Transcript

Title text: This is how you all fucking sound

[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]

Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]

Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]

Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]

Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.

Still Vreni on Bluesky

  • auntieclokwise@lemmy.world
    45·
    6 days ago

    Agree AI is as overhyped as the internet in the late 90’s was. I also think AI or some descendent of it will likely be as ubiquitous as the Internet is now. There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem. I look at AI as being the bridge between the real world where things are fuzzy, rules are inconsistent, things don’t have clear cut answers, etc and the digital world where everything is precise and well defined. That’s not something that’s going away.

    However, what I see happening with AI is much the same thing as what happened with the Internet. To use the Internet in the late 90’s was frustrating. The computers sucked, they were huge, they used a bunch of power, the connection was slow, connections dropped, they weren’t always on, they took quite some to establish, etc. It wasn’t till CPUs got good enough to be able to be battery powered and still render full websites (in other words, the key building block of a smartphone) that the Internet really became a ubiquitous thing for most people. Today’s AI uses way too much power, requires hardware that’s way too expensive, is less smart than people think it is, has problems learning, has problems with hallucinations, etc. What I see happening is the AI bubble crashes, like the dotcom crash, but then it comes back once the technology is really ready.

    As far as law and IP go, the Internet often had lots of issues with that too. Lookup the origins of why we have Section 230. It’s still something we’re arguing over. We’ll figure out the legal issues. And IP law is broken, has been for a long time. It needs a revamp to bring it back to some sanity. I have no problem with AI breaking IP law. Much of that shouldn’t be under copyright anyway.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
      1·
      5 days ago

      There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem.

      That’s a great point.

      • Web 2.0 was way overhyped, but widely useful.
      • Web 3.0 was way overhyped and really useful in some very niche applications.
      • “Mobile first” was way overhyped, but basically correct (they typed into their phone, lol.)
      • AI is way overhyped, and probably falls somewhere in between - not as complete of a waste of time as most of the blockchain crap, and nowhere near as practical as web 2.0 or mobile first.

      Edit: (Sarcasm incoming:) But we can all agree with the tech bros, that I became obsolete during each of these transitions, because I didn’t drop everything else and focus on it completely to the exclusion of all else.

      I guess my paycheck disagrees, but who are we going to trust - cold hard cash, or some con artist tech bro CEOs? Lol.

      • auntieclokwise@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 days ago

        I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain. Where I see it’s biggest potential though isn’t in the stuff most people do everyday, but in specialized applications. I see some of the uses in stuff like medical research and find the potential there to be wild. In alot of ways, it’s sort of a revolution in how we think about doing computing. We’re still really early on it, so its hard to know just where it takes us. Even on the more mundane stuff, it really does help programmers be alot more productive (though it’s hardly a replacement for talented programmers). Which is a huge for helping us build the next generation of tech.

        There’s alot of stuff they say is obsolete but really isn’t. For example, in my day job, I’m an analog IC design engineer. The most advanced process I work on is sort of 90nm (but not really). The previous silicon process I worked on was basically a 0.5um process. Ask most people and that’s all stupidly obsolete - should have died out in the 90s or something. But I work on power products. Power is analog, not digital. We may have some digital stuff, to be sure, but what we fundamentally do is analog. And you can’t use 5nm processes to deal with “high” voltages - that’s all on “old”, “obsolete” silicon processes. Oh and you know what we power with all this? Among many other things, those fancy AI chips. So yeah, alot of these transitions do obsolete stuff, but there’s often still important niches in older technologies. I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.

        • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
          1·
          4 days ago

          I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain.

          I 100% agree. I use AI on purpose for things, once in awhile. I’ve never had a use for blockchain, only had it shoved at me.

          I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.

          Exactly. Ilike Cobol as an obvious point against both extremes of the AI argument.

          “AI is going completely away…” - Sure. Right after Cobol and the Fax machine.

          But also “AI has eliminated all need for X, Y and Z.” Sure. Right. And it also just got rid of Cobol and fax machines, right?

          Things change surprisingly fast, at the same time as things change shockingly slowly.

          What doesn’t go out of style is learning and expertise.