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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

#321

Post by kakacik »

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…

* * *

You should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are.

To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.

And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.

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

#322

Post by contravariant »

bdangubic wrote: post #189
contravariant wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've somehow confused using AI well with using it extensively. Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.

not using it at all is no longer an option, companies that are not using it at all will die slow/fast death but death nonetheless.

That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.

This is literally the same with every single technological development.

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

#323

Post by 9dev »

card_zero wrote: post #198
9dev wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise you get effects like; > * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value, > * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful. These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you. You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering t…

Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good. But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.) I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more…

I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.

And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.

And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.

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

#324

Post by dfxm12 »

romaniv wrote: post #212
joe_mamba wrote: post #160

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.

Additionally, Schmidt is not just opining that this future is inevitable, he represents people in a position of power to actually impose this future upon the grads (as opposed to something more mutually beneficial).

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

#325

Post by itsalwaysgood »

watwut wrote: post #278
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead? Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought. >The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy. It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schm…

I agree with most of your points except the last one.

Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services?

Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.

I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.

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

#326

Post by ihumanable »

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.

For the last 15 years you could take a picture of a lightbulb and pop it in google search and it would tell you what kind it was.

I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.

There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported

> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011

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

#327

Post by card_zero »

danaris wrote: post #314
card_zero wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering. Otherwise you get effects like; * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value, * Don't do anything less "joyful" even thoug…

....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.

So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.

The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.

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

#328

Post by lanyard-textile »

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…

* * *

The graduation speech is a spiritual ceremony.

It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.

In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.

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

#329

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

JTbane wrote: post #280
dchftcs wrote: 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.

No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth. My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.

> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.

I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.

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

#330

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mancerayder wrote: post #186
vanilla_nut wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master. Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackl…

One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone. It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems. But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking…

Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
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