In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
This is me right nowWhat do you mean? Cory figured it out like 20 years ago already, he was reporting on tech bro grift from the beginning
Cory has been that “crazy” guy warning of all sorts of grift, exploitation, privacy fuckery and security forever like a modern-day Kassandra. Now that we start to see the direction the technology sector is headed more clearly, his warnings finally start to ring true.
I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
I mean… it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
It’s not lying if they have no idea what they’re talking about and constantly swoon over it.
What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.
Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
Trust me, bro!
They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.
But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
“But the charts say AI is helping”
Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
c/nothingeverhappens
Well, he hasn’t been describing our future for at least two decades. /sarcasm
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Well I wouldn’t recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.I mean, I’m sure the same applies to all tech sectors and likely worse. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It’s just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
That’s all an LLM is, a gas-powered bullshit firehose.
This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the “I wish I could do ____. but _____” ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer “a thing”. This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We’re at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.
never seen it helpful to anyone, except for the people wanting to do the layoffs. most of the time it gives misinformation to people looking for abstract-to-reality ideas.
I mean its use as a tool, maybe in a small business context. The individual can be the “visionary” giving their idea for a book to a de-facto ghost writer. AI’s will often give you back info that confirms your ideas, so its like any other tool. If I am not good with a hammer then I smash my fingers and if I’m not good with AI then I convince myself the earth is actually flat.
The recent Bank of England report indicates that, yes, small businesses are seeing the biggest benefit of the tool (AI agents), but they are not spending big dollars on it. Free models and/or entry accounts are more than enough per their survey.
I agree, its a tool. I have used free models for the last few weeks to make python scripts into portable exes to help streamline some onsite job activities that normally are done multiple times a month. I never would have the time to research how to code python, figure out libraries and such to put together, and then compile all that into an exe. You’ll never see me spend money on AI when the free models work well enough not needing “frontier” features.
The funny thing to me is that Lemmy users seem to be so staunchly against LLMs, that they are unable to even acknowledge the small things it truly is good for as a tool. It’s like the opposite of hackernews on here.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
I’m glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They’re very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn’t warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI…
Wasn’t Nano predicated on those lines? I remember reading transactions could be done locally, even off-line, validated beetween the parts and only later added to the global ledger.
That requires a global ledger. Blockchain is an appallingly bad way to implement one.
What I understood then was that the local ledger of a given user of the coin would authorize and register the transactions done on/off the recorded balance and, when network available, would broadcast such transactions to the global ledger.
The global ledger was the total sum of transactions, not imperatively required to authorize transaction by transaction.
Funny, that you even know about Nano!
…it’s one of the often overlooked projects because it doesn’t have a ton of fuck-off-money and instead tries to focus on a solid protocol.Nano has a lot of interesting attributes, but I fail to see how what you describe would work in practice.
If both parties want to make sure there are no shenenigans at play, they need to know about the most recent state of the respective account chains, which essentially requires them to be online for agreeing on said transaction.
But overall Nano is very fast and efficient by design and only a failure in terms of “gainz for Lambo”.As we’re here in a thread about AI I should remark that machine-to-machine-payments - in this case: agent-to-agent-payments - would work pretty well with Nano as currency because of the transaction finality (typically less than 1 second) and the feeless nature of transactions.
If AI agents are looking for the most viable way to transfer tiny amounts of value fast and without fees they might find Nano and use it - who knows…
…and just like Nano showed that efficient ways to create digital money are possible I’m hoping for efficient AI models that are economically and ecologically worthwhile.
I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
The core issue feels like the dead torrent problem.
Its distributed, so it needs to be hosted, by several locations. Which becomes probitive over time as.it becomes huge. Its also massively inefficient for what its trying to do.
At some point, its basically just one server farm somewhere hosting a glorified MySWL database that doubles as a space heater for the entire planet every time you need to add a row.
I was thinking that with legal backing, blockchain could be a good record of ownership for deeds. Like NFTs but for physical property.
The history of ownership and the public visibility are good features there.
Lack of reliable, authoritative attribution of changes and no rollback or compensatory transactions are all dealbreakers.
Yes, exactly.
Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.
It can still be used that way. While most people talk about how corrupt politicians enrich themselves with fake currencies, more legal and legitimate uses can still use decentralized ledgers for useful things. Of course these won’t make headlines.
There are far better global ledger approaches than blockchain.
That’s top down thinking for you.
AI is changing everything… Mostly to bad, that’s the part they keep.
But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.
It’s changing a lot of things, but many of them in only relatively minor ways. It’s not affecting e.g. food supply systems in a significant way - it might be screwing up the management structures of companies involved, but that will be repairable fairly quickly…
memisrized? dont you mean hypnotized, and is in a honeymoon phase.
There is no difference between hypnotism and mesmerism. Mesmer was the great populariser of hypnotism, so that’s what it was called at first.
I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.
It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.
This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.
silently growing underground for years.
And not so silently, for decades. Even J. Edgar Hoover was using early forms of AI to manage his data trove.
If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re already past the point of no return.
The climate is changing more drastically every year. Hurricanes and typhoons are more severe and the season lasts longer than just a couple years ago. Thunderstorms are more severe, with longer and hotter periods between them and fewer regular rain events. Ocean currents are changing and stopping, meaning the flows that sea life use aren’t there. There is no longer a constant polar ice cap on the north pole.
We will not be staying under 2°C average warming, which was the target back in 2010.
The question isn’t where the point of no return is - we’ve been beyond those the whole time. The question is how bad we want to let it get. Ever fraction of a degree extra warming means worse impacts.
Agree that less than +2°C is unlikely (though not completely impossible). But still, better that than +2.5°C, etc.
This unfortunately, I’m sick tech broligarchs and billionaire broligarchs and broligarch billionaires ruining everything
In the near future an ai company will turn on their ASI and ask it what to do about climate change and it will say “first off shut me down, second off eat the rich” and only then will we know we did it
It’s also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that’s what good monkeys do.
