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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
21–30 of 309 posts
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#22I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?). Through this lens it's way more normal
Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.
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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#23If you read the paper, they make a good case that AI is just a normal technology. They're a bit dissmissive, but they're not alone in that. The AI sector has been all too much hype and far too little substance.
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#24AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology. Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.
Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call it what you will, it is what it is.
It will depend on the final form the normal useful tools take, but for now it's 'LLMs', 'coding agents', etc.
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#25I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?). Through this lens it's way more normal
Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.
So are LLMs. Under the covers they are just deterministic matmul.
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#26What if this paper actually took things seriously? A serious paper would start by acknowledging that every previous general-purpose technology required human oversight precisely because it couldn't perceive context, make decisions, or correct errors - capabilities that are AI's core value proposition. It would wrestle with the fundamental tension: if AI remains error-prone enough to need human supervisors, it's not t…
> because it couldn't perceive context, make decisions, or correct errors - capabilities that are AI's core value proposition
I could ask the same thing then. When will you take "AI" seriously and stop attributing the above capabilities to it?
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.
So are LLMs. Under the covers they are just deterministic matmul.
And at scale you even have a "sampling" of sorts (even if the distribution is very narrow unless you've done something truly unfortunate in your FP code) via scheduling and parallelism.
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#28https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
Seems to be the referenced paper?
If so previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43697717
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a name: Large Language Models, or "Generative" AI. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and it doesn't listen to instructions, but it does generate pretty good text!
[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.
What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof.
The proof burden is on AI proponents.
Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
#30Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.