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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

#361
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.

Or you take the old bulb to the store and buy the same kind. Funny how everytime someone says the AI made their life easier, it really didn’t seem like it when you paint out what the “old way” actually looked like.

You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.

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

#362

This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward…

This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.

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

#363

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…

Btw. they were booing him before he even got on a stage. There was a leaflet and a student action to boo him not because of his AI stance, but because of his ex accusing him of abuse (sic)

Here's the link to the leaflet: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOdBRJlPe6/

Sure the AI comment brought a bit more boos, but he would be booed regardless of what he said.

Here is a link to uncut version of his speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1eM3jv0vWY&t=7984s

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

Harsh Old Geezer Take: - You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the…

>you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century.

Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.

>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?

The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.

>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.

And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.

>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.

Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.

>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.

So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?

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

#365
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 is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.

> there should be no question about their worth as a person

Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.

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

#366
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.

>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.

Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?

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

#368

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…

* * *

Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?

Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"

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

#369
post #81
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.

Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil. Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

But this new tool is not a blacksmith’s tool in the traditional sense. It’s more like an automated blacksmith that works fast, for cheap, does mediocre work, but has this mediocre skill level in an exceptional broad range of tasks.

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

#370
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”. https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114 Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Coo…

The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it. They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I stil…

Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.
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