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

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

#291

Post by gnerd00 »

naravara wrote: post #222
al_borland wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.

For people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.” Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted i…

agree but it is military thinking that makes him smug like that

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

#292

Post by rowanG077 »

watwut wrote: post #227
rowanG077 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.

Trying to limit harm of something that is likely to happen 100% makes sense.

I agree, this is why you need to tell students a realistic outlook. And of these two I believe Wozniak is in fantasy land and Schmidt is closer to reality.

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

#293

Post by ryandrake »

naravara wrote: post #222
al_borland wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.

For people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.” Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted i…

Yea, it's the smug grins from these guys that I can't stand. It's not enough that they won and they know they won, but they have to rub everyone else's noses in it, too.

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

#294

Post by butlike »

doginasuit wrote: post #202
whack wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering? I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular eff…

There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?

The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.

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

#295

Post by mekoka »

abirch wrote: post #231
romaniv wrote: post #212

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.

I imagine how you intended your comment to come across and I get it to some level. But I can't help feeling that there's something a bit dystopian in a world where all friction is removed just to more quickly get to the juicy bits.

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

#296

Post by tmp10423288442 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #160
alsetmusic wrote: post #90

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…

* * *

> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview

As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.

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

#297

Post by ryandrake »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #260
lukecarr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.

Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back? Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead? Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete. The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy. I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going oversea…

It's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.

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

#298

Post by jjulius »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #287
akudha wrote: 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.

It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it.

How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.

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

#299

Post by butlike »

vitally3643 wrote: post #183
whack wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Our value isn't predicated on our utility. In the moral sense, sure. But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists. The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you d…

You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).

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

#300

Post by ElevenLathe »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #239
ElevenLathe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.

At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities. A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are lef…

I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard.

Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.

It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.

For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)

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