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Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

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Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.

"But the commies will do it" is just an old hat version of what I just described. And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore. The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their…

You don't think an attacker will think twice if the prey also has nuclear weapons?

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.

They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.

"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines.

They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted.

Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the presumption of innocence? The case is in open court now, AFAIU.

Can someone who downvoted parent's comment explain what's wrong with the presumption of innocence in their opinion?

The presumption of innocence is for courts of law.

The court of public opinion has no such rules.

If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.

Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so. If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.

> Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so. "So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt. It seems you are against the presumption of innocen…

The presumption of innocence is a legal principle.

This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)

If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#145

I can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this: devaluation of expertise, whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas. College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally…

I would frame it more that AI will cause the value of knowledge to plummet.

College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.

Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#146
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields. I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in…

> and become proficient in it From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.

That's fair, I should have defined proficient a little better. By proficient I mean, I can read Rust code and roughly understand what it's doing. I understand idiomatic patterns, and can identify when something especially an AI, has gone against those. I am familiar with the toolings capabilities and limitations, and I can make use of them directly. I can write rust code without having to use AI, though I do still need to lean on documentation, but I don't consider that to be non-proficient as I am definitely at least proficient in C++, elixir, Ruby, JavaScript/type script, and a few others, having written many non-trivial applications in all of those over the last 20 years, and I still reference documentation all the time. I can look at a rust project's organization and infer details from it, and spot areas where things look janky. I can read and understand the details and code examples in the rust book without having to look up earlier sections on syntax and things like that. The point where I would consider myself proficient was when I was able to read the ownership sections and understand them.

Note that when I say proficient, I in no way mean mastery. It will take years to get to that point. Rust is still one of my weakest languages overall, but I've been surprised at how quickly I've been able to get up to speed with AI assistance.

At this point, nothing I've written with AI is something I don't think I could have written by hand if I had significantly more time to do so.

On a side note, one thing that I have not enjoyed about the Rust community, is a general attitude that rust is hard. I personally find rust to be a whole lot easier than c++ was/is. There's definitely a lot to learn around the ownership model, but it's not rocket science. One of the things I love about Rust is how expressive it is, without compromising on performance and developer empowerment. I'm not implying that this is what you did with your comment as I have no idea what your intentions or thoughts were, just making an observation that this is something I haven't liked.

AI is definitely not a silver bullet for anything, but it has bridged a gap that kept me from diving fully into rust in the past, which is that at the end of the day I need to actually ship something. I learn languages for fun, but also for practical use. A theoretical language that I never use is not interesting to me because it's not useful to me because I can't ship anything with it. AI lets me ship actually useful things for just myself as part of the learning process, and it also gives me a great opportunity to debug Rust code that I know the exact intention of. When trying to clone someone else's project and review or debug that, there's a massive upfront step of understanding what it's supposed to do. When it's my code AI generated, I know what it's supposed to do because the requirements/prompts came from my own mind. That's hugely powerful and something that a lot of other old school developers don't seem to understand yet.

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.

"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines . They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted. Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/

How did you come to believe that the industrial revolution in England caused a drop in life expectancy?

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.

"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines . They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted. Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/

That paper appears to be yet another case of social scientists not understanding that correlation isn't causation. They demonstrate a trend in a noisy dataset of some very specific forms of injury and then declare it was the industrial revolution which caused it. But their analysis can't show that.

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.

Yes its more difficult now they are not students. Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way. Edits - condensing the questions: 1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students? 2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education? Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?

The friction at these commencements is a reaction to the macroeconomic consequences not the technology itself.

Re: Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

#150
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good start would have been them not calling this artificial intelligence at all. The hype is largely based on the term "AI" and if it really is simply a (very impressive) auto complete tool it isn't intelligence at all, though as you said can be a very useful tool.

It's amazing that there are people who still believe in "it's just autocomplete". It hasn't been true for a long time, but currently it's position that reveals complete lack of awareness how good AI has become. It has solved Erdos problem using novel approach. Constant moving of goalpost is recurring theme when discussing AI, but it's really impossible to move it so far that you can frame this achievement as "impress…

I mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?
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