https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess
"This is a weird time to be alive.
I grew up on Asimov and Clarke, watching
Star Trek and dreaming of
intelligent machines. My dad’s library was full of books on computers. I spent
camping trips reading about perceptrons and symbolic reasoning. I never
imagined that the Turing test would fall within my lifetime. Nor did I imagine
that I would feel so
disheartened by it.
Around 2019 I attended a talk by one of the hyperscalers about their new cloud
hardware for training Large Language Models (LLMs). During the Q&A I asked if
what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more
accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Since then, friends
have been asking me what I make of all this “AI stuff”. I’ve been turning over
the outline for this piece for years, but never sat down to complete it; I
wanted to be well-read, precise, and thoroughly sourced. A half-decade later
I’ve realized that the perfect essay will never happen, and I might as well get
something out there.
This is
bullshit about bullshit machines, and I mean it. It is neither
balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property
issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online.
Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is
also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories
in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate
predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play.
Some of these ideas felt prescient in the 2010s and are now obvious. Others may
be more novel, or not yet widely-heard. Some predictions will pan out, but
others are wild speculation. I hope that regardless of your background or
feelings on the current generation of ML systems, you find something
interesting to think about."
Via Yifei Zhan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
