The Age of AI has begun
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
I was one of the people that started off in tech with dreams of a digital Nirvana. I ignored the "negative naysayers," and sallied forth, with an open heart, and hope for the future.
I'm really quite disappointed in what we've done with these marvelous tools. As I've gotten older, wiser, and a lot more cynical, I can tell you that, if I had known, then, about human nature, what I know now, it would have been entirely predictable.
I think we'll be seeing AI-driven scammers, calling and messaging us, almost incessantly, I think we'll be seeing AI-generated political manipulation, like fake videos and audio, of politicians and public figures, I think we'll be seeing AI-driven promotional campaigns, and almost undetectably subtle media manipulation, like corporations seeding news stories with their talking points. I also think that we'll be seeing AI-driven workplaces, where it will be hard to be simply human, and AI-driven surveillance, by authoritarian regimes (and people right here, will happily sell it to them).
I want to believe that we'll do good, but bad pays so well, and there's outright scorn for doing stuff for any reason other than pure, personal profit.
However, all it takes is a couple minutes of browsing social media or playing an online game to see that humanity has some pretty poor ideas of what constitutes acceptable social behavior.
I don't think we've advanced socially all that much. I've read a fair number of history books (my degree is in history), and while our data on daily social behavior of the common person is woefully incomplete, I haven't seen much evidence that we're all that much more polite than our ancient Babylonian cousins.
I think in the ways gen-x’ers talk about the “pre-internet” days spent offline, we’ll talk about the “pre-AI” days spent online. I can imagine a flood of content so gargantuan and vast that by 2030, finding new real words online written by real breathing people will be like finding a teacup in a junkyard. I’ll stress that this view is strictly my own and not my employers, but I personally wish this box had remained closed. The benefit we’re seeing now just isn’t worth what’s to come, I fear.
I like the pre-social media days we spent online. When making a web site took some non-trivial effort so just having something up and hosted meant that you were either interested in the technology, or felt that whatever you were publishing was important enough to warrant the effort.
When there were no "normies" online, or if they were, they were confined to e-mail.
I'm sure if you go far back enough, you'll find someone centuries ago expressing the same thing. Oh how the printing press has cheapened writing. Back when people had to put quill on paper, they really had something to say . . .
Think about how little time utilization most cars get.
That blurs the line between public and private, in a good way.
In tandem to self-driving, electric car hardware keeps getting cheaper. Projected lifetimes keep getting longer. So the economics are going to trend better for quite a while.
I've been having similar concerns, however, I just wanted to note in this paragraph there is not a damn thing you've listed here that isn't already being done right now without ai. We already get scammed incessantly. Every political message we receive is meant for manipulation versus actual understanding. Corporations have been seeding news stories since there was ever news stories. We have corporate cultures that routinely dehumanize us, forcing us to be sedentary indoors, when we ought to be foraging during the daylight if we actually lived according to our biology. we surveille eachother, and have no need of any advanced technology to oppress ourselves by the millions with brutal effectiveness. If you are concerned now, then you must not have been paying much attention. If you have issues with these things, then ai is not what you need to be going after, this is how the world is incentivized to run.
I remember, in the 1980s, companies getting actual snail mail 419 scams, then, in the 1990s, faxes.
But AI will be giving the same sharks, new tools.
Soon, you will actually be hearing your granddaughter on the phone, screaming, as they rip out her fingernails. The "IRS agent" will no longer have a dodgy Indian accent. Those "I caught you masturbating" emails will now have actual deepfakes of your face. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a new racket appears, of extortion, using wholly-fabricated nude/embarrassing photos. I suspect that influencers will be targeted, as they put out so much material, and many have means.
I just know exactly how bad people can get; better than most, hereabouts. I have few illusions.
But we'll also be getting some good. This is the real deal. It isn't Claptrap's BECHOWafers.
Back in the day, a three-letter agency could send a person to spy on your 24/7. They couldn't do that for everyone. Now, mass surveillance is possible.
Back in the day, you had to send a letter in the mail or have a person calling someone to run a scam operation, and that had a cost to it. Email started changing that, but remained impersonal, non-interactive. Generative ML changes that.
Back in the day, traveling across the US took months or even years. Now, you can fly across in a few hours, or drive across in a few days. You're behaving as if that didn't change things.
I'm optimistic we'll pull through.
yes but technology has enabled good people to be shut down much more effectively
Personally, I’m looking forward to an AI that can immediately answer the questions “is this a scam?” and “what are the facts underpinning this?”.
What I have realized is that until we evolve our hearts and minds, no amount of technology will solve our collective existential crisis.
With that said, I am still young (33), live in Maui, and am still hungry and foolish to try new and bold things. :)
> The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface
> The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI
I guess it's not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it's interesting he never mentions "the internet" in this list.
I think the web would have evolved quite differently had their been a good PowerPoint like gui design tool for building sites, one that wasn’t focused on the backside.
From https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overlo... (https://archive.is/r4F8T)
> Even Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and widely regarded as the crown prince of the World Wide Web, was taken unawares by the Internet's grassroots acceptance.
> In his book, "The Road Ahead" (not available on-line), Mr. Gates admitted that he believed the technology for "killer applications" was inadequate to lure consumers to the Internet.
Of course, like any smart person at the time, he changed his views as the internet became more popular and eventually mainstream.
It's not that he didn't see something equivalent to the Internet happening, he disagreed with exactly how it would look (who would own/control it is more likely what he had in mind given the context; I think he wanted a more closed off network that companies like Microsoft could thoroughly dominate).
But it didn’t work, so they recycled the name into the MSN we know today.
25 years ago when I was just starting my Bachelor's degree, AI was in a sort of "hiatus". The "great" AI procedures were mostly rule based systems. We read about MYCIN and similar expert systems and how they could do amazing stuff. We also read about AI generating new strategies for Backgammon. That was amazing.
But during the 90s/2000s, nothing spectacular happened. We had some advances in neural networks, which were just an academic curiosity given their processing requirements. (I remember implementing a NN that could recognize vowels using C in school). We also had Genetic Algorithms, that were basically optimizers. We had some interesting implementations such as the Creatures game series and similar.
Then "Machine Learning" started gaining notoriety. Industry started using "Machine Learning" techniques to perform some types of forecasting. This came a bit later after "Data warehousing". I remember all the talk about hypercubes and that crap. And how Walmart would extract "knowledge" and place beer six-packs in the diapers aisle so that "dad" would impulse-buy beer when "mom" makes him go to buy diapers.
The ML time was an exciting time, and for some time mainstream thought that ML was AI ... but there were lots of other things cooking.
Now suddenly we have enough power to make non-trivial Neural Networks... and suddenly we have Deep Learning and these LLM with HUGE networks. And industry has just started looking at it. These are exciting times.
The other side of the coin is that during all these times, "mainstream" goal-post has been pushed and pushed for AI... what was AI in the 60s-70s (rule based systems like MyCIN), is not AI nowadays (they are just pattern matching, if-elses!! they say). What was AI in the 80s-90s (Genetic Algorithms, Multi-Agent systems) is not AI nowadays... and what was AI in the 2000-2010s (Random Forests, SVMs, AdaBoost) is no AI nowadays (just statistics!). But overall, it has been a very interesting subject to study.
The 90's AI is out there making trucks and ships cheaper to run; reducing the amount of wood, steel, plastics, etc our industries use; helping design bridges or microprocessors; optimizing your code at runtime inside the CPU.
The 10's AIs aren't out there a lot. Maybe it is because of lack of time. But it's just research that moves on, the value stays.
LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name. All previously developed AIs lost their AI naming rights - magic powers - soon after production deployment. These two are truly AI - they’re still magic, perhaps even more so than even 3 months ago and given the number of parameters in them, this will likely remain true for a while. Working with ChatGPT and stable diffusion, seeing GPT-4 write games and midjourney generate presidents of US as Warhammer 40k characters really feels surreal.
This is the sufficiently advanced technology. Literally indistinguishable from magic.
"AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then.
Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time.
This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its naming rights".
(Although myself I would still call most of them AI).
Just like most programmers who get better year by year will look back at any code they used to write and say "How did I think that was good code?!"
Mobile's are magic to my grandma...
I know how NN work... I've done them. I am so excited at the thought of my equivalent to what mobiles are to my grandma. I'm 40 years old and wish so hard I live to see the marvels of 2060
After graduating I did do some work on rule-based and ML translation engines, but I quickly got bored of it. I have been focused on application development since then. I didn't pay much attention to Deep Learning until 2022 came around and it surprised me. Now I am reviewing old notes and trying to catch up. 2023 is a very exciting year for computing and human language from an application side (I don't think LLMs give any insight into the way humans generate language).
I don't know, around 2005 there were guys making cat door that could recognize the picture of the home cat.
https://www.metafilter.com/15802/
There was also someone playing chess with a spam filter.
https://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess-1.html
Indeed there were anti-viruses and spam filters.
In the mobile industry I remember a company selling noise reduction systems which used RNN.
But for most people that I saw accessing the internet the first time it clicked immediately and they were hooked.
Yes, and the aha moment for (generative) AI is at the same time for everyone. That's what makes it a true aha moment.
The internet was just a technology that made it possible, like the semiconductor or batteries, but for most people the internet without social media is just the place you go to check your e-mail and maybe read the news.
But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket touchscreen smartphone was really the moment.
Before phone, I printed Mapquest onto paper. The end result was pretty similar to me using an old paper map. The internet was evolutionary in that regard. It replaced some newspaper, and letters/phone calls. Text messaging sort of existed tangentially parallel to the internet. Search engines were pretty cool. It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life. You didn’t have to like, drive home, to go dial in. Even having a color touchscreen pda that ran doom, it was still a novelty, and not like an extension of my being like the iPhone is now. Momentum scroll. And realistically it was the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 that was the turning point. iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste.
Smartphones would be pretty useless without internet.
To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled around.
I would tend to agree with you about the rest; the internet didn't strike the average person as very useful, or at least as revolutionary as it did with the advent of the smartphone. Arguably the iPhone was the mainstream breakthrough there.
But this is what kills me, and you said it yourself: "It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life."
That was a good thing when the titans of today's web didn't employ armies of psychologists to hijack your attention to sell ads, inadvertently destroying the fabric of society. I don't have to tell the HN crowd how algorithms tuned to increase engagement blindly steer us toward outrage and division.
I recently posted comments about how I went from the Apple ecosystem to as open source as feasible. Nowadays the FairPhone only does duty as a GPS (hardmounted to my car). I have to be able to receive phone calls so I still use a Nokia, but it lives at home as much as possible.
For me personally, the total invasion of every aspect of life by the internet, and more specifically the tech giants in Silicon Valley, has killed all the joy and excitement I used to feel at the bleeding edge of tech. The bright-eyed sci-fi future turned out to be just another avenue for greed.
It's just a laptop now, and a gaming PC for the (very) occasional game with friends. If my house burned down with those in it, I doubt I'd feel loss.
And what I meant by it is I would otherwise give the revolution award to the 3GS, but really the 4 was the first “feature complete” iPhone, without visible pixels. It was the maturation and commotization moment for a previously bit niche product.
In a middle of nowhere town that I grew up in, in Appalachia, it was common to use Netscape + dial-up access circa 1995-1999 (that included at home, at work and at school). Tens of millions of Americans rapidly adopted the Web due to Netscape making it easy to navigate and that all happened in about five years. The Web became a common story point of movies, TV, advertisements (@ everywhere campaigns, email, urls on movie screen ads, etc etc); it went from almost nowhere to everywhere in roughly 4-6 years.
A tiny fraction of the US and world populations have utilized ChatGPT. It would be equivalent to where the Web was at in terms of adoption in ~1994.
I’m lucky to have been involved with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution. I’m just as excited about this moment.
This is subtitle of the article, just above the byline, so I suspect he's talking about how impressive the demonstration was to him.
> I’m lucky to have been involved with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution.
What do you mean? In 2004 MSIE had 95% market share. It was toppled by Chrome only in 2012.
Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did not get contract extensions because of AI, stock photo sites that are just flooded with AI content, and managers clearly using gpt to write half their mails.
Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your friends who got laid off had their jobs automated. Now what will happen, is they will go to other parts of the economy and add value where they are more needed. Total economic output has just increased and the world economy is now slightly more productive (same number of people making more stuff). You can't protest against your friends losing their jobs in this instance and not do the same for every previous technological invention going back to the wheel, all of which put someone out of a job. Because what you'd be advocating for is a lot of suffering and misery, in the form of material poverty.
If you want to protest against a lack of social policies contributing to wealth inequality, then just do that.
> All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer.
It's far cheaper.
But he fails to mention in the risks how AI can also be a cause of increase for some of the world's worst inequalities due to failure to have representative datasets, or simply by creating an ever increasing technological gap between classes(just 2 off the top of my head).
Every sci-fi movie show any of those jobs as replaced by AI (or robots). Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning).
Those jobs will be replaced, not because there is a human that will be replaced, but because there is no human doing them. There are plenty of people in need of education, caring or just loneliness.
I believe AI might instead replace a lot of work done by journalists, software devs, managers and other office workers who mainly produce and manipulate text. Then there people may be re-educated to become care workers.
The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training "medical AIs" that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly, sounds madness to tell someone to rely on a LLM for medical advice today, although I can kind of imagine it happening over time as we get better at taming them.
Basically, prompt engineering for medical conditions.
If the problem is a shortage of doctors, this is one solution.
Microsoft, led by Gates, were far ahead on pursuing smartphones. They picked the wrong approach (Gates was certain it'd use a stylus for interaction; Jobs was certain the finger was the ideal tool) and lost to the path Apple pursued.
They absolutely saw it, at least a decade before the iPhone was launched.
Microsoft Continuum was insane - you would be able to plug in your phone to a USB-hub like dock with monitor and keyboard, and it would effective run a near-desktop Windows experience[1]. In 2015.
Tiles were also so ahead of their time it was insane.
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About an hour later he came back, told me he'd asked ChatGPT to write the code for him and yes, it did work.
Anyway, thing is it really made me think about how much of the grunt/support work can potentially be offloaded like this; in this case it really did save us both some time.
On the other hand, when I've played with it before, it got stuff really badly wrong (ever tried ego-surfing with it?).
What is ego-surfing?
huh, closeAI is certainly not helping at this moment in time.
What is most baffling to me is that the highlight of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all honesty I see the exact opposite being more likely. Our current economic systems just fundamentally can't deal with ever larger swaths of the population being unable to compete with AI. And despite all the answers I've seen of "well, duh, that's because our current economic systems are so broken!", I have yet to see any sort of plausible answer that addresses how we get from our current version of capitalism to something else where all the spoils just don't go to the few people that control the strongest AI implementations (that doesn't involve massive amounts of strife and despair).
Perhaps technologists, even ones as smart as Gates, are just too siloed in their worldview of technology being an ever increasing force for good. I actually find this particularly surprising from Gates, given how he's seen first hand that large swaths of the world blame him for the pandemic, or for wanting to vaccinate us with "microchips", due to the power of propaganda through social media.
“the government should fix that”
Narrator: the government didn’t fix it.
Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.
There is one big difference though : there are TONS of tasks chatgpt can do that don't require 100% accuracy to be useful and actually replace humans.
Also from a computational complexity angle there’s actually a mathematical definition — “NP Complete” which describes problems that are cheap to verify but hard to solve. One example could be a solution to a maze. It’s easy to look at the maze solution and verify it connects start to end without crossing walls, but much more time consuming to actually solve the maze with all the wrong turns needed to produce a solution.
- billing/ordering/anything clerical: add the product catalog and customer details to the prompt
- customer support: add the entire support manual and customer history to the prompt, use devices like prompt tools to allow the model to pull in data from external systems
- sales/pre-sales: the "internet sales" team of car dealerships can be replaced with gpt
- medical billing/transcription: this one should be pretty obvious
- anything where customer communication/status is needed (half the job of a project manager)
- paralegal: prompt with details of document to be drawn up, which is then reviewed by a lawyer
- journalism/copywriting/editing: should be obvious
- admins/assistants
In some cases a role is completely replaced. In others, it allows for fewer people to support the same or higher output. People supervise the model and catch any errors rather than handle each task directly.
I wouldn't be so sure about that!
This "ground truth" model doing the rounds seems to be outperforming all other models in their respective papers!
;p
This is such a trope at this point.
We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was,
> That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing.
It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got the gist of the number right in the first half of its response, and it even cites essentially the right source, the claim it says the citation backs … is not backed by the citation. It then goes on to equate it to something that it isn't related to.
It's words, strung together: i.e., bullshit. The higher-level reasoning (like that the math needs to work out, or the citation should actually have the cited claim) are utterly absent, and will never be present in these models no matter how much data you train them on.
The response is at best wrong, and at worst, fools someone into believing that it knows what it is talking about.
But yeah, this is going to replace me.
The actual article is … pretty long-winded, and really lacks specific, concrete examples as to how AI will actually move a needle somewhere. Take this chunk,
> Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement.
(Wikipedia hasn't had a meaningful effect?! [citation needed] there. Wikipedia affected my own achievements, and it has been a while since I was in school. I can only think that such a high quality encyclopedia is of immense value to students, particularly if you're not lucky enough … old enough? … to have an actual encyclopedia — even the use of the word actual here exposes how much effect Wikipedia has had!)
> But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.
We've been saying this about ads for decades. The last ad I remember seeing was "The Mandela Effect: In Queen's 'We Are The Champtions (sic)' He Doesn't Say '…Of The World'" ((sic: the ad title is factually inaccurate) ; … this is no more related to my interests than any of the many Taboola and Taboola-like junk ads at the bottom of half the Internet now. I have no idea where that ad ponzi scheme even ends.)
> There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments.
And we're 3 paras in with very little meat here: the only example is "comments on student papers". Given the inability to reason … no, I don't think AI will be evaluating papers anytime soon. (The whole passage … if not the article … feels like a human vaguely touched up the output from GPT.)
And the entire idea of trying to help poor unfortunate souls in desperate places with AI feels very much like God vomit from a Cory Doctorow tale.
If GPT-4 was truly all that, it would be classified and at work in Ukraine (or somewhere) right now. Not running Akinator-tier promo marketing gigs.
GPT-4 plays ~1400 level chess having never been taught the rules of the game explicitly (except for potentially reading them on one of it's ingested webpages)
Yeah, that's a pretty huge "except".
Chess literature is just literally hundreds and hundreds of transcripts of chess games. You just need to memorize them.
The fact is that most wars tend to drag on for years.
As a general rule: when rich big egos try to improve education, it ends poorly. Consider the Gates Foundation itself trying to MBAify teaching and then being astounded when it (a) didn't improve student outcomes and (b) drove teachers away (not surprising: if you have put up with MBA levels of brain rot you might as well get paid better than teaching can ever sustainably pay) [1].
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...
Sure, maybe we're about to hit a wall. But I'm not seeing any evidence of that as it stands.
Also, it's not clear to me why it's impossible for an LLM to learn symbolic manipulation?
I was very excited by GPT when it came out, but this showed to me how an absolute confident bullshiter it is. It can't say "I don't know".
A year ago it would have been considered too high level for an AI to provide insightful feedback on the themes contained in the draft of a script, but here we are again.
Every comment here is words strung together, and we are going to realise that we were the ones bullshitting all along. AI will expose that our high levelled reasoning (and who knows what else) is not particularly special.
Kids born today will grow up with their phones/device being their best friend and pet, like a Pokémon. You will be incredibly socially shunned if you don’t have one, and corporations will have not only data but an emotional hook into you for life
The "always connected nature of cell phones" is pretty clearly not any good, and you can safely assume that most teenagers right now have watched at least one parent, grandparent, or relative get turned into something disgusting by being always connected - that one relative who's always on TwitFace railing about how evil Muskerberg is, or whatever the outrage of the day is. I've got a few. They're certain that Zuckerberg is a traitor, will be arrested Any Day Now, etc... and can't comprehend that by posting all about this on Facebook, all they're doing is helping out his yacht fund.
It's been an utterly toxic last decade of consumer technology, from human-first perspective, and I'd wager that those being born today will have the long view back over that and see how awful it's really been.
Remember: Last year, vinyl outsold CDs in "units moved" for the first time since the mid-1980s, and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Instax cameras ("Polaroid, but newer") are quite popular. There's a rejection of modern digital/consumer tech going on.
It can't even parrot this year's memes!
You literally can’t [0], though you can prompt it.
[0] Unless you are an OpenAI insider or someone else with privileged access to the model that isn’t provided to the public.
Imagine what it will do in 5 years. Many versions later. Intellect based job is going to die as we know it.
I know it's a trope to insert, "but I did x thing and it failed miserably," but I do think people actually using it on a daily basis have a much more realistic view of its capabilities.
HN used to (this is a new account, but I am not new to HN) embrace technology, optimism, and the intersection of the two. Now it’s a race to see who can demonstrate their bona fides by sneering enough or affecting enough disillusionment. It’s really disappointing! And yes, I realize I’m not being the change I want to see, but it is so disheartening to see so many grumpy people racing to tear others down.
Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples.
It's certainly possible to formulate a biology question that a decent student would be able to answer easily, but LLM would be helpless at (by carefully choosing heterodox wording & structure).
The Age of Bullshit continues unabated.
Indeed. For some of us in the world of business, this is actually a very compelling "just".
Most use cases are indeed still bullshit, but I think we are getting to a point where maybe there exists at least one that isn't, and many of us don't want to be left holding the bag when the threshold hits 50%.
Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.
Honestly though, ten years ago NLP was using Bag of Words and Markov Chains, it's pretty phenomenal how far it's come.
To be fair, I mostly agree with your main point, but it's still remarkably impressive progress in a relatively short period of time.
One great first step OpenAI can take towards this is by actually making their models open. As long as the models are intentionally kept back and intentionally profited from by already wealthy private citizens, inequality will grow, not shrink.
Not to mention that people in poor countries (which as Gates cites as the "hotspots" for inequality in health) won't be able to use some HTTP API based in US/SF. Not just that latency will kill requests, some of the places don't even have internet connectivity. How is OpenAI supposed to help those communities if the "inequality fighter GPT-4" is gate-kept behind a centralized HTTP API?
To reduce inequity abolish (c)opywrong laws.
BG grew rich via (c)opywrong laws.
That is the dilemma. Does he see it and just not connect the dots? Or can he connect the dots but doesn't really care? I am not sure.
I'm not being facetious. What specifically are you drawing objection to?
A correction of the copyright misnomer.
You didn't carve out any exceptions, hence my assumption.
I'm not sure this answers the question. Who's revenue is this, and which of the elements you described is "a tax"?
Is it fair to say that 90's and early 2000's microsoft was a great proponent and enabler of such inequalities?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
People in developing countries chose to pirate and use Windows because it ran most of the important apps of the era, namely video games, which were also easy to pirate, and because it ran on any custom built PC from the parts each user could afford to scrap together. It was the perfect storm.
One may see them as a good "driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software" for a very limited time. I don't know if the result of 90's and early 2000's microsoft was a net positive to the field.
I don't think "They have done more to educate people in developing countries [..] than maybe any other company in history" considering how they also made many governments, institutions and people dependent on their software. This eventually cost these same entities a lot more than needed if there was a healthy competition which always fought against.
Done charity work there.
Created an IT company there.
You have it totally backward.
IT is NOT helping the poorest part of Africa. Quite the opposite.
But it does help us create a lot of BS virtue signaling about all the good we do in Africa.
The explanation would take a lot of text, unfortunately and I'm not in the mood for the rant again. But it comes from experience, not from the idealized narrative you have been sold.
- the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks we should have 15% more software engineers in 10 years. What if we had 10% fewer?
-800k project managers - how about 650k in 10 years?
-nearly 4 million executive assistants and admins - let’s take 1M off that total
-millions combined (still) in clerical roles across industries, including financial, medical, warehouse, etc. let’s take 1-2M off that total
- journalists, writers, editors, graphic designers, interior designers, illustrators, …
… and the list goes on. These are intentionally conservative numbers (no 50% cuts or jobs going away entirely) but they still add up to millions.
(I mean, my intuition would be, for example, that it means more software engineers, and disproportionately even more PMs -- though probably often with a different title -- as it expabds the market for software solutions, and reduces the engineering effort to product decision ratio. But that’s not conservative, any more than your catastrophizing is.)
> The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example.
First, he's already shown how teaching jobs can be easily eliminated by AI, just a few paragraphs above. And 'caring for patients' and 'supporting the elderly' sound sort ok, until you realize that these joblines are all sharply constrained by available funding. Further competition will drive wages down further. Not to mention that an out-of-work software engineer would probably make a terrible nurse, even if working under the watchful eye of HospitalAI or whatever.
Moreover, these are all already underfunded pink-collar jobs -- which means you're going to have a lot of men that, for reasons of identity or machismo or inclination or what-have-you, simply don't want to do. We already have a crisis in college & career performance with men, especially young men. Telling them that they will be helping dress their grandparents for $16/h, with zero opportunity to advance, is probably not going to go down great.
Statistically, this is precisely the demographic most inclined to cause political unrest. Further declines in opportunity will therefore probably lead to a rise in, for example, far-right militias, QAnon-like phenomena, and attempted coups.
[aside: Jan 6 will probably be seen as a 'Columbine moment' -- a singular event that spawned countless imitations, to which we will become so inured that they will become part of the fabric of the evening news.(Perhaps the Onion will make an article for coups that it recycles every coup.)]
So, once again, we have an AI-celebratory article that sounds great until you press it on the question of: what will we be doing with our time, and how will any of us make a living doing it?
Billg has no coherent idea.
Socioeconomically, we're the proverbial racetrack greyhound that caught the mechanical rabbit. The game is over, the greyhound is confused, and everybody is checking their losses, wondering if there will be another race any time soon.
EDIT: light revision for clarity (broke out the paragraph beginning 'Jan 6' as an aside, removed the word 'ever' in front of 'any time soon', and cut redundant/reiterative first paragraph) at 13:32PDT Mar 21
AI was already a thing with robotics / games
What's being promoted these days are AI assisted generative tools, i personally call it "AI assisted copy pasta"
This guy needs to GTFO out of Humanity at this point.
ANYTHING this guy says about AI is ging to be because he is going to fund AI-Malevolence-Protection-Racket then sell some pre-planned AI-cyber-storm solution that every computer on the planet will be mandated on installing.
truly evil. and all the people praising what chatgpt can do will be the first one to tell us that they warned us back then.
I enquired about it, and it then referenced an article.
At the bottom of the article was something along the lines of "This content was generated with ChatGPT.".
It made me think, if people stop thinking for themselves and start making articles which contain slight errors, those errors will become pervasive, and then these AI's could enter a loop where they generate confidently sounding incorrect information.
It'll then make sense to weight information sources - but then who is in charge of deciding what weights to give what sources?
I guess in the end where we get our "facts" will be decided by our "Benevolent AI Dictator Overlords".
One of the biggest risks right now is viruses created by transformers trained on known viruses and anti-virus binaries and databases.
Humans created relatively simple viruses which took down hospitals, etc.. Transformer can make new "super" viruses and keep fighting the anti-viruses/firewalls in real-time with high-quality custom attacks.
Privacy is the least talked about aspect of our current AI systems from what I've gathered. Perhaps we're sleepwalking into yet another surveillance capitalism nightmare and handing over data blindly to these systems, where they learn our preferences, private thoughts, habits, etc (And store all that forever).
Anyone reluctant to 'feed the beast' as it were, and starve these AI systems of personal data that could be potentially weaponized at a future date for nefarious purposes?
He'd be right, too. But with an eye to Jan 6, I fear it won't be the revolution he wanted.
Clearly that is not the case, and the tests or measurements themselves lack much or all value.
What most people believe makes someone’s opinion valuable (economic production, social wanking, allowing and enforcing inequality) is ironically what prevents most of these people from being in a room with actually intelligent people.
Take the case of Grigori Perelman: mathematical genius who created insights into fractal geometry and chaos mathematics who now contributes nothing but his personal disgust at the state of the world and how willing people are to cheat and steal.
Bill Gates has made a lot of money, but he has never made any deep insights or valuable contributions. He can make more money but history will bury the man because he is nothing more than someone who became an exalted dung beetle of wealth. Mindless, brainless, and stacking that shit.
I find this article in the same vein: mostly some shitty business crap that will extol it’s fecal values to the investors and businessmen who are now immune to their own stink.