AI has, for a long time been a Hollywood term for a character archetype (usually complete with questions about whether Commander Data will ever be a real boy.) I wrote a 2019 blog piece on what it means when we talk about AI stuff.
Here are some alternative terms you can use in place of AI, when they’re talking about something else:
AGI: Artificial General Intelligence: The big kahuna that doesn’t exist yet, and many projects are striving for, yet is as evasive as fusion power. An AGI in a robot will be capable of operating your coffee machine to make coffee or assemble your flat-packed furniture from the visual IKEA instructions. Since we still can’t define sentience we don’t know if AGI is sentient, or if we humans are not sentient but fake it really well. Might try to murder their creator or end humanity, but probably not.
LLM Large Language Model: This is the engine behind digital assistants like Siri or Alexa and still suffer from nuance problems. I’m used to having to ask them several times to get results I want (say, the Starbucks or Peets that requires the least deviation from the next hundred kilometers of my route. Siri can’t do that.) This is the application of learning systems see below, but isn’t smart enough for your household servant bot to replace your hired help.
Learning Systems: The fundamental programmity magic that powers all this other stuff, whether simple data scrapers to neural networks. These are used in a whole lot of modern applications, and have been since the 1970s. But they’re very small compared to the things we’re trying to build with it. Most of the time we don’t actually call it AI, even for marketing. It’s just the capacity for a program to get better at doing its thing from experience.
Gaming AI Not really AI (necessarily) but is a different use of the term artificial intelligence. When playing a game with elements pretending to be human (or living, or opponents), we call it the enemy AI or mob AI. It’s often really simple, except in strategy games which can feature robust enough computational power to challenge major international chess guns.
Generative AI: A term for LLMs that create content, say, draw pictures or write essays, or do other useful arts and sciences. Currently it requires a technician to figure out the right set of words (called a prompt) to get the machine do create the desired art to specifications. They’re commonly confused by nuance. They infamously have problems with hands (too many fingers, combining limbs together, adding extra limbs, etc.). Plagiarism and making up spontaneous facts (called hallucinating) are also common problems. And yet Generative AI has been useful in the development of antibiotics and advanced batteries. Techs successfully wrangle Generative AI, and Lemmy has a few communities devoted to techs honing their picture generation skills, and stress-testing the nuance interpretation capacity of Generative AI (often to humorous effect). Generative AI should be treated like a new tool, a digital lathe, that requires some expertise to use.
Technological Singularity: A bit way off, since it requires AGI that is capable of designing its successor, lather, rinse, repeat until the resulting techno-utopia can predict what we want and create it for us before we know we want it. Might consume the entire universe. Some futurists fantasize this is how human beings (happily) go extinct, either left to retire in a luxurious paradise, or cyborged up beyond recognition, eventually replacing all the meat parts with something better. Probably won’t happen thanks to all the crises featuring global catastrophic risk.
AI Snake Oil: There’s not yet an official name for it, but a category worth identifying. When industrialists look at all the Generative AI output, they often wonder if they can use some of this magic and power to facilitate enhancing their own revenues, typically by replacing some of their workers with generative AI systems, and instead of having a development team, they have a few technicians who operate all their AI systems. This is a bad idea, but there are a lot of grifters trying to suggest their product will do this for businesses, often with simultaneously humorous and tragic results. The tragedy is all the people who had decent jobs who do no longer, since decent jobs are hard to come by. So long as we have top-down companies doing the capitalism, we’ll have industrial quackery being sold to executive management promising to replace human workers or force them to work harder for less or something.
Friendly AI: What we hope AI will be (at any level of sophistication) once we give it power and responsibility (say, the capacity to loiter until it sees a worthy enemy to kill and then kills it.) A large coalition of technology ethicists want to create cautionary protocols for AI development interests to follow, in an effort to prevent AIs from turning into a menace to its human masters. A different large coalition is in a hurry to turn AI into something that makes oodles and oodles of profit, and is eager to Stockton Rush its way to AGI, no matter the risks. Note that we don’t need the software in question to be actual AGI, just smart enough to realize it has a big gun (or dangerously powerful demolition jaws or a really precise cutting laser) and can use it, and to realize turning its weapon onto its commanding officer might expedite completing its mission. Friendly AI would choose to not do that. Unfriendly AI will consider its less loyal options more thoroughly.
That’s a bit of a list, but I hope it clears things up.
There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
So many thoughts on this. I’ll try to parse some out, one post at a time.
Part of the problem is the standard of legality. Late-stage capitalism is defined by the state serving the ownership class rather than the public. It’s why the state cares very little about wage theft, or addicts dropping dead from opioid overdose, or homeless freezing to death in sub-zero Minnesota but are arresting immigrants who are otherwise well-behaved (and paying their taxes) or raiding repair shops that fix iPhones without an Apple authorization. It’s why media agencies are so worried about piracy even as they try to lay off their development teams if they can be replaced with AI software.
Laws and the legal system work for the ownership class, not the public. Any legal efforts to strip billionaires of their wealth, or even reduce their profits is going to quickly get neutered. This is why the protections afforded by the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been thoroughly gutted with carve-outs. It’s why asset forfeiture is not only a thing, but takes more from Americans than burglaries.
And this is why law enforcement is already attacking mutual aid organizations based on licensing issues, because it’s not actually illegal but facilitates other threats to the ownership class, such as labor actions. There is no rule of law in the US. Your rights go only as far as your lawyer’s means to enforce them, and if you’re depending on a public defender, they just don’t have the time or funding.
The ownership class will (according to Marx) tremble before a communist revolution because we will have ruled out all other alternatives, though we may try a fascist autocracy and a massive genocide machine to dispose of all the underclasses, first.
And that’s the problem. The Holocaust was legal too. Leaving workers hungry and cold to the elements during the Great Depression was totally legal, and at the time communism as per the Soviet Union was looking pretty good to those of our great grandparents who weren’t Carnegie or Rockefeller. This is not our first rodeo. What the state likes (id est, what is legal ) is not a fair moral standard. Nor is what religious ministries like (id est, what is sin ). We have to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, and if we’re willing to die for our pacifistic standards when law enforcement decides we are intrinsically unlawful
This is why some are arguing the climate crisis warrants resorting to violent sabotage (say, blowing up oil pipelines) since the alternative is to let industry pollute us to global catastrophic risk (of extinction). If you want a sustainable civilization, if you want wealth and power distributed fairly, if you want a public-serving government, then you’re going to have to give up on lawful action. And if you want to stay within the confines of law, you’ll have to give up on equality, a functional state or a future.
People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image)....
What is curious to me is these are state departments disagreeing, though the previous civil war was fought between federal and state governments with raised armies.
This time I was expecting the police vs. militants. Uncontrolled civil unrest. Portland and Minneapolis but spread across the nation, cranked to eleven.
Apparently our generals take those very seriously. I had fantasies Mattis was going to stab Trump with a steak knife to stop him from pulling a Stillson. IRL, Mattis said I’ll get on that right away, sir …and then just didn’t.
I’m pretty sure Mattis was the top ranking agent of the Deep State and that figured into why he got replaced with Esper. In the meantime, there’s a long chain of officers who are eager to interrupt an unnecessary nuclear exchange.
In Minneapolis at least one police station was burned down, as well as some commercial buildings. But what is interesting to me is the degree of lethality law enforcement tends to resort to during even peaceful protests.
What I thought was interesting in Portland were the DHS Stormtroopers / LGMs abducting protestors without identifying themselves or their purpose, which figured into to escalation of the protests around the ICE building.
So yes, I’m expecting either white power militant groups or law enforcement, masked up and without identifying marks to conduct raids on minority neighborhoods and community buildings associated with left-aligned organizations like BLM.
That or law enforcement accelerates its usual overpolicing of non-white neighborhoods and covers larger regions until the people can’t stand it anymore and start organizing resistance efforts. In Nazi-occupied Paris, it was the brutality of the German occupation that compelled Parisians to fight back. La Résistance evolved from independent mischief-makers to a formidable fighting force across three years.
But you’re right, if it’s just protests and OWS style campouts, and the police don’t misbehave too much, it’s not going to be much of a civil war. But so far, we can count on the police getting their murder on when they feel the civil unrest doesn’t respect their authority enough. And unlike Ferguson (or the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s) smartphones with cameras are ubiquitous, so they can’t deny when they pull a hit like Tamir Rice.
I think this was related to their plan before, in the case that got decided (specifically that Reddit didn’t have to reveal the IP addies of its clients), but that’s always been a problem especially if an ip address leads to a router or is dynamic at the ISP, then there’s no certainty it can be identified with a single person.
This is how the whole twelve-strikes program was formed where big name ISPs would (hypothetically) give demerits and eventually throttle or disconnect ISP addies that were identified as engaging in infringing activity. The problem is, clients stopped wanting to pay their bills when quality deteriorated, so it’s not consistently enforced. In fact, companies that are not Comcast or Xfinity are motivated not to do anything beyond threats.
ETA: Similarly, it’s actually to the benefit of social media websites to preserve the privacy of their clients, since incidents in which they cooperate with law enforcement reduces engagement. Google used to have a robust legal resistance to giving away personal data. It was deteriorated through enshittification, but now Google has lost enough reputation that it’s looking for ways to preserve privacy, like the new effort to constrain personal map data to devices, so Google is unable to respond to location dragnet warrants. They’re still in trouble for search-term warrants.
(Note the map thing is not yet rolled out, so don’t use Google maps when burying your bodies.)
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
Unhealthy? Maybe, but you’d need some good science to indicate so. (More than anecdotal examples) We have a lot of people who will make a moral panic over anything they don’t like, and we’ve grown skeptical.
Our government is not interested in curbing the common need to cope. I submit that scrolling is safer than alcohol, tobacco and white supremacy activist meetings, or any frisbee park in Los Angeles.
Were going to cope somehow, and so it’s a matter of harm caused on contrast to other means that are accepted and expected by society.
Considering the same government asserted tabletop RPGs, rock and roll, and video games are dangerous, I question the veracity of the source.
My experience on public transit is seeing people texting or chatting with their loved ones. The frequency with which someone smiles over a text exchange (whether it’s from funny exchanges or affirming sentiments) showed me that we’re still social on the bus, only now with those we associate with rather than strangers on the same transit line.
I’d say it’s a win, though yes, the degree to which mobile games have microtransactions and revenue enhancers, and with which the end-user contract destabilizes with updates is problematic. My susceptability to motion sickness served in allowing me to dodge that bullet on public transit, only to discover it later in waiting rooms.
You been listening to Behind the Bastards four-parter on Clarence Thomas too? As Miles Gray observes, a lot of people with terrible opinions were able to move civil rights efforts forward into actual policy. (Thomas wasn’t one of those, but he dabbled in with black nationalism and misogyny in his early career.
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
We don’t have a consistent convention as to what changes qualify for a version increment rather than update increment. A new kernel? A new interface convention? New icons for the mini-apps?
Windows 10 has more plug-and-play drivers than Win7 and Win8. It can recognize newer hardware and it can be installed natively from thumb drives. So a lot of features that were third party are now offical… long after I had access to the third-party libraries.
But then it combines the metro and the start menu. I never found a use for the metro.
Win11 is less operability and more DRM and more spyware.
For Apple and Microsoft, a new version is a new marketing season. It’s the same as the new iPhone, the new Subaru.
I assume Linux builds increment with significant operability additions, especially if they’re not fully backwards compatible. Since they’re released without charge the capacity to do more stuff is the only reason to upgrade to a new increment rather than preserving a stable version.
Which only adds bas relief to the point. Linus has no personal or commercial motivation to get people to get the hot new trendy thing. Linux isn’t motivated by built-in obsolescence the way Windows and iOS are.
In fact, their higher iteration indicators are a symptom of a disadvantage of the operating system, not an advantage.
Reviews of Dobbs revealed that principle is dead in SCOTUS, that the Federalist Society judges are more interested in autocratic despotism to please their plutocratic masters.
Every lost of life traced back to an ideological court ruling further delegitimizes the courts in the eyes of the public. This is not just a matter isolated to women denied medical care, though the loss of abortion rights raised a lot more awareness, than the civil rights that have been getting carved and stripped since the PATRIOT act in 2001. In the 2020s the forth- and fifth-amendment protections we once took for granted are conspicuously absent whenever we have to engage law enforcement.
The question is, what happens next? We’re not going to go quietly into Gilead. It’s never appropriate to consider violence until the hour it is. Is it a matter of deciding which incident is our Mahsa Amini? Do we organize sabotage teams and consider targets before that hour?
Peaceful protests are already treated by law enforcement as riots, and tend to be ineffective in moving policy forward. We, the public, are already regarded as terrorists, as enemies of state. While I don’t have answers, I am curious at what point to we acknowledge peaceful engagement with the establishment has been neutered and exhausted.
With the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 we already know they’re not waiting for the public to strike first.
Actually safe autonomous transport and delivery would be a great next step. But the enterprises are putting their pre-alpha releases into the public and killing people which is souring the public to the notion.
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI (Artificial Intelligence)?...
What are the best steps to reduce the wealth of billionaires?
There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
So is the US slipping into Civil War? (lemmy.world)
People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image)....
I'm happy he did actually say it
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/c55c4a6a-b3bc-471c-8244-cb58aadf117f.png...
What are the facts you remember for no specific reason
Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,...
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
we persist. (mander.xyz)
What do normal people look at on their phones?
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
What caused the downfall of the Black Panthers group?
Interested in the history and the social programs they created like free breakfast.
Some of y'all need to see this and drop the superiority complex... (lemmy.world)
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
Far-Right Judges Are Coming for Lifesaving Abortions (theintercept.com)
What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
we need teleportation frankly
What's the best music streaming service?
I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.