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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

181–190 of 320 posts

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#181

My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives). However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested pro…

I could not disagree more. You must have used the better models by now. Even if you only lightly use them for a question from time to time, it must have become clear that these things are pretty damn good and aren't going away?

When doing hard things I need to be 100% in the loop, but I don't have to do anything menial anymore. Imagine being in some CIA control room with 10 emplyees, and you're directing the team. You're still on top of things, just not bogged down with bulky minutiae.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#182
post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

No revolution revolutionizes in the way planned or hyped. Instead, once triggered, it emerges mostly unplanned. It unfolds as the product of human action but not of human design.

Individuals will use LLMs as they see fit in their work. They'll make a lot of mistakes because they don't see their own work clearly and because they don't really understand the outcomes others care about. Executives who make their money with their mouths will, of course, endlessly open their mouths, even as they don't understand the tech because they never really use any tech beyond email, text, and phones. And so on.

Nobody knows how LLMs will ultimately shake out. But even five minutes of using Claude makes it hard to imagine all white-collar work will continue as in the past.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#183
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great insight. I appreciate you sharing this perspective directly. But honestly, it's not diarrhea, it's not vomit, it's a lean mean machine—AI has become load-bearing and you're right to question that.

I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience. All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.

Fixed

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate. > Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier. I'm not sure I follow why you would think this. Prior to AI was the reaso…

Generating code is not, and never was, a bottleneck to projects. Understanding the problem, designing a solution, organizing resources, testing, and customer buy-in and moving targets have always represented the real issues. Now, with LLMs, we're supposed to be able to paper over some or all of these problems. They're supposed to be able to understand and intuitively fill the assumptions present in vague requirements…

Faster and cheaper.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies with projects that are doing well don't try to hire consultants who specialized in saving failing projects. No company with a good AI strategy is going to go to the Hermit Tech website where text written in Ye Olde Font explains that they'll use ancient techniques from the 80s and 90s to make your software work and thinks, "These are the right people for our AI job!" These people are trying to carve out a n…

Christ they are profiting off of reaction, they're like Trump but even worse since at least Trump is not stupid enough to be anti-technology.

Check out some of Trump's positions on renewable energy.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#186
post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

I totally agree with all your points except welcoming the singularity.

How do you imagine your or your children's lives in the singularity?

What do you do there for a living, or which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies?

What do you do in the worst case it pushes everyone to underground strongholds to fight machines for the survival of the humankind?

And if there's some middle ground, how is it different from today's state of affairs?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#187
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience. All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.

Fixed

PS: the diarrhea machine was a reference to the Active Denial style tech they used to make Maduro's soldiers shit themselves.

I'm no fan of narco, but with all the prejudicial executions of boaters and such, I really think Claude overstepped with the Venezuela plot. You just don't want too many historically unprecedented events happening all at once. The tyranny should be spaced. As I said, a little more sanding down of the harness, AI & Palantir should be ready to permanently solve our problems,

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#188
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

1. Everything you said is more about revolutionizing IT though. IT is more easily testable than other things in real life. 2. The gap between the singularity and really strong automation is huge. It's basically that between 1 million and infinity, or even better, that joke about the difference between 1 million and 1 billion being roughly 1 billion.

#1 is what's so crazy to me that people have trouble understanding. No one is saying that we're going back to the pre-LLM world; it's just that the world isn't honestly that different than before. Most people's lives are pretty much the same. Their power bills are higher, but that's not all that different from when gas starts costing more because of a new oil war. The government has some new ways to spy and target weapons, but that's pretty abstract to most people (and it's not like they were having trouble doing those things before). Some new tech companies pop up and have a bunch of money, and some existing ones have less, but nobody outside of the tech industry who isn't already a huge outlier in terms of how much they pay attention to stock prices really cares.

If this is the singularity, consider me extremely underwhelmed. My job my have changed, but to the rest of the world, it's just more of the same.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christ they are profiting off of reaction, they're like Trump but even worse since at least Trump is not stupid enough to be anti-technology.

Check out some of Trump's positions on renewable energy.

Perhaps I should have specified Anti-AI. Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…

> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching? I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My…

> Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

To a degree. There was breathless expectation that this was a turning point for commerce, government and society and that everyone had to stake their claim now. Everything was going to change.

What was it going to change into? Beyond "$OLDTHING but on the Internet!!!", nobody really knew. Those first steps were just webbifying existing processes, stumbling along, refining what was reasonably successful and dumping that which wasn't.

It was like a black hole; from afar we could vaguely see an event horizon, but the people falling into it had no idea what was happening or where they were in the process.

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