I Need AI

These are valid weaknesses of current tech, but most likely to just improve with time. Networks are already above human-level on many image categorization tasks.

> to produce generic art for unimaginative creators

Personally I think novelty in art thrives when the entry barrier is low and experimentation is possible without a huge investment, which AI can help achieve. A lot of works/trends I've found interesting recently have involved some creative usage of AI (e.g: https://i.imgur.com/Jybvj0r.png - zoom out). Granted, Sturgeon's law is still in full effect.

> to pilot autonomous vehicles that injure pedestrians and take jobs from taxi drivers and truckers.

When we get to the point where they injure pedestrians at a lower rate than human drivers, then yes. We should be fighting for UBI or broader economic changes to ensure everyone (not just rightsholders like Getty/Universal) can benefit, not trying to ensure that human labor will always be required to drive trucks across the country.

> AI that can't taste to create recipes [...] that's never traveled to plan my vacation [...] that can't appreciate music to recommend music for me

If I'm actively seeking a recommendation, I don't see an inherent issue with that being done through statistical methods that take into account the preferences of many.

> I need AI to replace web search [...]

Web search has been AI for either years (using machine learning with transformers/language model embeddings) or since it's inception, depending on your definition of AI.

Same for malware scanning, spam filtering, DDoS prevention, reverse image search, language translation, fraud prevention, material/product defect detection, voice dictation, drug discovery and interaction prediction, logistics optimization, infectious disease modelling, protein folding, weather forecasting/early-warning systems, tumour segmentation, video transcription, and so on.

And whether you realize it or not, you also stand to benefit from it.

It’s fair that “we” (the collective human race) have been too optimistic about new things and too sanguine about the cost. That’s why climate change is as bad as it is. That’s why having everyone plugged into social networks makes us sad.

This constant stream of pessimism that started in the 10’s for everything (tech, any institutions, the world) etc is just so..small seeming. Complaining like this makes none of these things better and the ideas expressed in this piece are far from unique. So as criticism goes it fails to even meet that definition.

So why even do it? To feel cool I guess to other people who think being pessimistic about everything is cool?

We’re coming up on a decade plus of this prevailing dour attitude and not a single bit of it has helped forestall anything. Maybe we try a new approach where we treat new things as things to be improved when they’re at the beginning (and therefore most able to be shaped). Maybe we try being cautiously optimistic?

Funny or not, the AI can be used to judge whether or not to read something, making the circle complete.

I need AI to highlight parts of the questions I had not thought of to ask.

> I need AI to make up APIs and lower my code quality. I need it to repeatedly give me wrong answers until I realize I could have just written it myself.

I need AI to highlight where APIs aren't as obvious as they should be and to highlight what a statistically more obvious API would have looked like.

> I need AI to do even more damage to the journalism industry and create content nobody can trust.

I need AI to help summarize and evaluate stories to avoid the damage that the journalism industry has done to the wider society.

> I need AI to replace web search with answers I can't trust and with no benefit to content creators.

I need AI to answer my questions succinctly rather than being monetized to make the viewer watch for as long as possible.

... and so on