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AI is most important tech advance in decades
- ChatGTP 4y ago"AI-driven improvements will be especially important for poor countries, where the vast majority of under-5 deaths happen," he wrote. Always with the poor countries. How does he know this won’t totally wreck poor countries ? Climate change is going to absolutely ruin poor countries long before they need an AI doctor which gives false information. Meanwhile wheat does he think these AI doctors run on ? Air? Fossil fuels.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoJust curious how many poor countries you have visited?
- ChatGTP 4y agoMore than you might actually realize. Even though I've seen a lot of poverty, I always laugh when I see Bill Gates speak of "poor" countries, because they're often the richest in love and warmth.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoNot an answer. Is this a bot account? Bill Gates buys waterfront property while preaching about rising water levels.
- anon7725 4y agoPerhaps try responding to the content instead of making an ad-hominem attack on the poster. Whether or not they've ever visited a poor country is not relevant to their statement.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoI disagree, very relevant. One must be able to question Crystal Ball weather pattern experts, proclaiming they know what's best for poor countries.
- palata 4y agoTo be fair, rich countries tend to rely more on fossil fuels than poor countries, as the GDP is related to energy. So the end of fossil fuels will probably wreck rich countries, too. Especially given that no country is remotely getting prepared for that.
- gwoolhurme 4y agoI think that is true but rich countries are in a position to transfer to clean energies where as poor countries will still use fossil fuels unless they get cheaper alternative that is stable.
- palata 4y agoThat's what we like to think, because it's reassuring ("tech will save us"), but that's very, very far to being proven. Right now we can develop photovoltaic and wind farms in a world that has a lot of fossil fuels. But remove the fossil fuels today, and everything collapses. The question is therefore: can we transition to clean energy before the end of fossil fuels? And the answer is really not clear. Actually it seems more likely that we cannot transition: we will probably have to do with less energy. Which in turn means that all the tech projects that try to replace "unlimited fossil fuels" by "unlimited clean energy" are just counting on the fact that somebody will solve the problem for them. What's the point of having electric sports cars if we don't have enough energy to use them? AI is in the business of doing more with more. Chances are that we will have to do less with less.
- ChatGTP 4y agoAI is in the business of doing more with more. Chances are that we will have to do less with less. We won't though because of the same trope Bill Gates et al regurgitate...this tech will solve all the problems, poor people need it... What's a shame we need to rush everything, it's a shame couldn't have just done less with less for longer, built more efficient understandable systems and just enjoyed the ride a little more.
- gwoolhurme 4y agoThat is kind of what I thought about my self. I don't see how AI-driven improvements will help poorer countries. I don't think it will wreck them, but if things don't solve Climate Change and if richer countries don't subsidize poorer countries... I don't see anything really positive out of AI, but maybe my imagination is really bad.
- ChatGTP 4y agoMy prediction, ChatGPT-4 will be another massive time waster, even if it is a productivity booster, humans will just be more engaged with it, talking to it about silly things and distractions and nothing will be done to further solve most real world problems.
- nonethewiser 4y agoRemoving affordable energy would hurt devastate poor countries.
- ljw1001 4y agoYou lost me at calling AI an “advance”. I think that’s a speculative statement that has yet to earn the positive bias it entails.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y agoSometimes, a contrarian take doesn't fit, and 2 and 2 does make 4.
- uoaei 4y agoIt's exactly this kind of inevitabilism that validates skepticism.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago*empiricism What we have, right now, is enough to turn many things in the world upside-down, and we only owe it to human and legal inertia that this is still not absolutely apparent yet, unless you're following what's happening.
- uoaei 4y agoEmpiricism by definition is concerned only with the past. There is no way to extrapolate from where we were to where we will be with such extreme technological shifts. Hindsight bias.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoThis is just a thinly veiled advertising piece for Microsoft. Yawn.
- jsemrau 4y agoWell, the way I see it, we have spent the last 20 years building Social Media, Influencer culture, Creators, and a Ad-tech driven surveillance. If AI helps us focus on Robotics, Spaceships, and underwater cities, I am game.
- dougmwne 4y agoYeah, I don’t get the panic. We’re not on any good trajectory here. All signs point to suck. At least we have a chance to pivot.
- raincole 4y agoThe most popular AI model right now is LLM. Does LLM help "Social Media, Influencer culture, Creators, and a Ad-tech driven surveillance" or "Robotics, Spaceships, and underwater cities" more?
- IIAOPSW 4y agoRobots and shit. What value is social media when its all just a big fat LLM dumping ground and everyone knows it. Long Live the Machine, killer of the bird and the book. That is my prophecy.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThat's a bit unclear at this point. Around GPT-3 it became apparent that LLMs are no longer glorified Markov chains - the training sets grew large enough, and the latent space high dimensional enough, that the model starts to capture the kind of fuzzy associations humans make. That is, it seems to capture an important subset of what we consider thinking. So I guess GPT-4 may still be most useful at destroying the modern information economy, thanks to being an infinite generator of garbage indistinguishable from content marketing. But GPT-5 might be just good enough to enable some qualitative breakthroughs in robotics, spaceships and underwater cities... (NOTE: this is not be believing that OpenAI solved consciousness. This is me recognizing the surprising ability for generative language models to navigate abstract concept space, just by virtue of being exposed to enough association implicitly encoded in everything we say or write...)
- 4y ago
- denysonique 4y agoHN title is clickbait, it should be rename to the actual title of the webpage: "Bill Gates: AI is most important tech advance in decades"
- atleastoptimal 4y agoIt's crazy how public fervor over tech advances can sometime correlate with how cool and useful they are (like with AI) or go wildly off the mark and fetishize something entirely scammy and useless (like NFTs). Remember 3-4 years ago when we were all going to live in a magical symphonious world brought to eternal harmony with blockchain built into everything? Now with AI actually promising a world like that (if things go right) people don't seem as excited as when the killer app for the new tech was pictures of apes with hash codes pointing to their urls.
- xwdv 4y agoIf people do not live in fear of their technology, then the technology is not sufficiently advanced.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> It's crazy how public fervor over tech advances can sometime correlate with how cool and useful they are (like with AI) or go wildly off the mark and fetishize something entirely scammy and useless (like NFTs). Obligatory reminder that modern public knows shit all about anything on aggregate - they get excited over things the advertisers tell them to. Cryptocurrencies were somewhat special, because by enabling a bunch of get-rich-quick schemes (rehashes of old fraudster tricks, for the digital era), they became awash with money that could be used to lure more victims. A positive feedback loop.
- nethdeco 4y agoIts as everyone is getting on the bandwagon, as what generative AI does is easier to understand for most people. But in the same time the uninformed public is not knowledgeable about the failure cases and the limitations. All the tech companies will make a killing adding couple of buzz words to their marketing.
- rektide 4y agoI don't disagree but it's such a shit advancement. It eschews making technology & understanding closer. It amplifies our capabilities yes, but in 99.99999% of cases in deep violation of Engelbartian principles: it's not intellectual augmentation, it doesn't extend how we think, it thinks for us. It's revilesome & further unhinges & decouples us from the real world. It's an alien, a remote expert system, that 0.1% of the 0.1% of AI practioners have even the faintest real-ish understanding of. It is a fantastic expert, of deep experience, but it is an idiot savant, and no peer in lifting us up as well. I have never been sadder to see a technology. I lived through the seemingly incredibly short term of Personal Computing which seemingly is at it's final ends, first eroded by online-services & Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS), and now fatalitied in a Mortal Kombat style by idiot machines fed on the immolent corpus of the internet of posts. A system which seems all too destined to radically outstrip the pop-culture-will-eat-itself idea with a new ultra-hyper-self-consuming internetworked online-content-will-be-begat-by-AIs-begat-by-online-content Oroborous. None of this shit informs. None of it makes clear. None of it raises human consciousness. It's the best monkey on a type-writer the universe-we-know has ever seen, but it's utterly without soul or character or purpose, is a refined regurgatory mimic devoid of purpose. This is the worst thing to happen to technology. And humanity will spend the rest of my life obsessing over it & fascinated with it. It's all bad magic. It's all against-the-cause. This is the worst shadow-puppet machine humankind has ever invented, and it's visage chains us to the wall. Do Not Want.
- textninja 4y ago[flagged]
- jodrellblank 4y ago> "None of this shit informs. None of it makes clear." Ask it to inform and make clear, ChatGPT can do explanations. Prompt: "I have heard people say "c'est ne pas un pipe" has deep meaning, can you explain simply to me?" Answer: "The phrase "c'est ne pas un pipe" is a French sentence that means "this is not a pipe." It is a famous statement by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, who painted a picture of a pipe with the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written underneath. The meaning behind the phrase is often interpreted as a commentary on the nature of representation and reality. Magritte's painting is not actually a pipe, but a representation of a pipe. The painting can never be smoked, and therefore it is not a pipe in the literal sense. The phrase "C'est ne pas un pipe" challenges the viewer's assumptions about the relationship between words, images, and reality, and invites them to question the nature of representation. In other words, the phrase suggests that there is a difference between an object or idea and its representation, and that the representation is not the same thing as the real thing. This idea can be applied to many aspects of life, such as language, art, and even our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us." It connected my broken French with the correct sentence, translated it, put it in context of who said it and when, and expanded into a coherent and correct explanation of some deeper meaning. That's a better explanation than a monkey-on-type-writer or Markov chain simple token-predictor has any right to give, isn't it? > "it's not intellectual augmentation, it doesn't extend how we think, it thinks for us" Ever had the experience where you recognise a famous person's face on TV but can't think who they are, wait for a while, and then the answer 'comes to you'? That is "thinking for myself" but it's not me actively doing anything, it's magic information retrieval that happens to me. I'm not sure what the act of thinking consists of ("when I went to bed, I lay awake, doing something I call thinking but probably is not." - JOB, Robert Heinlein); what do you have in mind for a machine 'extending how we think'?
- alienicecream 4y agoWhat's the hype about? A single textbook would be better than 100 GPT approximations. You have to verify everything it gives you. It doesn't have intelligence. It's an oracle channeling a random number generator.
- wolverine876 4y agoDon't miss the end of the article: "Market forces won't naturally produce AI products and service that help the poorest," he [Gates] said. "The opposite is more likely. "With reliable funding and the right policies, governments and philanthropy can ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity. "Just as the world needs its brightest people focused on its biggest problems, we will need to focus the world's best AIs on its biggest problems."
- wolverine876 4y agoThe quality of GPT output is deceptive. It's the ultimate confirmation bias: It doesn't challenge our norms, it is designed (maybe unintentionally) to repeat them. It repeats them in a friendly, safe, unchallenging voice; and with precision and completeness that signals to us real knowledge. How well do we evaluate its response when it keeps telling us, in its safe voice, 'you're so right boss! That's brilliant!'
- grantcas 4y ago[dead]
- nmcela 4y agoWhat a HUGE shame that the worst and greediest american tech monopolies are leading us into this new world. It feels extremely dystopian. Let's hope the OSS community can build something with the llama models.