Live data from Hacker News

The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

wired.com

391–400 of 402 posts

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it’s possible I’m wrong. But if we make any sort of projection based on current developments, it would certainly seem that live-streaming AI indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the capabilities of anything out today, and given current expenses and development times, seems to be at least a few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic assumption, especially assuming that live prese…

You imply that the technological development will stop, but that's not what happened to flying cars - they do and could exist. Since the 1930s the technology didn't stop developing - aircraft went jet powered, supersonic, to the edge of space, huge, light, heavy, more efficient, more affordable, safer; cars went faster, more reliable, safer, more efficient, bigger, smaller, more capable, self driving; fuel got more p…

Do 1970 instead, over50 years of stagnation.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You imply that the technological development will stop, but that's not what happened to flying cars - they do and could exist. Since the 1930s the technology didn't stop developing - aircraft went jet powered, supersonic, to the edge of space, huge, light, heavy, more efficient, more affordable, safer; cars went faster, more reliable, safer, more efficient, bigger, smaller, more capable, self driving; fuel got more p…

I didn't mean to imply that, but that's my fault for just quickly using it as an example. I do think there will be some slowdown of the technological development, but I think the situation will be similar to flying cars: regulations, social behavior, etc. will prevent AI from simply devouring everything. Specifically, I expect there to be a system which verifies humanity, and thus popular content will ultimately end…

I don't think regulations and social behaviour could stop a Skynet style "AI go FOOM" future. It might be able to stop LLM filler from covering the internet, but given how it can't stop carbon dioxide filler from the atmosphere and "AI text" is less measurable, less easy to stop, and has less clear consequences, I'm not sure I'd bet on it.

Possibly in the sense of going to a small server where ID is verified and hiding away on Discord from the rest of the internet. That would be more like building a bunker to hide from the flying cars, rather than flying cars never happening.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#394
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don’t need to prove to you that I’m more than a BASIC program. I mean listen to yourself. You simply don’t live in the real world. If your mom died and we replaced her with a program that printed a bunch of statements that were designed to as closely mimic your conversations with her as much as possible you wouldn’t argue hey this program is just like my mom. But hey maybe you wouldn’t be able to tell the…

I'm not claiming that any particular chatbot has an equivalent experience, I'm claiming there is no basis beyond its behaviour that it does not. With the duplicate mother problem, if you cannot tell then there is no reason to believe that it is not a being of equivalent nature. That is not the same as identity, for a layman approach to that viewpoint, see Star Trek: TNG, Season 6, Episode 24. A duplicate Will Riker i…

Ok you can have your radically skeptic hard materialist rhetoric. I just don’t take it seriously, and I don’t think you do either. It’s like those people who insist there is no free will and yet go about their day clearly making choices and exercising their free will. If you want to say technically everyone might as well be a philosophical zombie just reacting to things and your internal subjective experience is an illusory phenomenon, fine you can say that as much as you want. In turn I’ll just give up here because you don’t even have a mind that could be changed. I can sit here and claim you’re the equivalent of a void that repeats radically skeptic lines at me. Maybe a sophisticated chatbot or program. Or maybe you’re actually a hallucination since I can’t prove anything really exists outside of my sense. In which case I’m really wasting my time here.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 100 years the air may not be breathable, much less have enough CO2 carrying capacity for silicon based AGI

So I’d lose the bet? I’m not sure I’d be any worse off than those winning it!

The bet itself would make Earth less hospitable on a long shot. It's like shredding a winning lottery ticket in the hopes the shreds will win an even bigger lottery someday in the future.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#396
post #370
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. We need better English teachers. :-) We won't get them unless we appreciate both teaching and the Humanities more than we do. I was good, but by no means the best (75th percentile, maybe?). I loved doing it, but changed careers to IT because I'd never have been able to support a family on what I was paid. A culture which pays teachers poorly, treats them with disrespect ("those who can do..."), and relentless…

I don't know how it is elsewhere, but where I grew up we had minimum word limits on pretty much all essays. Doesn't matter if you can say what you want to say in 6 sentences, you need 4000 words or 2 pages or whatever metric they use

Oh, of course. Length requirements are important, for the reasons I explained up-thread. However, if teachers accept any old thing ("padding") to reach the count, then that metric is arbitrary, which (justifiably!) makes students cynical.

If a student can say all that they want to say in six sentences then they need to learn more about the topic, and / or think through their opinions more deeply. Teachers who do not take that next step are bad teachers, because they are neither modeling nor encouraging critical thinking.

In some places the majority of teachers are themselves incapable of critical thinking, because those who are leave the profession (or the locale) for the reasons in my comment above.

[Edit to add]: Please note that I say bad teachers, not bad people. Same goes for students / citizens, as well. The ability to think critically is not a determinate of moral worth, and in some ways and some cases might be anti-correlated.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#397
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish my high school English teachers had taught that. I remember fluffing essays to get to a minimum College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.

Don't get me started on college admissions essays. Rich kids pay other people to write them. Poor kids don't understand the class-markers they're expected to include. If AI consigns them to the dustbin of history it might be the first unalloyed good that tech ever does.

Clarification: "that tech" meaning the direct antecedent: "[AI] tech", not tech in general. I'm a Humanities guy, not an idiot. :-)

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#398
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not claiming that any particular chatbot has an equivalent experience, I'm claiming there is no basis beyond its behaviour that it does not. With the duplicate mother problem, if you cannot tell then there is no reason to believe that it is not a being of equivalent nature. That is not the same as identity, for a layman approach to that viewpoint, see Star Trek: TNG, Season 6, Episode 24. A duplicate Will Riker i…

Ok you can have your radically skeptic hard materialist rhetoric. I just don’t take it seriously, and I don’t think you do either. It’s like those people who insist there is no free will and yet go about their day clearly making choices and exercising their free will. If you want to say technically everyone might as well be a philosophical zombie just reacting to things and your internal subjective experience is an i…

Well I'm a combatibilist, So I certainly believe in free will. I also will accept any entity that consistently acts as if it has a will that it does actually have that. That's has always been my point, treating things as what they appear to be is the only rational approach when you cannot prove or disprove the existence of the property in question.

It follows from that that you cannot exclude something that appears to have a property if you cannot prove it doesn't or even prove it if it does.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#399
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok you can have your radically skeptic hard materialist rhetoric. I just don’t take it seriously, and I don’t think you do either. It’s like those people who insist there is no free will and yet go about their day clearly making choices and exercising their free will. If you want to say technically everyone might as well be a philosophical zombie just reacting to things and your internal subjective experience is an i…

Well I'm a combatibilist, So I certainly believe in free will. I also will accept any entity that consistently acts as if it has a will that it does actually have that. That's has always been my point, treating things as what they appear to be is the only rational approach when you cannot prove or disprove the existence of the property in question. It follows from that that you cannot exclude something that appears t…

Fair enough. I wouldn’t say a program is acting with a will of its own just because it’s trained to respond to questions in a human like way. That doesn't even say anything about its capacity to have a will. Language is a tool that can convey internal state, not the thing itself.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#400
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you both think AI will do a soulless garbage job and that it will displace all the creative people who put their blood sweat and tears into doing art. If you think it can be 20 times easier to make a movie, then it seems to me that it would be 20 times less impactful to make a creative work, since the market should quickly react to creative success by making a ton of cheap knockoffs of your work until the dea…

> How can you both think AI will do a soulless garbage job and that it will displace all the creative people who put their blood sweat and tears into doing art. They don't, that's why they're saying 20% of creative departments will remain. The part that will go is the part that's already soulless - making ads in the style of the current trendy drama series or what have you. > If you think it can be 20 times easier to…

You may not understand that creativity and work are literally one and the same thing.
Post reply on HN