Read this: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.
I agree with almost everything the author is saying. This includes the part about physically beating douchebags who aren’t smart enough to run a database but who are getting hot and bothered over AI like it’s the next coming of Jesus. The author differentiates between people who do shit and the vast swarms of bullshit peddlers jumping on the AI bandwagon in hopes of harvesting more money to shove up their own ass:
We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’.
I’ll add that AI, as it exists now, is a shitty solution in search of a problem which it won’t address. I’ve seen this before. I’m old enough to remember when personal computers were just entering normal households. I remember idiots suggesting housewives might use dBASE to store their recipes. Yes, that was an actual thing spoken by an actual human. Every era has another herd of idiots trying to shoehorn fancy new technology into whatever orifice seems handy.
“Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits.”
It seems to me most of the AI hype is a work avoidance process. Doing a good job with tools that already exist takes effort… and competence. Telling your boss you’ll make straw into gold with the newest buzzword is so much easier.
“How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.”
And we all know management is mostly herd beasts with great hair; they’ll believe any dumb thing so long as it’s hip and new. Remember other buzzwords like “cyber”, NFT, and blockchain?
“…some of my friends feel that they have to be in leadership positions, and it is because someone needs to wrench the reins of power from your lizard-person-claws before you drive us all collectively off a cliff…”
The best solution probably is a brick to the face.
“With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don’t personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it, then just sit back and wait for you to load it into ChatGPT because you probably can’t read unassisted anymore.”
Hat tip to 357 Magnum.
Follow-up:
I wanted to add this myself. Watch and you’ll see there’s nothing new under the sun. Whenever you hear “AI” in its current context, just substitute “blockchain”, “NFT”, “cyber-space”, “e-commerce”, or fucking “tulip mania“.
Just one of the many cycles of stampeding midwits I’ve watched in my brief life was the dot com bubble. At it’s height, people would put the words “dot com” after anything, hurl money at it, and assume they’d strike it rich. “Rollerskate sandwich dot.com! It’ll make a ton of money!”
At its peak, someone thought it brilliant to sell dogfood over the internet. Between November 1998 and November 2000 this fucking thing was all over TV. The best minds of Wall Street thought riches would come from using “e-commerce” to “solve the problem of buying dog food”. What sane world would use Superbowl ad money to sell fucking kibbles for Fido?
Less than a year later, Pets.com crashed (everything else in the “dot.com bubble” crashed too). Pets.com never made a profit. It turned an IPO price of $11/share into $0.19/share and not a single business executive was thrown off a cliff! That’s part of the game, the dipshits that vaporizing huge piles of money chasing “the new thing” never seem to pay the price. It all burns down but they’re already chasing the next “magic noun”. Our current AI situation is what happens when business dweebs find a new word and pound it to death.
I feel like there’s two separate lenses to the whole AI phenomenon. Or at least a “right way” and a “wrong way” to be pursuing these technologies.
On the one hand, there’s the sort of horizon level goal of understanding how brains work, and if we’re really ambitious, how awareness works. What the mind is. The mystery of existence. How to reproduce the soul and bridge the gap between what every animal can do, and what our creations cannot.
On a less ambitious level, how to create systems that are more flexible and able than our current ascended thermostats. Roboticists would sell organs to be able to make something that can navigate the world as adroitly and automatously as a fruit fly, much less a honeybee.
The Turing test is sort of an anti-waypoint on the way to each of these goals, because of the fatal focus on creating quick and dirty appearances, as opposed to genuine internal reality. The stage magic, not the actual magic. Solving a judge, as opposed to solving the problem.
Then there is what is actually happening in Silicon Valley, where grifters are selling oligarchs visions of being able to finally do away with all their dirty peasants, or at least the ability to browbeat their workers with the threat of being replced by ROBOTS! “Don’t be too proud of your native ability, prole! Soon I can replace you with ROBOTS! ROBOTS, I tell you! And then you’ll be sorry.” Visions of sweeping aside the puny world of man and remaking the world.
Its as if a convention of alchemists have descended on a trading kingdom and are trying to sell the nobles on how soon they’ll be able to turn lead into gold with this one weird trick, and they won’t need any of these unsightly sailors or their ships anymore, they can manufacture as much money as they want.
Meanwhile off in an attic somewhere, there are probably a few chemists hard at work trying to figure out what a metal even is, and why it differs from a dielectric.
-madrocketsci
I’ve seen a bit of this in the fusion field. Waxing poetic about all the applications with oleagenous marketing materials about your “one weird trick”, and not talking very much, or very truthfully, about where you are with the confinement problem. The TED talk about how awesome your cart will be after the IPO, with the horse nowhere to be found.
-madrocketsci
If it weren’t for the political implications poisoning things: Grifters threatening/promising (mostly threatening) to replace the accumulated talents, skill, care, and knowledge of all of humanity with this one weird trick:
Pursuit of (real) AI *could* be an intellectual adventure, as epoch-making, and as initially innocent (the bombers came later), as the pursuit of manned flight. This entire scene could be something better and less debased than what it is becoming. It would need humility, and honesty, and openness instead of tricks and trying to shortcut to positions of dominance.
(anyway, spammed enough comments)
-madrocketsci
So, you actually want to fix NS (natural stupidity). You have some interesting solutions offered, such as self-bludgeoning by synthetic rock, or terminal gravitational therapy. Sadly, the carriers of NS are too dang S to be trusted with critical systemic hygiene duties and complicated techniques. Only God can make self-healing systems. We must learn from His example…He sent us S’s as learning examples. As far as we sub-terminally-S entities have determined thus far, only the worst completely S’s are worthy of professional un-S-ing, and even then only with great caution, lest one summon a S-nexus which attracts hordes of dumb S’s in a self replicating S-hole which consumes all local sub-S. Wandering S’s are to be avoided, and only dispatched rapidly as long as this can also be done quietly, hence the legendary SSSS procedure (shoot the stupid then shovel and shaddup). The best solution is to escape and evade, and maintain a S-free zone as best one is enabled. Independent resolute problem solving and contentment in small victories, and above all gratitude and humility toward The Great Non/Anti-S, are key to serenity and peace. No matter how many S’s you un-S, multitudes more will appear. The crafting of personal watercraft is an ideal beginning, but to reap and sow (thereby gaining a new greater crop later!) is to perpetuate an irrestible anti-S force. May this force be with you, and reports of your S-free adventures strengthen and encourage us in our de-S’ing travails. This means moar boat. Are you waiting for the water to boil?
You got me on the boat. I haven’t checked the hull and prepped for sailing. I went camping instead.
Yeah, you’re a tease. Just do whatever pleases you, write what and when you want, I’ll still come and fester on your electronic porch or peer over the fence as you live my parallel vicarious life. Does Mrs C ever go boating with you, or is she monitoring the SAR HQ, and exploring Craigslist price fluctuations and profit margins for offloading various used motorised equipment in estate sales?
Thanks. Mrs. Curmudgeon happily watches me sail sometimes but she’s far too wise to ride in such a tiny boat. It’s just me out there when it’s floating about.
A viciously humourous person might make a neutrally bouyant giant shark fin replica and tow it with a hidden line from the bottom rudder pintle….and video it for the amusement of the world. Such is my inventiveness. Ok, my cunning plan™ lacks an explanation for freshwater sharks in the landlocked subCanuckistani wilderness lakes, but with the general insanity of the times it will likely still be worthy clickbait. Maybe an enterprising tackle shop might sponsor Plan J, and catch more angler’s moulah.
“And in the news today a 9′ shark was seen chasing an 8′ sailboat 2,000 miles from salt water. The government has declared it a state of emergency and is ordering all bass fishermen to carry shark repellent.”
Hm… it tracks with everything else going on.