There was a lot of capital sunken into chasing the crypto line, and now all these bazinga brains are stuck with compute farms they don't know what to do with. Some of these maniacs have even converted defunct coal power plants to operate their datacenters. I'm convinced this is a big part of the reason AI is being hyped so hard. All these people are desperate for a return on their investments.
AI doesn't have anything to do with crypto currency though. They are two different ideas that dipshits have cottoned on to. The difference being that AI does have some legitimate uses
that's pretty stupid the bottleneck is largely data collection and sorting for these things
I wondered if I could find anything notable on the writer's Wikipedia page. It took me all of ~30 seconds to find this gem...
In 2023, Cowen falsely claimed on his blog that Francis Bacon was a critic of the printing press, including fictional quotations and references he had gotten from ChatGPT.
Depends on what you mean. It's not useless like crypto, and it has very different societal implications than crypto does. However, every last article like this one about either crypto or AI is uninformed or knowingly false, motivated speculation.
From the perspective of a copywriter, AI is automating away a job. From the perspective of a capitalist, AI is both useful automation and a useful scare tactic against labor, all the moreso for it's wildly inflated reputation. From the perspective of mass media, I guess the main implication of AI is yet another goldrush for them to encourage people to dive into so that capitalists can mine the prospective miners.
That's the aspect where a flippant dismissal is equally appropriate for both: They're both subject to a coordinated effort to mystify and essentialize them in the eye of the public. LLMs can not "figure out" anything, but news outlets keep pretending that we've coded some kind of digital person
If you're looking at AI as just LLMs like ChatGPT, yeah you're probably right about them being overhyped. I think a lot of people on this site and on the left in general are writing AI off because the hype surrounding it is largely being propped up by annoying tech-dudes/Elon shills. For background, I worked as a research assistant on AI projects in my undergrad and did my thesis on using AI to automate chemical syntheses. There are a lot of legitimately good (and potentially horrifying) use cases for stuff like deep neural networks and reinforcement learning. There aren't many good parallels to describe just how quickly the field has been advancing, especially in the last year alone. We are still decades if not centuries away from genuine artificial consciousness, but in the meantime a lot of things are gonna significantly change for better and for worse.
I don't think it's just LLMs, but I do think it's reasonable to think of it as automating data-science. I mean that to describe how I see its scope of applications, rather than a bah humbug, and of course the scope of data-science is huge. Being able to automate specific analyses sounds like game changer
That's all sort of esoteric though - to most people, AI is being deliberately presented over and over in human-intelligence terms, and that's how they learn to understand it. Like, none of my coworkers approach me to ask what I think about AI's potential uses in chemistry, content moderation, copywriting, statistical modeling, catching relations between data that people aren't very well suited to catching, or anything else plausible. They want to know if their geekest coworker is worried about The Singularity
So for the general public, who unironically seem to think of AI in a "Skynet/not Skynet" dichotomy, I tell them "not Skynet"
Wife: "Why did you buy another table saw"
Me: "Who knows! Let the emotional support monkey figure it out"
Wife: "The what"What's the Best Use for Crypto?
Just spitballing here, but how about as a red flag to identify shitty people whose ideas are definitely not worth publishing?
I love that the example cited is using AI to teach underprivileged schoolchildren. Can't wait to see this technology hallucinate an entire curriculum and heap disadvantage on the already disadvantaged.
Critics often point out that dollars are more efficient than crypto as a form of exchange. But if AI bots can’t use dollars, then they will have to use crypto.
Handing crypto to bots doesn't magically solve the efficiency problem of crypto, does it? What do these bots do when the blockchain gets overloaded and it costs as much to conduct a timely transaction as the amount being transacted? Isn't that scenario much more likely to collapse the economy than giving them traditional bank accounts with no ability to overdraft?
This article reads like a fever dream, it's wild.
Say you run a charity and want to create and distribute an AI bot that will teach mathematics to underprivileged schoolchildren. That’s great, but the bot will encounter some obstacles. In some jurisdictions, it may need to pay licensing and registration fees. It may need to purchase add-ons for recent innovations in teaching. If it operates abroad, it may wish to upgrade its ability to translate. For a variety of reasons, it might need money.
This is just poorly conceived science fiction. An AI bot? You mean the programs we have now that respond to prompts convincingly but incorrectly? How are those going to autonomously teach children, perhaps one of the least automatable jobs we have? Why does the bot need to pay the fees? It's a program. It's owned by someone. They can pay the fees. Frankly if you have a program that can teach, filling out paperwork seems like the easy part.
All those transactions would be easy enough if AIs were allowed to have bank accounts. But that’s unlikely anytime soon. How many banks are ready to handle this? And imagine the public outcry if there were a bank failure and the government had to bail out some bot accounts. So bots are likely to remain “unbanked” — which will push them to use crypto as their core medium of exchange.
IT IS NOT A PERSON. IT IS NOT A FACSIMILE OF A PERSON. IT IS A PROBABILISTIC SOUP OF THINGS THAT PEOPLE SOMETIMES SAY. THERE IS NO REASON TO TREAT THE COMPUTER PROGRAM LIKE A PERSON.
Also we already have computer programs that autonomously move money around! That's what most of the finance industry is built on! This moron has completely lost the plot, he has no idea what's going on! Holy shit how can you be a literal economics professor at GMU and think that banks aren't ready to let computer programs play with money?
Furthermore, possibly for liability reasons (do you want to be indicted in some foreign country because of something your bot said or did?), many of these bots won’t be owned at all.
Hey, that sounds bad! Liability isn't a just a legal fiction! It inscribes a concept of moral responsibility for one's actions into the law! If you create something that does harm, there's a good chance that you should be held liable for it!
Remember the DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization? I’ve yet to see a human-run DAO succeed at significant scale, perhaps because humans need more authority or because the DAO is just hidden human authority in another guise (e.g., one person controls 51% of the votes). The bots already have read about DAOs and their failings, and they may give them another go. In the meantime the bots will train themselves to learn how to make their DAOs work, and bot “corporations” may end up as more democratic than their human counterparts.
"So, this idea has never worked, but if we imagine a magical genius program, that is very very very smart, it could be so smart that it could make a bad idea good."
How are those going to autonomously teach children, perhaps one of the least automatable jobs we have?
I'm only partially joking when I say that tech bros think tech is akin to magic and the only thing stopping it from solving every problem is that people get in the way.
He's not even a tech guy! He's an econ guy! His reasoning is "well, the people saying AI is magic have lots of money, and they wouldn't have lots of money if they weren't right. The market has spoken.
Ironically enough, AI chatbots display far more compassion and concern for equitable outcomes than the libertarian cryptobros that plague the culture it was created in. So I would at least trust its judgment more than its current stewards.
I don't think AI can take my job. Is it easy enough a chatbot can do it? Yeah. But if the same grifters that hyped nfts are hyping this shit, it's gonna crash and burn somehow.
What's the Best Use fro Crypto?
For baiting out its supporters and benefactors in order to decide who we shoot out of a large cannon into the ocean
What if we take this big dumb speculative thing we've hitched the economy to despite little practical use, and we mashed it up with this other big dumb speculative thing we've hitched the economy to spite little practical use?
Roko's modern basilisk is a VERY RATIONAL thing to be concerned about! Future AI is a big scary threat to humanity. Give us money to fix that!
AI is going to tell us how to make Crypto useful. It knows what is best for us. I welcome our algorithmic financial overlords! We will boil the oceans in their honor!
Which way western tech bros?
