of these systems that did everything for them an

One of the best predictions from Idiocracy is our reliance on AI that no one understands anymore. They made all of these systems that did everything for them and decades later, after barely even needing to think for themselves for so long, they’re dumb as rocks and have no idea how anything works.

scollet 5y ago
The Time Machine is pretty relevant here. "Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks."
gota 5y ago
That's more Wall-e than Idiocracy, I think. Was there any talk of AI in Idiocracy?
- mateomorris 5y ago
  Automation, at least. When they started spraying the crops with water (like from the toilet) instead of Brawndo, half the population got automatically laid off.
  - gota 5y ago
    Good point. I was recalling the movie here and also noticed that the doctor's appointment consisted of the doctor plugging the patient into a machine, too.
titzer 5y ago
I particularly love the UI at the Hospital. Just icons. I have felt this way about tablets and the ever-devolving UI trends on the web that infantilize users. Just mashing our big fat fingers onto one of three pretty, beveled chips. Turning us into sub-literate simpletons because they can't be bothered to put a word on a thing!
- wyldfire 5y ago
  Icons have a practical benefit of reducing the cost of selling your product in international markets. But it does introduce confusion and ambiguity sometimes when the intended function is unclear. I suppose there's a side effect that it lowers the bar for the illiterate, making it easier for them to function. I doubt it's a significant factor in whether they decide to learn to read.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  > ever-devolving UI trends I thought it was just lazy developers who don't want to internationalize their strings.
- anthropodie 5y ago
  And that is why it's good to learn terminal. You get to know inner working's of what's happening.
neuronic 5y ago
AI doesn't exist. There is nothing inherently intelligent about deep NNs which are merely very good pattern matching algorithms, statistics really... The term AI suggests something is thinking which is false marketing at best, abused by thousands of consulting companies for a decade now. Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.
- autokad 5y ago
  some of the new techniques in natural language processing that uses transformers is getting closer to understanding. Understanding may be an illusion though. I wrote a game in 2002 for a class I was in, you have a space ship and you shoot alien ships. To make the game challenging, when the user was far away from the alien ships they would move randomly, if you moved in on them they moved away in a random direction, and once you got too close they would vector strait for the ship in a kamakaze attack. I also needed to figure out when the alien ships would fire back, so I just made them randomly fire when the user also fired. Given that your ship's firing range was limited, this created a dangerous scenario where you tried to chase down a ship, and at the last moment it would come right at you and fire. the point of all of this was that when people played the game, they stated "wow, the AI of this game is really good". People believed the AI was thinking when it was just a few rules. I dont suppose its impossible to be tricked into thinking something had understanding even if that something is itself. if something is complicated enough and good enough at making decisions, it seems possible its not understanding but just a sufficiently complicated process, or maybe a sufficiently complicated process is understanding
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  "Pattern matching" is what regular expressions do. What you are alluding to is "pattern recognition", which is an older name for so-called "statistical" machine learning, particularly used to perform "perception" tasks (such as machine vision). "Statistical" machine learning is also not very much about statistics, it's just that similar technologies and concepts are sometimes used as in statistics, for example probabilities, function optimisation etc. "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is the name of the field of research that studies approaches to artificial intelligence. It's a bit confusing but when someone says "I study AI" they don't, today, mean that they study artificially intelligent entities, rather they mean they study approaches that might one day allow us to create such entities.

scollet 5y ago

The Time Machine is pretty relevant here. "Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks."

gota 5y ago

That's more Wall-e than Idiocracy, I think. Was there any talk of AI in Idiocracy?

mateomorris 5y ago
Automation, at least. When they started spraying the crops with water (like from the toilet) instead of Brawndo, half the population got automatically laid off.
- gota 5y ago
  Good point. I was recalling the movie here and also noticed that the doctor's appointment consisted of the doctor plugging the patient into a machine, too.

titzer 5y ago

I particularly love the UI at the Hospital. Just icons. I have felt this way about tablets and the ever-devolving UI trends on the web that infantilize users. Just mashing our big fat fingers onto one of three pretty, beveled chips. Turning us into sub-literate simpletons because they can't be bothered to put a word on a thing!

wyldfire 5y ago
Icons have a practical benefit of reducing the cost of selling your product in international markets. But it does introduce confusion and ambiguity sometimes when the intended function is unclear. I suppose there's a side effect that it lowers the bar for the illiterate, making it easier for them to function. I doubt it's a significant factor in whether they decide to learn to read.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> ever-devolving UI trends I thought it was just lazy developers who don't want to internationalize their strings.
anthropodie 5y ago
And that is why it's good to learn terminal. You get to know inner working's of what's happening.

neuronic 5y ago

AI doesn't exist. There is nothing inherently intelligent about deep NNs which are merely very good pattern matching algorithms, statistics really... The term AI suggests something is thinking which is false marketing at best, abused by thousands of consulting companies for a decade now. Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.

autokad 5y ago
some of the new techniques in natural language processing that uses transformers is getting closer to understanding. Understanding may be an illusion though. I wrote a game in 2002 for a class I was in, you have a space ship and you shoot alien ships. To make the game challenging, when the user was far away from the alien ships they would move randomly, if you moved in on them they moved away in a random direction, and once you got too close they would vector strait for the ship in a kamakaze attack. I also needed to figure out when the alien ships would fire back, so I just made them randomly fire when the user also fired. Given that your ship's firing range was limited, this created a dangerous scenario where you tried to chase down a ship, and at the last moment it would come right at you and fire. the point of all of this was that when people played the game, they stated "wow, the AI of this game is really good". People believed the AI was thinking when it was just a few rules. I dont suppose its impossible to be tricked into thinking something had understanding even if that something is itself. if something is complicated enough and good enough at making decisions, it seems possible its not understanding but just a sufficiently complicated process, or maybe a sufficiently complicated process is understanding
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
"Pattern matching" is what regular expressions do. What you are alluding to is "pattern recognition", which is an older name for so-called "statistical" machine learning, particularly used to perform "perception" tasks (such as machine vision). "Statistical" machine learning is also not very much about statistics, it's just that similar technologies and concepts are sometimes used as in statistics, for example probabilities, function optimisation etc. "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is the name of the field of research that studies approaches to artificial intelligence. It's a bit confusing but when someone says "I study AI" they don't, today, mean that they study artificially intelligent entities, rather they mean they study approaches that might one day allow us to create such entities.