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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#91

Post by sgt101 »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

We can manipulate matter in a number of ways unimagined in 1970. For example; trapping atoms with lasers, artificial proteins, meta materials, high vacuums, near absolute zero temperatures, high energy plasma, photonic memory, microwave atomic control, ion traps, scanning tunneling microscopes, high temperature high tesla super conducting magnets, gene sequencing and splicing.

I think it depends where you look at technology and how closely...

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#92

Post by notahacker »

ExactoKnight wrote: post #87
paperpunk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freez…

Almost everything you listed there already started becoming common by the 1960's. Step back and forget about informational technology. Look at the world of atoms, not at the world of bits. Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower , not faster. Man hasn't reached farther out in space than the moon missions of the 1960s. The first half th…

Not sure I'd consider stuff like the vast majority of human knowledge sitting in my pocket to be less useful than the dishwasher because it has fewer moving parts or most people can afford to fly to be less of an achievement than the megarich can fly 50% faster.

Recent decades might a disappointment compared with the millenialist interpretation of exponential curves, but that's only the same as the disappointment a Victorian idealist might feel with the lack of stuff that happened in the twentieth century as a whole given that neither utopian socialism nor the Second Coming has occurred yet.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#93

Post by bante »

vanderZwan wrote: post #86
zackchase wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with an economics background (BA), and medical research career (concurrent with ML), I can say (subjectively), that this feels different.

Can you also put into words why? Sincere question, not being snarky; I also know the feeling of something feeling off but not knowing how to express it in words (yet).

(I'm not the person you replied to)

In more established field it tends to be that people outside the field exaggerate things because the can't put them into the context of the field i.e. they lack domain knowledge. In "tech" it seem like it's the people in the field that exaggerate things because they can't put them into the context of the world.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#94

Post by SCHiM »

nostrademons wrote: post #69
lottin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, FI -for fake intelligence- would be more accurate :)

I think AI is accurate, but it's actually short for "aggregated intelligence". Most AI algorithms can't actually generate "intelligence" as we know it. Rather, they aggregate the intelligence of the humans who contributed to their training data, and then generalize it to situations where those humans are not present. If the humans are stupid (as we saw with Microsoft's Tay chatbot), the AI is going to be pretty stupi…

Expert systems (which is what you're describing) are generally considered to belong in the AI category.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#95

Post by iwintermute »

vanderZwan wrote: post #86
zackchase wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with an economics background (BA), and medical research career (concurrent with ML), I can say (subjectively), that this feels different.

Can you also put into words why? Sincere question, not being snarky; I also know the feeling of something feeling off but not knowing how to express it in words (yet).

Not op, but also from economics background - the issue with economics in public perception for me is that is't became modern "religion"/ideology and moved far from proper science. Especially "mainstream" economics theory.

So the issue is not that it's getting misinterpreted due to lack of understanding. The issue there is that it's getting unscientific and politicised purposefully.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#96

Post by skynode »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

I think it's also important to consider and analyze technological advances in the context of various periods in the historical development of humanity.

For much more than half of the 20th century, nations were at war with each other, the British Empire was declining (and there had to be a replacement fitting for the times), etc. Man's taste for blood has not necessarily gone away with the 20th century, it only found expression in soft power and other psychological means of domination (e.g., Hollywood movies whose central theme is American​ Exceptionalism). This fresh awareness that actionable information is what may determine the fate of nations has also polarized technological progress in favour of advancements in understanding data and processing large volumes of it in the most efficient way possible. To be fair, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing made outsized contributions to this space.

Just as there were Economic Consequences of the Peace (thanks, J.M. Keynes), I think we will also have to chronicle the The Effects of Peacetime on Technological Progress.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#97

Post by ralfd »

paperpunk wrote: post #78
Banthum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'. I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freez…

> near-instantaneous hot water at all times

But only with two faucets.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#98

Post by puranjay »

Banthum wrote: post #28
ExactoKnight wrote: post #26

The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

A flying car would be nearly magical for someone from 1880.

But a smartphone to someone from 1950? It would seem pretty fancy, but not impossible to imagine. The guy from 1950 already knows the basic tech behind it - it has a screen, it uses wireless data, and is powered by computers.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#99

Post by unityByFreedom »

robotresearcher wrote: post #49
unityByFreedom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. Everyone has a personal computer in their pocket and can communicate with anyone in seconds across the world. The world's libraries are at your fingertips by mail order or on your screen. We may not be on the cusp of a singularity, but that's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be proud we haven't seen a major world war in 70 years.

Perhaps it was a greater achievement to get the first 10^4 people online than the next 10^9. More of the same-or-slightly-smaller. I certainly got more delta-value out of pre-web Internet (email, Usenet, chat) and Web 1.0 (online papers and libraries, nearly-free publishing) than Web 2.0 onwards (Facebook, etc). Maybe it's not accelerating constantly.

I think you're really underselling things like 3G data plans which are now worldwide. That didn't exist 10 years ago.

Even just the widespread use of SMS has helped medical teams assess and treat diseases in remote areas.

When people complain about some lack of technological advancements, it sounds to me like they're just not aware of what we have accomplished. And I am not surprised that Thiel is in this category. He has a JD, not a PhD

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#100

Post by sgt101 »

sgt101 wrote: post #91
Banthum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…

We can manipulate matter in a number of ways unimagined in 1970. For example; trapping atoms with lasers, artificial proteins, meta materials, high vacuums, near absolute zero temperatures, high energy plasma, photonic memory, microwave atomic control, ion traps, scanning tunneling microscopes, high temperature high tesla super conducting magnets, gene sequencing and splicing. I think it depends where you look at tec…

Also look at additive manufacturing - we can make things that were literally impossible to fabricate five years ago with a 200k sintering setup. 4d printing is pretty cool to!

In your examples consider a modern turbofan blade, a single crystal of titanium grown in a xenon atmosphere and then heated white hot before being blown up like a balloon so as to allow refrigeration during operation! Another mind blowing sector is the change in medical scanning, ct, pet, mri - all new since 1970

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