EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

nations supplying weapons to Kyiv have the right to limit their use

What a pathetic statement. “We’re going to encourage Ukraine to start WW3 and then hand the responsibility to the individual states.”

Smart. Argentina is very vulnerable to a Russian invasion if Russia ever decides to drill a tunnel straight through the earth’s core and out the other side.

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going “cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow” and no you most certainly can’t. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there’s no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It’s the representative of the company, that’s what “customer service representative” means. If a customer can’t trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can’t even replace customer service reps with “AI” tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can’t do that job.

Agreed that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it’s just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don’t even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Looking forward to seeing this very real Russian sonic weapon. It’ll be interesting to see how it works, who designed it, how long it’s existed (which it definitely does). It’s a little worrisome that the Russians were able to keep it a secret so successfully. We don’t even have a theoretical basis for how it works, and yet they’ve managed to not only build it but also deploy it in multiple locations for literally years. Anyways, I hope they eventually find a way to combat this very serious and not at all made up threat.