I say this as someone who’s not particularly a fan of AI and tries to use it very sparingly.

For me AI is not so much about productivity gains. Where I find it useful instead is to push me past the initial block of starting something from scratch. It’s that initial dopamine rush that the article mentions, from seeing an idea starting to take shape.

In that sense, if I compare projects by time spent on them with or without AI after they are completed, I too would probably find there were no productivity gains. But some of these things I would never get started at all by myself.

If you are a senior developer in a corporation, you know what you have to do, you are an expert in your domain, you rarely start something really new (and when you do, it is only after endless discussions and studies on tools, language, tech stack, architecture). AI is probably not a great help for you.

But even in corporate life, there are a lot of things that are inportant but that you constantly set aside: from planning your career, to honing your communication skills or whatever it is that you could certainly learn to do (with time and dedication) but for some reason you keep postponing because you are not already an expert at them and it takes motivation to learn. That’s where AI found its niche in my life.

Loophole. They didn’t cross their heart and hope to die. The only way is calling them out with Liar Liar Pants on Fire

If he’s going to fuck whole nations now, I though he’d go for South Sudan, as it’s now less than 15 years old as a state.

Being a bubble does not mean the service they provide is useless. It means that the service is never generating enough profit to repay for the huge cost of providing it.

Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?

Because these AI companies are currently burning through literally a good chunk of all the cash in the world and they will eventually need to make even more gigantic profits to repay that cash. And the only one that is currently making money from AI seems to be NVIDIA, by selling the hardware that powers the AI giants.

I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.

Microsoft could write an AI agent to filter threads based on context you don’t like. Come to think of it, Megagenius Elon Musk already has one he wrote to censor anti-Israel posts on Trump’s Truth Social. There, I think I got them all… Happy holidays!

“no, we meant it as a compliment!”

Not an expert at all, but I think to an extent this already happens with the current system in most countries, and it would probably need to be done much more now. Not that Automation pays more taxes, but that having employees generally qualifies companies for tax breaks.

For instance, when Amazon said “we’re going to open a new HQ”, Cities and States tripped over themselves to try and give them the largest tax breaks. But that was under the assumption that the HQ would give jobs to tens of thousand of people, not to 5 data scientist and a massive, energy-hungry data center.

Yeah, they didn’t even kiss until season 2!

And yes, you CAN run Doom on it. But turns out it’s not a great idea

***k

Hey, how do you know my password?

I see… so people have to find Xi useful instead of the old outdated system where they are allowed to vote. Oh, also NOT finding Xi useful is a crime. Got it. Seems like a sensible system!

Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.

But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.

Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.

Almost right, but the “I think” sounds out of character.

I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:

• algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it’s “The Algorithm” in capital letters like “The Social Media Algorithm”; then it becomes evil
• machine learning - been out for decades, hasn’t destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
• machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. “Machine intelligence” performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we’ll give it a pass)
• artificial intelligence - machine intelligence’s evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it’s the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists

One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.

Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords

If I know anything at all after I’m dead, I will already have the answer to the biggest question from all major religions

“I’m not a Nazi, I just like the esthetics of someone else’s blood on my black uniform”

It’s almost like “you have to buy a new laptop to install it and help train our AI on your private documents” is somehow not convincing enough. Maybe if they also removed local accounts and forced you to have an online MS account? Nah scratch that, it would be stupid

AI goes haywire and starts actually giving reliable information

but can YOU do it before I finish my coffee?