My take would be that people have no idea what is going on today, as time expires history drifts further away from clueless to the absurd... and now you want to do the future? Whatever you say, we should at least completely ignore what your audience wants to hear. Whatever is left could be correct but only by accident. This is what the future will be like... or wait...
How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#972Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t agree with your conclusion. It’s like Michael Burry, he’s gotten 10 of the last 2 economic crashes right.
How many people in the financial space recognized Burry's name before 2008?
Pretty much none, but he’s been saying the sky is falling for the last decade.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#973Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought in the post Ed was being evaluated based on all his predictions, and it turned out all of them were wrong. Most people will read the post as going over all the falsifiable predictions and none of them panning out, since after the chronological prediction list it says "After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future". If Dan is reading maybe he can c…
The list is chronological; as it nears the present, the predictions actually refer to the future, and are thus not yet resolved.
Yes it's chronological but no it doesn't have unresolved items nearer the present:
The last 5 ones in the list read "Wrong" and seem reasonable. The first thing after the list is "After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future".
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#974> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over…
> gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary.
You can think of yourself and draw your own conclusions (or we have completely lost the aptitude since "ai" started off?). You don't have to agree with Ed, or even follow his conclusions.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#975Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ed Zitron is a grifter. Period. I highly doubt he believes any of the stuff he writes himself. He plays a role in society which is the role that tells people AI is going to fail so those who don't participate in or benefit from AI feel better. They sign up to his subscriptions and pay him money to confirm their own bias. If you look at the sub reddit r/betteroffline where these people gather and worship Zitron, most…
Doesn't it say something about our society that (a) it's known (at least among smart people, however 'smart' is defined) that AI is going to take away jobs, and (b) the way its treated is that people gather to online discussion forums to worship someone saying the thing that will replace their jobs isn't going to do it (but in actuality, eventually will)? In other words, who's actually doing anything to help the peop…
Why do you think there is no one or nothing that is helping people who lose their jobs?
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#976> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over…
> gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. You can think of yourself and draw your own conclusions (or we have completely lost the aptitude since "ai" started off?). You don't have to agree with Ed, or even follow his conclusions.
Like I said, "This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is."
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#977Earlier quoted context omitted.
My recollection is a couple years before it popped everybody (except tech CEOs going public or investing tens of millions in dog food delivery infrastructure) was in disbelief it hadn't happened yet
yeah I also remember a lot of talk about the bubble for 18 months to 2 years before it actually popped. i think we're in that (quite long) stage with AI right now where most halfway smart people "know" but they're still invested due to the greater fool theory and still talking their book.
I'm invested because I "know" it'll pop and I also "know" it'll eventually work and revolutionize everything.
What do I have to lose? I'm just going to get decrepit and die anyway if it doesn't work out.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#978Earlier quoted context omitted.
RIM is dying now -> useful for stock trading RIM is dying in the next four years -> useful for life planning. Anyway, i just wanna get on record that i predict an ai bubble pop event in the next 12 months.
> Anyway, i just wanna get on record that i predict an ai bubble pop event in the next 12 months. If it happens on Sep 2nd 2027 you'd be wrong though.
Next 12 months: Oct 2026, Nov 2026, Dec 2026, Jan 2027, Feb 2027, Mar 2027, Apr 2027, May 2027, Jun 2027, Jul 2027, Aug 2027, Sep 2027.
So, if we're being pedantic, I'm not wrong until Oct 1st 2027 or later. But I'm also wrong if it happens this month ;)
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
> gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. You can think of yourself and draw your own conclusions (or we have completely lost the aptitude since "ai" started off?). You don't have to agree with Ed, or even follow his conclusions.
Like I said, "This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is."
I still fail to see the problem here. If you disagree with numbers / conclusions he makes, I would be happy to hear/read your opinion on that (no sarcasm at all).
It makes me a bit concerned seeing how many people say oh he is this and that so I wouldn't even read or help him. For G'ds sake, what happened to healthy discussions? If you disagree, lets just share opinions and let people judge. But if we just recuse ourselves from it, it will let opinions unchallenged.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I've noticed is that since LLMs came out, scientific papers with poor English have essentially disappeared. Just one of the many ways that AI is changing the world. People are using AI in all kinds of fields.
Oh c’mon. You must be trolling. Great, now we have have scientific papers with formally correct English, but data and sources of which are fabricated and most of the paragraphs are utter nonsense. And publications are drowning on these. Oh thanks for changing the world!
The good news is that, while the number of fabricated papers have accelerated, so too is our ability to detect fabrications. Also, fabricated papers were a massive problem well before AI was useful in research. I think it's fair to characterise AI as our saviour here instead of the villain.
The broader issue pertains to the [Replication Crisis.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) For decades, journals relied mostly on the honour system. Many people think peer review requires validating the data. It does not. It's basically a cursory check that the claimed methods are valid. The data is usually not validated. In fact, the data is usually not even produced for the journal or peer reviewers at all. This has become such a large issue that research began to sample studies to see if they could replicate the results given the claimed methods. A shocking number of papers could not be replicated. Scientists are loathe to claim this proves fraud, but when one has carefully written 50 pages of dense research methodology to arrive at statistically significant findings, it's clear that they would know if their experiments were replicable.
There is also another major issue with academic research as it exists: findings are (almost) only ever published when they confirm the hypothesis. Researchers begin from an often very biased perspective about the way they believe the world works (sociology is one of the worst for this), and work backwards from their conclusion. They might conduct dozens or hundreds of experiments, all while fail and are never published. Then they land on an experiment which can be massaged to reflect the message, and that is published. The fact is that all those "failures" are equally insightful research, and it should all be published for a variety of reasons.
There are also major issues re how research is gated and funded, and how many hobby researchers are never given the opportunity to publish at all - even if they could afford to pay the journal bribe.
Long story short, this entire industry was on the verge of collapse prior to AI. I cannot imagine it could get any worse, and I'm hopefully that AI will enable us to easily screen fraudulent and non-replicable research in the future. I expect 98% of papers to be rejected.