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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#301

Post by DiscourseFan »

amalcon wrote: post #276
DiscourseFan wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I understand your point. Its not the case that more people voted for Trump in a place where more people are taking reverse psychological cues from him, but precisely the opposite case, the more people take reverse cues the less vote for him, which implies their positions are on account of reaction and not because they are genuinely reflecting on their social and political condition, which would elevate t…

You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).

I think that absolute numbers in specific cities don't tell the full story. NYC also has far fewer people with college degrees than SFO, which would correlate more strongly with Trump supporters. I think that if you polled those who voted against Trump in NYC now, and asked them about their opinions on AI, you'd find they diverge significantly from those who did vote for him, whereas if you asked the same question to Trump voters and non Trump voters in SFO they would answer pretty much the same. SFO is also in California which does not have the same cultural relationship with technology as NYC or much of the Northeast, although the culture I'm describing stretches basically all over the east coast.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#302

Post by RiverStone »

hliyan wrote: post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

This is overly dramatic and not true.

This exact situation occurred to me. I blocked all PRs with “request changes”. Most engineers don’t like AI slop, most take pride in their work.

The occasional AI slop engineer can be contained by rejecting their PRs, having team discussions around norms, bringing up feedback on retros, etc.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#303

Post by oliculipolicula »

jdw64 wrote: post #280
oliculipolicula wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(i'm more chatty because it's my "down-day". Hope you don't mind) I don't think you're upset because AI is useful and valuable. Are you upset because you can't describe how the bubble will burst? Some (more) quantitative types saying that the economics are deflationary. So NVIDIA have already won. But there are some that claim that the bubble has nothing to do with NVIDIA's monopoly on compute (21.C steam engine/stee…

I think AI is useful and has value, but what I find problematic is the illogical behavior that people display while claiming to be engaging in thoughtful writing. Rather than saying NVIDIA will be the ultimate winner, I think Apple could be the final winner as a hedge against semiconductor stocks, at least for now. In that sense, I'm not sure. You can't time a bubble, so it's just a bubble. But I do think NVIDIA will…

[Bro I was hoping you'd rip into your own OX idea here.. then we could have a convo here or offline.

I wouldn't say I get frustrated by illogical writing--esoecially ones that only _seem_ illogical---, but more that people like us who might know better don't point out precisely where that illogic is after thinking carefully about it. ]

It's possible to time a burst _if_ you see the pin, but anything you do _when_ you see it is technical illegal?

So your OX idea feels like just the sort of thing that could open our eyes new kinds of pins.

Further, I'm not totally closed to the idea that actively trying to pop the Anthropic bubble is moral, indie of how quixotic that sounds. Even if it might be a good case study for deinstitionalizing research math.. even if that Napoleon quote that's trending..

I would also never bet against Jensen taking some ideas from "the Apple playbook". Especially when multiple people have already pointed it out. Though this is tangential. Less tangential---

Refinement of OX framework would help us think about how NVIDIA can or cannot play the Apple game. Certainly, if given calibrated riskiness and timing, Apple would move against Anthropic. You know what I mean?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#304

Post by dtj1123 »

fabianholzer wrote: post #267
preg_match wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

> I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?

May I recommend "Look to Windward" to you?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#305

Post by jdw64 »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #303
jdw64 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI is useful and has value, but what I find problematic is the illogical behavior that people display while claiming to be engaging in thoughtful writing. Rather than saying NVIDIA will be the ultimate winner, I think Apple could be the final winner as a hedge against semiconductor stocks, at least for now. In that sense, I'm not sure. You can't time a bubble, so it's just a bubble. But I do think NVIDIA will…

[Bro I was hoping you'd rip into your own OX idea here.. then we could have a convo here or offline. I wouldn't say I get frustrated by illogical writing--esoecially ones that only _seem_ illogical---, but more that people like us who might know better don't point out precisely where that illogic is after thinking carefully about it. ] It's possible to time a burst _if_ you see the pin, but anything you do _when_ you…

You can contact me anytime via my emai

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#306

Post by amalcon »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #301
amalcon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).

I think that absolute numbers in specific cities don't tell the full story. NYC also has far fewer people with college degrees than SFO, which would correlate more strongly with Trump supporters. I think that if you polled those who voted against Trump in NYC now, and asked them about their opinions on AI, you'd find they diverge significantly from those who did vote for him, whereas if you asked the same question to…

So, you're postulating that there is something of a Simpson's paradox going on in NYC between two largely separate cultures -- that of people with college degrees, and that without? This is theoretically possible, but conveniently not directly testable due to secret ballots. It is however indirectly testable in two different ways -- and the numbers still don't back you up.

1) Exit polling (https://www.timesunion.com/capitol/article/voted-trump-new-y...) does not back you up. More college educated New Yorkers reported voting for Trump than total fraction of San Franciscans that voted for Trump.

2) Middlesex County, Massachusetts (roughly, the north half of greater Boston) is an alternative example to NYC that has a very similar proportion of college degrees compared to SFO (about 1% less). Middlesex County is in the northeast. About 42% of those voters voted for Trump, which is more than New York and more than double SFO. Suffolk County (with Boston proper) has very similar numbers to NYC for both college education and voting for Trump. This can't be explained as a cultural difference between NYC and Boston because the Suffolk ratios are so similar. It can't be explained as an educational difference between SFO and Boston because the Middlesex educational numbers are so similar but there are proportionally more Trump voters than NYC. It can't be explained as a cultural difference between Suffolk and Middlesex because first, they are direct neighbors sharing a public transit system, and second, Middlesex is considerably more traditionally leftist than Suffolk (leaning on that cultural difference would undermine your original argument).

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#307

Post by hollerith »

dofm wrote: post #195
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manias go back a long way. The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.

The paradox of the cutbacks after the railway industry corrected is that more or less every track they got rid of would now be useful. The Beeching cut damage done to East Sussex, for example, is devastating and unfixable.

Sounds like the government (which owned the entire system during Beeching) should have kept at least a right-of-way (if they have that concept in the UK) instead of selling everything.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#308

Post by hollerith »

dtj1123 wrote: post #115
drob518 wrote: post #103

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…

There was certainly a vast gold rush around the internet with massive attention from almost everybody in journalism or in business and almost every retail investor -- at least in the US (where I was) -- but it differed from the AI hype in that there was no vision of utopia or at least not any that resonated with more than a very small fraction of the population.

The closest the internet got to becoming the focus of hopes for a great transformation of society (or the focus of an ideology or comprehensive narrative) that I saw was a conversation started by John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (published Feb 1996) and the crypto enthusiasts. Both conversations consisted mostly of libertarians (with the crypto conversation also having anarchists), which as everyone knows only ever made up 4 or 5% of the US population (but a much larger fraction of internet users in the 1990s).

Also, Teilhard de Chardin's books (written in the 1950s and 1960s) inspired people with a grand vision of the human future and in particular predicted the creation of a "noösphere" which was much like the global internet, so Teilhardists wrote some about that. But the Teilhardists were never more a tiny tiny group, much smaller even than the aforementioned crypto enthusiasts. Almost not worth mentioning.

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

No. Although millions of words were written during the 1990s about the singularity (referring to it using that word specifically IIRC), even then it was always AI that was expected to bring about a utopia, never the internet. And the discussion was restricted to a few mailing lists (the extropians list, Yudkowsky's SL4 list and ISTR a transhumanism list), one or two books (e.g., Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition), Omni magazine and maybe Wired magazine.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#309

Post by Starman_Jones »

sph wrote: post #269
preg_match wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

People say they want to get challenged. > most people don't want to turn off their brains Biologically, life is an effort-minimizing machine. Our brains have a whole system of habit-forming to minimize the enormous amount of energy it takes to think. Whatever people say, give them a way to think less, and they will necessarily prefer it unless they literally are a Buddhist monk, seeking to be aware over every action…

Our brains also have evolved rewards for performing life-continuing behaviors, and then evolved to rewarding proxy behaviors, instead of the actual life-continuing behavior. This is perfectly in line with what you are saying, but now we are rewarded for spotting enemy snipers in CODBLOPS, rather than spotting lions/snakes/crocodiles.

We have gotten very good at hacking this reward function. It has reached a point where a thinking-minimization engine will pay a significant amount of resources to, say, Paradox Studios to do what is effectively the opposite of not thinking.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#310

Post by phatskat »

neetle wrote: post #239
phatskat wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc. Person…

I think the sentiment comes from people that just don’t find pleasure from working/mastery. The incentives have changed so much with llm-enabled development, but not which ones people respond to. I miss the code mines

I’m still in the mines but I don’t know for how long. Part of my performance evaluation for the year will include a section on using AI, so I’ll be biting the bullet and using copilot for glorified autocomplete like I did when it was still in beta.

I’m also perusing for shops that aren’t necessarily “anti-ai”, but where lack of using it isn’t seen as a negative

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