Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI | The Daily Show
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mesamune@lemmy.world
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY
I have to say, I agree 90% with Jon on this. Which is significantly less than I usually agree with him.
I think he could have talked more about the lack of reliability of AI. It's not simply a drop in replacement for people like the invention of the conveyor belt or sewing machine. A better analogy would be the mass outsourcing of call center jobs to South Asia.
Well that's where it's at now. There's no guarantee it will stay that way. Give Moore's law several more cycles, and maybe we'll have enough computing power to make drop in replacement humans.
I think people are misinformed about the current readiness of AI specifically because Silicon Valley VCs have taken a lot of the R&D funding market share from the DARPA government types.
VC funding decisions are heavily oriented around the prototype product demo. (No grant writing!). This encourages "fake it till you make it": demo a fake product to get the funding to build the real one. This stuff does leak out to the public, and you end up with overstated capabilities.
There seems to be a misunderstanding of how LLM's and statistical modelling work. Neither of these can solve their accuracy as they operate based on a probability distribution and only find correlations in ones and zeros. LLM's generate the probability distribution internally, without supervision (a "black box"). They're only as "smart" as the human-generated input data, and will always find false positives and false negatives. This is unavoidable. There simply is no critical thought or intelligence whatsoever — only mimicry.
I'm not saying LLM's won't shakeup employment, find their niche, and make many jobs redundant, or that critical general AI advances won't occur, just that LLM's simply can't replace human decision making or control, and doing so is a disaster waiting to happen — the best they can do is speed up certain tasks, but a human will always be needed to determine if the results make (real world) sense.
Feels like a bit of a loop back there. "It can only ever be as smart as human output. So we'll always need humans." To... What? Create equivalent mistakes? Maybe LLMs in their current form won't be the drop in replacement, but it's a critical milestone and a sign of what's around the corner. So these concerns are still relevant.
Should have finished reading the comment:
You're right, but not in the way you think.
It's only a matter of time before these compankes start trying to simulate human brains. We need state recognition of legal personhood for digital humans /*before*/ corporations start torturing them for profit.
This is why I invoked Moore's law earlier. People have already estimated how many petaflops or exaflops we need to simulate a brain's worth of neurons and a complete connectome. We currently don't have enough computer power. But if the exponential growth continues, we will get there.
Moore's law predicts that compared to 1980, computers in 2040 would be a BILLION times faster.
Also that compared to 1994 computers, the ones rolling out now are a MILLION times faster.
A cheap Raspberry PI would easily be able to handle the computational workload of a room full of equipment in 1984.
What would have taken a million years to calculate in 1984 would theoretically take 131 hours today and 29 seconds in 2044...
If it were only a matter of processing power, we’d already be able to demonstrate much more capable AIs. More computing power in more places will facilitate further development, but it’s the “further development” that’s key.
Personally, I’m looking for Moore’s Law to make home AIs more responsive and more similar to today’s cloud-based AIs. - The one I have configured is slow and not very good, but it’s running on a Raspberry Pi, so I could throw more processing at it and probably will at some point. - there was an Apple announcement several weeks ago about optimizing performance on memory-constrained devices, that has me really hopeful for effective home-based devices soon. I don’t know what Apples “neural processors” do but I know my phone has them and maybe they apply here
Leave it to comedians to actually be on point. Technical 3/10, social 8/10.
As with every big technological advancement, the powerful rush to consolidate their control over it and prioritize how it can benefit them over how it can benefit society at large.
And the sheep bask in awe and let themselves be pushed down even further.