Have you demo'd one? I use mine a few hours a day...great for pairing with a macbook and working from and awesome for movies too. Bit too expensive though
I'd go easy on them, they're a student with what is almost certainly a very bizarre view of the world from that POV right now.
It doesn't sound very different from when I was in undergrad an eon ago, except substitute "AI" with "blatant and rampant cheating" and "openAI offer" with "google" or "facebook"
many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.
iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.
high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.
The way I ask it in public situations with scientists is this:
If you had an AI that could output cures for diseases (IE, drugs that pass phase III clinical trial, get approved by the FDA, and are highly effective), but it couldn't explain how it worked, would you use it?
Opinions are mixed. Some folks will say that it's morally imperative to cure people even if we don't understand the specific or general principles. Other folks will insist that it's a terrible idea to hand over the comprehension of medical treatments to LLMs, because in the long term it will leave us helpless and dependent.
Is it guaranteed? The most likely outcome is you get rid of both the humans to understand the research and the artificial wizard of Oz was actually just outputting nonsense, and it took killing a bunch of people to find that out.
Ive been thinking about this a a lot, like now if LLMs can just try a bunch of things, you can just try them all now. Are there some applications where we can just brute force and test at scale and no longer need to understand? Where understanding is now in essence that it “works” and passes our acceptance tests.
There's been a decent amount of drugs that have been made via a brute force method, but it's a pretty physical process, usually pipetting a few hundred thousand compounds and samples. There's also a lot of drugs where we don't fully understand how they work.
I agree! I'm also not going to turn down an Alzheimer's vaccine that's been demonstrated to be safe and effective even if we don't know exactly how it works. (And if you think that's a contrived fantasy, check out the shingles vaccine).
True, but it's also not your job to understand what post-docs are suggesting (hopefully), unlike post-docs who kind of need to understand what LLMs are suggesting.
Not to get back into the AI safety debate from last week, but I really, really want a team of human experts to understand what the AI is suggesting before we administer new medical treatments or synthesize new lifeforms in the lab.
There will always be a %age of humans who will be curious how the universe works including LLMs. Delusional to think those humans are only incentivized by degrees, or money.
Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.
For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs have a major outage.
Sure. But unless they are born into a very wealthy family, or decide to pass up on having a family and other hobbies, they won't be able to satisfy that curiosity beyond a very basic level.
We got to 80 without inventing money. Living that long back then was hard work every day.
Then the industrial revolution happened, and we got state pensions at one end of life and extended childhood a few years past adolescence on the other. We currently pay for this… by taxes funding both education and a pension.
Absent the radical transformations of an AI driven economy, we live 200 years in exactly the same way.
With those transformations, all bets are off unless they violate the laws of physics.
But the majority of people in the world are still working just as hard now as before the industrial revolution? Most of the labor rights activists of the 19th and 20th century spent their time advocating for working hours closer to their pre-industrial grandparents. Industrialization increased working hours with the promise that eventually everyone will have to work less hours once the equipment was built. And yet many generations later countries are talking about increasing retirement age, reducing worker rights, and wage theft is more prevalent than all other forms of theft combined.
What is AI going to do that industrialization and automation hasn't already made the same promises for?
Before the industrial revolution, you started working as soon as you could assist with anything (cooking meant firewood, washing clothes was by hand, etc.); you stopped working when you were too feeble, and only if you were lucky (or from another perspective, very unlucky) a lord's almshouse might look after you.
Life back then was a never-ending quest to make more calories, and you had to consume about 90% of what you made just to not starve (the other 10% went to the lords, the army, and very young children; though I'm oversimplifying here because farm animals also eat and you had to feed them). As total production was lower (and because "preservative" meant cats, alcohol, salt, and grain silos on mushroom-shaped pillars so rats couldn't get in, not industrial refrigeration and sodium benzoate etc.), this meant very different work schedule compare to today; but people were working at the limits of what biology would support, even if hours were fewer (no affordable artificial light to work at night) and "holy days" more plentiful… but on that front, most pop reporting on that seems to forget that today we have two-day weekends, while medieval European communities often only rested on Sunday (and even Sunday-is-rest-day was relaxed somewhat to avoid crop spoilage).
The modern equivalent would be if everyone's job was to hit the gym for 10 hours a day in summer and 4 a day in winter, and still sometimes had mandatory overtime. Some people do labour-intensive work today, but pre-industrial this would be 90%+ of the population and not by choice.
What we actually have in developed nations today, is no significant labour before 18 or over 68, only about 70% the people of working age* are in work at any given time, and the "work" is far less intensive. Less than half of us are employed today to support the whole population. I say "are employed" rather than "work" because childcare and domestic work is still work, but this too is much easier than pre-industrial life.
A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you. 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
Industrialization increased working hours, not decreased them.
> A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you.
Way to misread what I wrote.
A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.
Their work cycle was arranged differently than ours, with harvest season being longer days because letting crops spoil in the fields meant starvation come winter, and winter hours being mostly limited by sunlight and moonlight because artificial illumination was far too expensive.
> 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts 200-100 years ago are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.
If we suddenly get an anti-aging treatment that has us all live 200 years*, all the governments can trivially handle this just by adjusting pension ages.
* somehow without any of the other things implied by the tech that can make such treatments; add those things in and you have to ask "why only 200?" and "what else can this tech do?" and this is all about AI having been a big contributor to some bio research, so there's a lot of "what else" already and we don't even have the anti-aging treatment yet.
Yeah harvest season has longer hours, I grew up on a farm. But you aren't putting in anything like that amount of work most of the year. You don't work the same fields all year long. You got plenty of other things to do but not a full modern work schedule.
Heating can be done in a few weeks even with handsaws and an axe. A chainsaw makes it faster.
If 12th century peasants had to work anything like a modern work schedule, how would people a 1000 years or more before then survive at all with less technology, tools, and knowledge? How would clothing exist at all without a loom? How did ancient people have any time for discovery and innovation at all if their lives were nearly so grueling.
Those workers rights activists didn't get all that they asked for. And why has it not gotten even better with another 100 years of productivity increases after that?
To me your explainations seem like repeates of what robber barons claimed. The luddites didn't form because people thought industrialisation was allowing them to work less than those before them.
This is a horribly wrong understanding of history. If you think life today is in any way comparable to the Industrial Revolution, you need to pick up a history book because your history classes failed you.
If you think malnourished subsidence farmers could work non-stop before industrialization then you need to think about that a bit more and aread a bit more early and pre-industrial works.
This is a bit like saying that shoes are more important than shoe factories. Yes, sure, I can't wear a shoe factory, but we'll all run out of shoes if all the factories are gone.
Medical advances require post doc levels of education and knowledge to advance. Otherwise we are pretty soon unable to determine what is trash and what is useful. It is easier to generate trash data than good data, and most data generated will be trash, so if nobody can sift through the good and bad the next level is going to be ingesting nonsense and getting worse every time.
Of all of ai's crimes, the greatest is bringing down the em-dash, the king of punctuation. Commas, periods, even semicolons can never hold a candle to the flexibility of the em-dash. But we must fold in the eyes of inflexible, unloving philistines.
For me - I forgive an em-dash, but it does make me more skeptical of the other tells of AI-written text. If I start to see those other tells I do start to get a bit annoyed.
It's not the readme that gets me. It's the damn "chasing loc" KPI in the industry that continuously drives Claude to spout entire essays of docstrings and comments that make code unreadable that infuriates me!
> As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created.
Do you? Just stop caring.
I don't think it makes sense to keep asserting that you're an AI vegan in order to please randos. You'll always get hate creating/building anything online. The people that enjoy your work won't care if it's AI or not or they'll believe you.
It's not just other creatives that care, it's consumers. There's a lot of backlash on steam against games that contain AI content. Personally, while I think GenAI has a place, I think this backlash is good. People have gotten way out ahead of their ski's and have gone way too hard on quantity instead of quality. If you use ChatGPT to do research for your book? Great. I bet it's better for it. Did you use ChatGPT to write your book? I have zero interest in reading it. It's a strong signal that no work was put into writing it so I should invest no work in reading it.
I don’t really care if someone use AI, I care if the result is slop. And it very much seems like it’s very rare for those who use AI to care about the result and avoid producing slop.
If it was bad, the hand produced result will also be criticized, but AI tools distort all the signals that let you avoid slop beforehand. No you need to invest time to recognize the slop and that time will not be given back to you.
Even disregarding the bizarre assertion that a human author could "just stop caring" at will, this is still unrealistic even on a practical level. Enough consumers want to know whether prose is AI that it matters.
I think the theme with negative-style statements, eg 'it's not this -- it's this', is authority groveling, ie when you are missing a brain, any successful claim registers toward credibility. It indicates that you know something.
A lot of writing publications are so overwhelmed by submissions that they run an AI tool on everything and don't even read the ones that fail (for whatever threshold they think is best). Plus look at the recent backlash against the book where the author according to detectors used about three quarters AI gen. If you do your art for anyone but yourself you care a great deal about your work showing as human and being treated as having soul rather than testing as machine and being treated as witch hunt grade slop.
The publishing market has been brutal for many years now: even before AI, there have been multiple stories of angry backlash for any number of reasons causing a book to get yanked before it is even officially released.
With such a small number of people actually buying new books now, the cohort of angry, vindictive Twitter/Goodreads loudmouths has a lot of power and publishers are terrified of them. "Not caring" about them isn't an option, from a business perspective.
We must prove ownership and creation to collect revenue in many situations. Its even more problematic that AI gets used to steal content, or directly impersonate creators. AI devalues everything.
