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You hype garbage to the moon, people are going to figure it out. There are good uses for AI. But most of the time it gets shoved out the door without enough th

by MBCook 3y ago

You hype garbage to the moon, people are going to figure it out. There are good uses for AI. But most of the time it gets shoved out the door without enough thought/care. Google’s recent issue or the article I saw yesterday about how TurboTax and H&R Block both have “helpful” AIs to answer tax questions, which of course are completely wrong. That never should have been deployed.

passwordoops 3y ago
Bingo. And the fact the horde comes after anyone who points a critical eye as being anti-tech or too stupid to possibly understand the massive power of AI doesn't help matters one bit
- haswell 3y ago
  As is so often the case where there are two “camps”, the public conversation degrades quickly because of binary extremes taken up by enthusiasts and naysayers. The reality is that there is truth in both. LLMs are revolutionary, and are already enabling things that didn’t seem possible a few years ago. I’ve experienced this personally as I use GPT4 as a research and troubleshooting assistant. But the fact that it seems so good on the surface (because sometimes it is) is what also makes it so dangerous. And the doomsday crowd rightly points out that this isn’t what many people think it is, and that people should not trust it in the way many people blindly have been. I think the public has been primed by a broader tendency towards polarization on social media to have exactly the wrong kind of conversation about AI tech as it emerges. The truth is some combination of all of the above. There are reasons to be excited. Reasons to be concerned. Transformational use cases. Dystopian use cases. What does worry me is that “the horde” seems like the default state of all public discourse at this point, which does add some credence to the doomer narrative. But the validity of that stance seems less about AI, and more about the current state of public social discourse.
soco 3y ago
But isn't this the way everything seems to come nowadays? Couple years ago everything was built on a blockchain, years before everything was going microservices, earlier everything was moving to the cloud... while every fad had its merits and is here to stay, none of them lived to the level of hype in which they came wrapped up - and rightly so. Edit: one example being the touted IBM-Maersk blockchain solution, ground-breaking as it was in 2021 then quietly retired in 2022.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  Pre-2000, Java and Object-Oriented programming were the big fad.
- yifanl 3y ago
  "Better to ask forgiveness than permission" has ruined us.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Eh, it's given us a tremendous amount of benefits across the internet as a whole. It's only once it enters into the territory where both permission and forgiveness are definitely denied that it becomes a problem - as well as the US insistence that free speech means an unlimited right to lie about things including your own products.
    - yifanl 3y ago
      It's maybe a problem of scale, since I can't easily name any entity that could "forgive" a questionable decision made by Google.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Let’s be honest. No one asks for forgiveness and there are no consequences of any kind, especially if they’re externalities to your business. Ruin the internet or something else for an extra $30k in profit. It’s fine. That’s what we do!
- circusfly 3y ago
  "Couple years ago everything was built on a blockchain" I've never worked anywhere where blockchain was used. "years before everything was going microservices" The vast majority of software architecture has gone microservices. "earlier everything was moving to the cloud" I've worked many places where the cloud was used but never 100%. You are right, blockchain was a fad, everything else you cited are valid and remain.
- MBCook 3y ago

by MBCook 3y ago

passwordoops 3y ago

Bingo. And the fact the horde comes after anyone who points a critical eye as being anti-tech or too stupid to possibly understand the massive power of AI doesn't help matters one bit

haswell 3y ago
As is so often the case where there are two “camps”, the public conversation degrades quickly because of binary extremes taken up by enthusiasts and naysayers. The reality is that there is truth in both. LLMs are revolutionary, and are already enabling things that didn’t seem possible a few years ago. I’ve experienced this personally as I use GPT4 as a research and troubleshooting assistant. But the fact that it seems so good on the surface (because sometimes it is) is what also makes it so dangerous. And the doomsday crowd rightly points out that this isn’t what many people think it is, and that people should not trust it in the way many people blindly have been. I think the public has been primed by a broader tendency towards polarization on social media to have exactly the wrong kind of conversation about AI tech as it emerges. The truth is some combination of all of the above. There are reasons to be excited. Reasons to be concerned. Transformational use cases. Dystopian use cases. What does worry me is that “the horde” seems like the default state of all public discourse at this point, which does add some credence to the doomer narrative. But the validity of that stance seems less about AI, and more about the current state of public social discourse.

soco 3y ago

But isn't this the way everything seems to come nowadays? Couple years ago everything was built on a blockchain, years before everything was going microservices, earlier everything was moving to the cloud... while every fad had its merits and is here to stay, none of them lived to the level of hype in which they came wrapped up - and rightly so. Edit: one example being the touted IBM-Maersk blockchain solution, ground-breaking as it was in 2021 then quietly retired in 2022.

armchairhacker 3y ago
Pre-2000, Java and Object-Oriented programming were the big fad.
yifanl 3y ago
"Better to ask forgiveness than permission" has ruined us.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Eh, it's given us a tremendous amount of benefits across the internet as a whole. It's only once it enters into the territory where both permission and forgiveness are definitely denied that it becomes a problem - as well as the US insistence that free speech means an unlimited right to lie about things including your own products.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    It's maybe a problem of scale, since I can't easily name any entity that could "forgive" a questionable decision made by Google.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Let’s be honest. No one asks for forgiveness and there are no consequences of any kind, especially if they’re externalities to your business. Ruin the internet or something else for an extra $30k in profit. It’s fine. That’s what we do!
circusfly 3y ago
"Couple years ago everything was built on a blockchain" I've never worked anywhere where blockchain was used. "years before everything was going microservices" The vast majority of software architecture has gone microservices. "earlier everything was moving to the cloud" I've worked many places where the cloud was used but never 100%. You are right, blockchain was a fad, everything else you cited are valid and remain.
MBCook 3y ago