Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksenzee | Hacker News Reader

> These insights pose a challenge for policymakers and educators. Efforts to boost AI literacy might unintentionally dampen people’s enthusiasm for using AI by making it seem less magical. This creates a tricky balance between helping people understand AI and keeping them open to its adoption. To make the most of AI’s potential, businesses, educators and policymakers need to strike this balance.

Why would we avoid educating people, in order to keep them willing to use AI? Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself? Did AI write this article? (Don’t answer that.)

View on HN

You're striking at the fundamental irrationality behind the current hype cycle. It is still, in the vast majority of cases, a solution looking for a real problem. Since there isn't an actual clear benefit or problem to solve yet, that justifies the high costs, people are trying to make their (silly) bets come true by brute force (get everyone to use this thing so I get my ROI, whether it makes any actual sense or not).

I’m sure it’s already a solution to a lot of things, that just aren’t sexy or justifiable for the current cost - for instance, if it was cheap enough, I would never have to use a keyboard again, which due to a disability I have, is becoming more difficult. That would help a lot of people almost certainly, but since it isn’t like, the next iphone, people turn their noses at it.

Solutions like neuralink if they become mature could probably use some sort of llm powered translation layer to machine instructions (which neither tech is near being perfect with). Things like that, I think we can technically do already, it is a matter of refining - the magical stuff though, I’m less sure of.

Have you tried dictation apps built on Whisper? They're pretty damn magic to me. Also they are often small enough to run locally.

Due to quirks in how I speak most dictation apps fail me miserably and I don’t like giving apps a lot of microphone access. I think dictation would be great, but sometimes is hard to do so at the speed one can think and type - I am hopeful for more technologies in the future that help disabled people gain more technical use, whether that be sci fi stuff like neuralink, or more friendly web protocols towards screen readers and stuff. Seems like LLM’s slot in to some layers there, somewhere, to me. One of the only great uses I get out of it is it greatly saves on my typing with code complete + vim. Fewer keystrokes is good for anyone’s hands, and it seems good at predicting what you want to do rather than what it thinks you should do.

I would love to understand your thinking around not wanting to give apps microphone access while simultaneously being excited about the prospect of giving apps direct access to your literal brain.

If my choice is two invasive technologies I’d probably end up choosing the one that works better, and I think it will be done irresponsibly, but if it means retaining access to the world around me, difficult to see any other real choice other than slowly becoming locked in one’s body. I have a degenerative muscle disease and only about 20 years left before my voice muscles will leave me, if my heart does not give out first. So, that is my thinking. Right now they simply don’t work well enough for me to adopt and give up that privacy, is the real issue with adoption (for me). If I regress further, and that’s all I can reach to, I would continue to try - just very frustrating to use.

That makes sense, thanks for your response!

I’m truly sorry to hear about the challenges you’re going through, and I genuinely hope improvements in the technological landscape afford you greater access to the world in each coming year than is taken away.

the issue is i slur badly due to multiple disorders and these apps can’t figure it out. many other disorders also struggle

> for instance, if it was cheap enough, I would never have to use a keyboard again, which due to a disability I have, is becoming more difficult. That would help a lot of people almost certainly

I mean, sure, but it’s a disability aid which isn’t useful to the average person. I don’t think most people are saying that ‘AI’ is entirely useless, but you mostly are talking about niche uses like this, not the world-changing thing it is being sold as.

I don't understand how this facilitates or admits any discussion.

If I tried to learn more about how you feel, anything I say that indicates any questioning of what you wrote, is to support something that is vapid, negative, worthless, that doesn't solve anything, a "solution" looking for a problem.

> Why would we avoid educating people, in order to keep them willing to use AI? Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself?

because you can't extract a few tenths of a cent every time someone engages their brain

> you can't extract a few tenths of a cent every time someone engages their brain

Don't give the startups any ideas

A non cynical answer: probably to try and encourage people to find new and useful ways to use AI, while learning about their limitations (e.g. hallucinations) and their strengths (e.g. rephrasing, autocomplete, concept art).

> (Don’t answer that.)

It is nevertheless important to say out loud:

> Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself?

Because user counts pump up the stock price. And that is all AI has.

Whether you believe the claims that inference is profitable or not (and there are good reasons to distrust them), AI does not live up to the financial hype.

AI cannot stand on it's own merits. It's not acceptable to let history run it's course and let the AI skeptics be shown wrong in due time. Because it'll dampen the hype, and perhaps these skeptics aren't so wrong. The people can't be educated into a healthy skepticism of AI, because they wouldn't use it enough.

It's readily obvious that the emperor has no clothes. The actions of the companies and executives involved betray their statements about how great AI is.

AI is forced into products, at deeply subsidized prices. You wouldn't do that if the tech is that big a deal. Apple charged premium prices for the iPhone.

Benchmarks are aggressively cheated. OpenAI funding FrontierMath and only giving a verbal agreement after having already broken so many of those is a joke. If the systems actually worked as promised there is no reason for this mess, and every reason in the world to gather accurate data on the generality of the intelligence.

And biggest of all: This entire mess has the implied framing of the Manhattan Project. That it's all a big race towards AGI, and whomever develops AGI will win capitalism forever. So important that they're getting support from the US government with their "Stargate" project. And until rather recently, everyone was making lots of noise about AI safety and the world-destroying dangers of letting someone else develop AGI.

In 1942 Georgii Flyorov figured out the Manhattan Project's existance from the sudden silence in nuclear fission research.

Today, despite stakes that are proclaimed to be even higher, all the big players will not shut up about their accomplishments. Everything is aggressively published and propagandized. Every single fart an AI model makes is spun into a research paper. You might as well mail the model weights directly to Beijing.

Those are not the actions of companies trying to win an R&D race. Those are the actions of companies pushing up their stock price by any means necessary.

Thanks for the sober perspective.

I really wonder what "losing the AI race" (typically meaning USA vs China) is supposed to indicate.

They have a better LLM or something......and then what? A rogue chatbot takes over the world or something?

We're like two plus years into being a few months away from LLMs taking every office jobs, and I'm still at a total loss as to where this is all supposed to go or what I'm even supposed to be sold on.

None of this thread means anything at all, it's 90% nihilistic cynicism wedded to 10% regurgitating talking points from their training data.

The real high-school-sophomore smelling thing, which you'd miss through all the purple prose about the Manhattan Project, is "open research is bad and proves it's fake bunko crap...that the Chinese are stealing(!?)"

I've been here for 15 years and am shuddering to think there are commentators here who would start selling you "open is bad" the instant they had a soapbox to pound their chest on.

That’s not what they wrote and you misinterpreted it. The point was that if it were true what is being claimed — that we’re close to AGI and we (the US, or EU, or China, etc., depending on where you live) must create it first or someone else will beat us to it and there’s no recovery from that — then the current behaviour makes no sense.

So someone is lying somewhere, and the end result is pumping stock prices.

Sure, if we only admit things in its cinematic universe it makes sense. It's incoherent as soon as you take a step out of the trees into the forest. For instance, we also know there's a well-made and popular argument that OpenAI is closed.

It's bizarre to flatten it to "they're giving it away because it's worthless but they're lying and saying its worth something so their stock goes higher", even setting aside the questionable premises that relies on.

Is there already something more advanced than langchain? I haven't really seen many integrated AI applications aside from bots of course.

We lose the race when politicians platform to bring AI jobs back from China.

Technological Manifest Destiny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=2208s

Titled: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?"

the profit motive

Reply on news.ycombinator.com