Hardy seems worth reiterating as it’s always in the news, but the US seems like it’s in overall decline for most any reason you can think of. Rising disparity, falling buying power for the average person, stagnant wages, increasing costs, rising political instability, rise of the far right with literal calls for civil war, rise of the far right looking to tear down any social, environmental, educational, or scientific advancements, the steady march towards oligarchy and corporatocracy, and then there’s the global climate crisis speeding up and the realization that we’ve been lied to about saving the world with recycling and EVs while the corporations rake in billions and pollute remorselessly.
30-40 years ago the economy looked steady, you could save the world by filling the recycle bin, and you could afford an education, home, and maybe retirement if you followed the “go to college and get a good job” path that generations before had followed.
Subjectively and objectively I’d say we’re worse off.
Sure, there’s some potential bright spots. Advances in medical care (that you probably can’t afford), fusion power advances (that will probably arrive too late to do any good), rising renewable energy (fought every step of the way by anti-environmental types), and a resurgence in the labor movement (also fought every step of the way by the wealthy and corporations), at least that’s something.
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.
I remember when OpenAI were talking like they had discovered AGI or were a couple weeks away from discovering it, this was around the time Sam Altman was fired. Obviously that was not true, and honestly we may never get there, but we might get there.
Good list tbh.
Personally I’m excited and cautious about the future of AI because of the ethical implications of it and how it could affect society as a whole.
Have you looked into the one time expense of buying an air fryer? You can make your own chips/fries/etc which are both cheaper and healthier. Obviously you have to buy the appliance but it pays off in terms of health and groceries eventually. Like, crackers are usually loaded with crap ingredients. You could air fry some potatoes in a little spray of healthy oil for a dollar or two and do your wallet and your heart a solid AND you’re still getting your daily allotment of potatoes lol
You don’t need the gadget. You can make these things with a normal stove and oven. As someone who cooks a lot someone gave me one of these for xmas. It’s a damn convection oven. A tiny one worth way too much money. Learn to use the appliances you have and stop with the useless gadgets.
It is a convection oven but most people don’t have a fancy oven with a convection oven. Yeah you can make it in the oven but it comes out better in the air fryer and mine heats in literally one minute, I can use it in summer because it doesn’t add nearly as much heat to my house, etc. It’s way more convenient than using the massive oven for a plate of fries or something and I can even cook an entire pizza in the air fryer I got using the bake setting, which again is just much easier and more convenient for me.
I haven’t reached the point yet where I’m personally dumpster diving, but I have a friend who has an inside connection at a major grocery store. They call when it’s time to take out the garbage, set it outside the compactor, and my friend swings by to snag it. It’s incredible how much gets thrown out. He preserves what can’t be used immediately and gives it away to those who don’t have a problem with the source. I’ve benefited from a 5 lb bag of jerky and a box full of dried fruits, veggies, and other items.
Otherwise, I’m always on the lookout for sales and deals. When I find one I stock up, like the one going on now at Amazon for Sweet Sue canned chicken that worked out to 78 cents for a 5oz can.
I’m fortunate enough to have a few acres and access to water at agricultural rates, so I grow enough produce to supply myself and a few other families that subscribe to my farm-to-home service. It’s enough to pay the costs and buy the grandkids some nice presents, but I ain’t getting rich off it.
In Canada we are dealing with a housing crisis, a healthcare crisis, and a climate crisis (we still have wildfires burning in January) on top of alt-righters trying to reverse all progress that we’ve made.
So very similar to America- not quite as dramatic. Though Albertabama has been quiet for a while so I expect the Premier to do something stupid soon.
I have three kids. I was present for the birth of the youngest two. But I adopted my oldest. She was 12 so she had to tell the judge she was OK with it. I told her it came with two conditions: Nothing between us needed to change and she didn’t have to call me “Dad”. She calls me by first name to my face but she calls me “dad” behind my back. I’ll take it.
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