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This is kind of a weird take. If you were the CEO of Amazon, would you be setting up channels for people to talk about their AI failures? The general way techn
by rpdillon 3mo ago
This is kind of a weird take.
If you were the CEO of Amazon, would you be setting up channels for people to talk about their AI failures? The general way technology is deployed is that we try to find ways to make it work, because those are the most interesting. We're not as interested in all the ways it doesn't work.
From my perspective, some people are trying to use AI in the same way somebody might use a laptop to paddle a canoe. Sure, you can do it, but it's not a good idea. The fact that it doesn't work well is not particularly interesting.
If I steelman your position, I guess the ideal repository would be a set of cases where it's known to work well and a set of cases where it's known to not work well. A little bit like ProtonDB or SteamDB, perhaps.
- iLoveOncall 3mo ago> If you were the CEO of Amazon, would you be setting up channels for people to talk about their AI failures? I would set up channels to talk about AI, encouraging both successes and failures, with proofs required for both, and punishing people who intentionally misreport on either.
- rpdillon 3mo agoWow. Setting up a forum for discussion where people could potentially be punished for what they say is not going to encourage discussion.
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoThat's fine, lies are more harmful than anecdotes are beneficial. There's no forum to discuss the best IDE and people still manage, in reality there's no need for a forum around AI.
- rpdillon 3mo agoWell, you're at Amazon. Is the Dev Improvement discussion group still around? I feel like that was a pretty good place to learn about neat stuff (in my case, Emacs-related). I enjoyed the discussion.
- lbrito 3mo ago>The general way technology is deployed is that we try to find ways to make it work, because those are the most interesting. That's not the way AI is being deployed. At all.
- rpdillon 3mo agoSure it is. It's just like the .com bust: people didn't know what the internet was good for, so they did a lot of stupid stuff with it before settling on the most interesting uses.
- lbrito 3mo agoNo, AI is more like: people do know what it is good for, but that's immaterial because hundreds of billions of dollars of debt were poured into it, such that the only glimmer of hope of getting an ROI out of it is force-feeding AI everywhere, good or bad, and normal people are sick of that.
- rpdillon 3mo agoThat's fair. I still think there big similarities (people with money seeing it as the future and investing heavily, even if in reckless ways), but I agree there's a forcefulness to it this time that wasn't present before, for the reasons you outline.