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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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281–290 of 575 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#281

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students. Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s

What did he do to deserve this, there’s no context?

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#282
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak? What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.

"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed." AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.

Nitpick, but it's not AI. Would be nice if that were true, but it's not

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#283

This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange. Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic, market and product results. Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs. From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker…

> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?] The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them. In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.

Woz should have a lot more money than that for being such a large early shareholder of Apple, so that actually speaks poorly to his reputation as a "successful entrepreneur/investor". Some of the reason why his net worth is below expectations is noble (giving $10m of shares to early employees), but most of it is not - 4 marriages as opposed to Steve Jobs' 1 marriage, an impractical attitude in general, and never having any success after Apple, even as an investor.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with public policy is that it allows other countries to get ahead of you. 'AI' isn't just a tool, it's also a race.

The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.

That is always going to be a personal race. You can get in the currents of education, but your success will always depend on your own paddling.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”

Doesn't that just mean that the merits will be unspoken and implied by what the enemy is saying as they speak to your deficits?

If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#287
post #192

Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak Stark contrast to other tech leaders...

Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#288
post #107
post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore. Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them. If y…

THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.

Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so…

In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#290
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed." AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.

I've been making some good use of this stuff, but identifying light bulbs, really? That wasn't exactly difficult in the Before Times.

As the old joke goes, "How many output tokens does it take to change a lightbulb?"
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