141–150 of 177 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're misinterpreting the implication. A better phrasing might be: A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, since all management decisions must have accountability, a computer must never make them.
Since when are (human) managers accountable?
So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…
> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
As a 52 year old my life experience disagrees.
It is much easier now because information flows both ways and "They" have a lot of information on you (and everyone else) and can use that information to manipulate you with algorithmic ragebait, and to extract maximum rents (in all aspects of commerce, not just literal rents) from you, etc.
Not that things were ever perfect in the past, they certainly weren't, but increasingly so much of everything is literally just an outright fucking scam these days and all of it is being turbocharged by various forms of "AI" adjacent technology and increasing deregulation.
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Until you take a baby to the vaccine clinic, the nurse googles which vaccine to give at his age, and blindly trusts the highlighted AI snippet at the top. Not a fictitious example.
Sure, but that's an incredible level of incompetence, that I can only see would be expose otherwise outside of AI use. The entire list of what vaccines to give to what age group could fit on a single piece of paper.
The entire thing reeks of laziness and incompetence. It's neat an all but its a giant sucking maw that is threatening to gobble up whats left of anything good.
A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION —IBM internal training, 1979 It took me a while to realise that the premise is saying the same thing as the reason why we have so many "Computer says no" experiences today. The conclusion only follows if you want someone to be accountable. If you want to avoid being accountable, computers should make all management dec…
computah says noooooo
> Perhaps we’ll see distributed boycotts where many people deploy personal models to force Burger King’s models to burn through tokens at a fantastic rate. Given how many people hate AI in general, I'm surprised there hasn't been anything like this happening. They could even get around the irony of using "AI" themselves, I bet low-tech language models like Markov chains could provide sufficient time wasting potential…
If your complaints about AI are largely about the industrial energy use, the poor quality of service, and the displacement of human labor, wasting more CPU time doesn't seem like a viable or useful protest. The lesson Burger King would take away from your DDoS protest isn't that they should provide better customer service, but that they shouldn't provide any customer service. You'd be giving them free cover to blame…
I knew that one time I needed a free Sam's Club membership for one thing and they kept on dropping me...
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Agreed. My only real complaint with this article is it frames needing to argue with a machine as though this is a new, freshly annoying thing. I already do this constantly. Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on…
At least phone trees are deterministic and there's still (usually) an option to get to a person for matters that aren't covered by the multiple choice options. Talking to AI is a much worse experience and the hope of the industry is that there won't need to be a human as a fallback anymore because (they believe) the AI is intelligent enough to handle anything.
(unless saying "no" / "agent" etc. the fifteen time would've been the trick! Sure, my name can be "O K"...
(I would def love this system if I worked there though, just surprising it didn't have an offramp along the way... maybe they did but everyone used it)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
Cheap distribution makes manipulation easier, not harder. The time it takes for a bad actor to capture attention is much smaller now. It used to be you'd read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life, etc. Now you're getting meme after meme of the same story multiple time…
The bit about having processing time and the social check and balance has been missing from my perspective. Thank you.
So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…
Our society, pre internet, built systems to manage trust. The conditions that allowed those systems to exist (the speed of transmission of data, the ratio of content generation to verification, the ability to shape consensus), have changed. You are ringing the clarion call for community and cooperation, and it will not work. Not because people don’t want community or the better things, but because incentives make the…
I always hit problems with it though. Let's say I can find someone I trust. Maybe it's me. Say I only enter online spaces, at least with intent of discussion, with those I've met in real life. Well, at some point, someone I've met face to face would be incentivized to maybe share a link to their friend's concert. Perhaps there's a free guest list spot in it for them if the show sells out. Or maybe it's all gravy, but eventually:
I want to expand the network we've created together, and it means trusting someone else to bring in people to the online space I've never met in real life. This could again be fine for a long time, but won't someone eventually be incentivized (especially if this practice were common) to promote this supplement, promote that politician...?
(recognize astroturfing is different from the impending slop tsunami but both feel to be in the same stadium)