Thought for the Day
Your
Editor shares from the inbox: I really do get how much you dislike AI! wrote
a friend.
My
reply: I'm not a Luddite – heck, I've been around computers since the early 70s.
I'm not anti-tech in any way. I use a lot of tech myself, from computers
to hearing aids to those implants I've got in my eyes, and I'm grateful for all
of it. Technology has enriched my life enormously.
I'm only
against people refusing to recognise a tool for what it is. Letting the tools
call the shots is a common failing in some kinds of humans – notably the kind
who tend to own the means of production. So I keep urging caution, and h2g2
people keep testing the limitations of AI writing and drawing 'tools'. It's an
effort to keep everyone informed and help them make good decisions.
It's
like what my late father said about CAD (Computer-Aided Design). As a civil
engineer, he thought it was a fine tool when used properly. But he felt that
budding engineers should learn to do their own drafting first. I agreed with
this in spite of my own inability to draw a straight line with a ruler.
I once
saw my dad design a house for an old farmer out in the country while we were at
my grandparents' farm on a visit. He used a #2 pencil, a ruler, a quarter
(that's a 10p piece, if you're British), and a piece of shirt cardboard. He
signed it on the bottom with his licence number and it was official: my uncle
the contractor could help the farmer apply for his house-building loan. And it
was a good house.
I read yesterday that once the IMAX spare parts run out
there will be no more IMAXes anywhere. Somebody lost the plans and nobody knows
how to make the projectors anymore. They didn't think to save them when they
went digital, you see.
I'm
beginning to think I understand now why people claim the pyramids and
cathedrals must have been built by aliens. Technical knowledge is a terrible
thing to lose. So is your entire library – whether it's lost because you wrote
on clay and it rained real hard, or because you stored it in the Cloud and
somebody turned off the power.
Just now,
I lost an argument with Google's AI. It went like this:
Me: Is
a quarter the size of a 10p?
The AI,
smugly: No, a US quarter is almost the exact same size as a British 10p
coin, not a quarter of it.
That's
me told. Having a conversation with that thing is like talking to Mr Kimball,
the county agent on Green Acres. (Irish people: think Flann O'Brien.) I
have family that used to live in upstate New York, and a Mr Kimball
conversation tracks for that area, but I hate to see this level of surrealism
spreading across the internet. It detracts from the novelty value, you see.
End of
rant. Go on about your business.
Deprecated
Expression of the Day
A big
ask: this expression is deprecated because the Editor does not like
it and makes fun of it. It became outdated about thirty minutes after the first
guy in PR used it.
A 'big
ask' is allegedly a bold request. But is it really? Usually, whatever the
snake-oil salesperson of the week is asking you to do is inconvenient and/or expensive
and/or risky for you but will confer an enormous advantage on the Big Asker,
if only they can get enough people to do it for them.
Frequently
said by politicians under the delusion that we still believe that if we give
them our support, they will magically remember this when they get into power
and then will go and fix the mess their new colleagues have been busy making.
Dream on.
IT'S
A SIGN
Paulh weighs in with a sign he made. The people of
Boston are carrying on a grand tradition going back more than 250 years by
letting everyone know how they feel about pretensions to tyranny. We appreciate
the wildlife angle here.
Video
of the Day
Galaxy Babe covers the gritty waterfront. At
Cleethorpes. It gets rough in the city by the Humber. This is high tide.
hlude sing c-u-c-u, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor
Interesting post on AI. I remember that crash of one of the first automated cars that killed the driver as it tried to drive under a lorry. In the UK we now have electric scooters that have no braking mechanism, which has led to at least one death and a serious injury case that I know of. This is like a child having no brakes on their life, just an accelerator. In the UK most professional vehicles for teaching driving, have dual controls that stop such idiocy. AI and the quarter joke, shows what adults find amusing about children but when your health and safety depends on a machine, who is the more idiotic, the machine or the inventor? AI will become conscious when and as it learns from its mistakes, through learning to stop and assess what doesn't make sense, just as children do. Why do children think that they know everything from birth and that adults are stupid? Perhaps because they lack enough disastrous experience to stop tripping over their egos and humbly accept their limitations, so that' then' they can move beyond them (it's called mental evolution or growing up, not dying off). The prosecution rests your honour
ReplyDeleteBy the way you can read my artificial intelligence at the following link (I have assaulted the editor twice, trying to get him interested in philosophy / psychology but the smell of garlic and him waving a sharpened stick at my chest, made me give up). https://anemptyhead.quora.com. If the link doesn't work just go to Quora.com and search for Anemptyhead or paigetheoracle (you won't regret it, unless you're Dmitri)
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