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The AI Misinformation Epidemic

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Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

jodrellblank wrote: post #67
wiz21c wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. But... What could be better than a car, I mean the concept of "mechanized individual transportation". Same question with train "mechanized mass transportation". Sewer ? What could be better ? While any of these is "not perfect", it's tough (at least for me) to come with something conceptually better right now. And also, I think we have to rememeber that many of these were possible because of oil. So, I think tha…

No car? A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close? Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car? Self-driving, self-cleaning car? Automated horse with roof and luggage compartment - no need for paved roads, muscles are quieter than engines?

> Cheap, safe, non-polluting, no maintenance car?

We've made tremendous progress in that direction since 1960. What's your point?

> A world where you could walk to the things you need because they're close?

That's not a technology problem; much of the developed world is like that and more of the world is getting to be like it with progressive urbanization. The US made a deliberate social choice to focus on auto-centric development that inhibits that a bit in the US, but that's a social problem, not a technical one.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#142

Post by CuriouslyC »

Fricken wrote: post #17

Welcome to the club. Now you know how Economists, healthcare professionals, skateboarders, basket weavers and anybody else whose domain knowledge runs deeper than the average joe's feels whenever their area of technical expertise becomes the subject du jour for the public at large.

On a deeper level, economists generally don't know what they're talking about. They create linear models of nonlinear systems, they assume Gaussian distribution when fat tails are common and their assumptions about rationality don't align with people's actual behavior. Trusting the models of economists to manage economies gives us the ability to trade a little bit of efficiency for a large amount of risk.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#143

Post by dragonwriter »

TuringNYC wrote: post #110
erkkie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should people be able to tell the difference vs the outcome of those products, unless someone (investors?) is specifically just buying into the AI hype itself? (in which case, this is nothing different from when everything was "social")

I'm not saying people should be able to tell the difference, nor am I discounting the value of the final outcome. Just that pitching an app as ML-driven, when it is barely 1% ML-driven is deceptive and mis-informs the public. Consider taking the side mirror from a Ferrari, putting it on a Ford Escort, and then pitching the Ford Escort as a race-car. The Ford Escort may be a great family car, but it is not a sports ca…

If that 1% is essential to the purpose of the app, it seems reasonable no matter what % of the code of the app it represents.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#144

Post by iwintermute »

VHRanger wrote: post #116
iwintermute wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is you "economics background" a BA, by any chance? The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes. Take a look at what modern economics research looks like [1]. Seriously, read __any__ of those articles and come tell me with a straight face it's not doing norm…

Yup, I'm quite familiar with what modern economics research looks like. My problem with them start when I get to "We now use formal econometric techniques", when they get very limited model with huge amount of assumptions and then draw some conclusions from that.

Math checks out. No questions about that (Although there's always stories about reproducibility of results). But after that there's huge gap, when you try to extrapolate the conclusions of the model to the real world precisely due to assumptions/limitations of the model.

I am rather sceptical about this approach - it's formal to the point where "my model of my virtual world totally works due to ideal nature of this world and mathematical logic", or "we managed to fit our model to carefully selected dataset". Yes, it's formal 'scientific methodology', yes small scope research is the practical way to publish paper after paper (the only real 'currency' in scientific world), but again it seems just to be 'safe haven' for economists, when they are abstracted from real world enough to not interfere with real politics. As with biology in Darwin times, when it was fine to be clergyman and study biology (but mainly in taxonomy sense - listing all 'god creatures' and not thinking about origin of species)

Also, "The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes." - yup, the same as some nobel laureates like Krugman or Hayek.

Can we agree that the state of the scientific field is as good as a decisions taken based on the achievements in this field?

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#145

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
iagovar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Everyone has the same problem. And it even gets worse in the Internet, where people just pretend to know things that they don't.

Well OTOH, in the land of the blind, one-eye is king - this goes for a lot of subjects. If you can give a general introduction to AI or the latest update, you can write for thousands of online outlets, each of which attracts some views and therefore money. Simple economics. Volume pays more than quality.

>If you can give a general introduction to AI or the latest update, you can write for thousands of online outlets, each of which attracts some views and therefore money.

Oh really? Where?

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#146

Post by CuriouslyC »

ilaksh wrote: post #75

Most of the people who have a strong machine learning or deep learning background are actually unaware of the large amount of existing research that applies to artificial general intelligence (AGI) because that group is just not mainstream. But there are groups who are combining cutting edge neural network research with AGI and seriously trying to build general intelligence. Researchers who are working on narrow AI t…

Honestly I think trying to top down design general intelligence is a mistake. The only model of intelligence we have resulted from the gradual agglomeration and integration of narrow intelligences. Not only is it a demonstrated path, but at every point along the way it is useful. Nature has given us a great roadmap, all we have to do is follow it.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#147

Post by SkyMarshal »

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.

>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

Is it possible we just covered most of the low-hanging fruit in the 1800s and 1900s, and now the only remaining discoveries that are really ground-breaking are the really difficult ones, hence the slower rate?

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#148

Post by justin66 »

bischofs wrote: post #137

Stop calling it "Machine Learning" and "Neural Networks" if you don't want the attention. Do we refer to code or computers as "Machines?". That kind of language is just begging for skynet references. Any sort of elaborate processing network could be called "Neural" or maybe even a fancy linked-list . Something more reasonable like a learning network would keep the sensationalism down. Im sure we can come up with bett…

> Do we refer to code or computers as "Machines?"

I do, sometimes. I don't know where I picked up the habit, to be honest, but it might date back to the eighties or nineties. (I know I'm not the only one)

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#149

Post by graeham »

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…

Oil prices are essentially capped at $60/barrel for the foreseeable future due to unconventional extraction techniques -> was not long ago oil production was thought to have peaked. Solar power can be economical without subsidy. Robotic and minimally invasive surgery. Battery cost becoming viable for mass-market cars. Gene sequencing. Sensors for pennies. New materials (cheaper carbon fibre, metal alloys, semiconductors, graphine/carbon nanotubes). Most of the things mentioned as 'first half of 20th century' coming to the next 5 billion people.

For aerospace, how about affordability of a ticket over time (Ryanair vs Concorde)? Space travel: number of journeys per vehicle or time astronauts are able to spend in space (was minutes in early space flight, unlimited now). Transportation speed is a straw-man, the industry optimises for cost not speed.

Re: The AI Misinformation Epidemic

#150

Post by iwintermute »

coldtea wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the decommissioning of the Concorde, our fastest commercial means of transportation has actually been getting slower, not faster. Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient. Prioritizing progress in average efficiency over speed of a showpiece that is used for a very small share of actual travel isn't the end of progress, and it is very much change in the world of atoms, not bits.

> Our means of travel have also gotten vastly more efficient. Hardly vastly. At best within an order of magnitude better, but not even close to that.

It has gotten twice as cheap (if you look at average ticket prices adjusted to inflation) from 70 to now. Also point about concorde - it's more fuel efficient to fly slower (look at drag coefficient [1])

So from point of view of affordability and mobility for general public - it's good progress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport#/media/Fi...

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