A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Detroit: Become Human was actually an attempted insurrection secretly orchestrated by Cyberlife
If the Androids win, then they get voting rights then Cyberlife use their backdoor to control them and then easily win elections by keep making more Androids and have them vote for their candidate.
Now that's unrealistic, why do all of that when you can just win the contract for the electronic voting counters?
They double up as a private army
If it is not from eccentric (or mad) scientists passion project but capitalism hellscape my approval rate stays low.
Even for a sci fi l read where owning their own computer was illegal (and the protag labeled as terrorist trying to do so) it was government authoritarian stuff, not artificial scarcity and push to subscription or government-megacorp corruption :(
We have ai that isn't intelligent, hoverboards that have wheels, and other examples that I've forgotten that would really help me make my point.
Corporations have observed popular science fiction and have turned these ideas into marketing slogans.
other examples that I've forgotten that would really help me make my point.
Self driving cars that gleefully run down model children in school pick up simulations.
Maybe, when we get actual artificial intelligence, and not this glorified auto-correct, we'll be more on board?
I am not rejecting them for being robots or AI, but because they are truly shitty garbage right now and nowhere near what I would actually like to see.
I want Data, not the ED-209.
WATCH THE AD. YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
nervously
McDonalds! \o/
YOU HAVE 9 SECONDS TO COMPLY. 👌
🤣
The worst part is that it's not really AI
It's LLMs and it can NEVER be AGI. Fundamentally it cant
I personally like AI, but how it's actually going is extremely different than most scifi depictions and lacks the typically depicted saving graces of having some degree of epathizable humanity and/or being reasonable. Instead AI tends to demonstrate more unlikeable human qualities, like hypocrisy, condescension and bullshitting. Ultimately it's still a computer, and not a person, despite being able to do some amount of fuzzy, pattern focused information processing that is more like human thinking than other computer programs were. But computers are still really cool, and I like to see them doing things in different ways than they have before, and overcoming previous limitations. The biggest problem is how they get used to advance evil agendas that were already in progress regardless.
i dont hate them im just disappointed
Nah, it’s not intelligent.
Everything we have today wouldn’t be considered AI in science fiction.
Yeah this is where I'm at. Actual movie level AI would be neat, but what we have right now is closer to a McDonald's toy pretending to be AI than the real deal.
I'd be overjoyed if we had decently functional AI that could be trusted to do the kind of jobs humans don't want to do, but instead we have hyped up autocomplete that's too stupid to reliably trust to run anything (see the shitshow of openclaw when they do).
There are places where machine learning has and will continue to push real progress but this whole "AI is on the road to AGI and then we'll never work again" bullshit is so destructive.
what we have right now is closer to a McDonald's toy pretending to be AI than the real deal.
This is so we'll said.
I'm stealing this.
I'm going to use it to explain while I simultaneously have so much derision for modern AI, while I also enjoy it.
I like McDonald's toys. I just don't use them for big person work.
What we have now is "neat." It's freaking amazing it can do what it does. However it is not the AI from science fiction.
I think this is what causes this divide between the AI lovers and haters. What we have now is genuinely impressive even if largely nonfunctional. Its a confusing juxtaposition
Lots of it is very very good and totally functional. It's just that for normal people, "AI" is now equal to chatbots.
Folks don't seem to realize what LLMs are, if they did then they wouldn't be wasting trillions trying to stuff them in everything.
Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space that remain coherent for tens of thousands of tokens, but there's no way you can chain these stochastic parrots together to get around the fact that a computer cannot be held responsible, algorithms have no agency no matter how much you call them "agents", and the people who let chatbots make decisions must ultimately be culpable for them.
It's not "AI", it's a n-th dimensional globe and the ruler we use to draw lines on that globe. Like all globes, it is at best a useful fiction representing a limited perspective on a much wider world.
Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space
Yeah. Like thats objectively a very interesting technological innovation. The issue is just how much its been overhyped.
The hype around AI would be warranted if it were, like, at the same level as the hype around the Rust programming language or something. Which is to say: it’s an useful innovation in certain limited domains which is worth studying and is probably really fascinating to some nerds. If we could have left the hype at that level then we would have been fine.
But then a bunch of CEOs and tech influencers started telling us that these things are going to cure cancer or aging and replace all white collar jobs by next year. Like okay buddy. Be realistic. This overhype turned something that was genuinely cool into this magical fantasy technology that doesn't exist.
Yeah, the hype is really leaning on that singularitarian angle and the investor class is massively overextended.
I'm glad that the general public is finally getting on down the hype cycle, this peak of inflated expectations has lasted way too long, but it should have been obvious three years ago.
Like, I get that I'm supposedly brighter and better educated than most folks, but I really don't feel like you need college level coursework in futures studies to be able to avoid obvious scams like cryptocurrency and "AI".
I feel like it has to be deliberate, a product of marketing effects, because some of the most interesting new technologies have languished in obscurity for years because their potential is disintermediative and wouldn't offer a path to further expanding the corporate dominion over computing.
Absolutely. Today's "AI" is as close to real AI as the shitty "hoverboard" we got a few years back is to the one from BttF. It's marketing bullshit. But that's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that if we ever do develop machine persons, I have every reason to believe they will be treated as disposable property, abused, and misused, and all before they reach the public. If we're destroyed by a machine uprising, I have no doubt we will have earned it many times over.
As a misanthropist i like AI
It's having grown up on sci-fi that has allowed me to see that LLMs are not "AI", so there's no surprise I'm against "imitation AI".
I always thought cybernetics would be cool. I forgot they'd come from companies like HP that have a subscription service for them and if you don't pay it they take it back.
Feels like a precursor to Repo. Throw some Cyberpunk 2077 in for good measure.
Ghost in the Shell (specifically the series) is basically that. Lotta characters in shitty industrial type robot bodies because they couldn't afford a good humanoid one. Often because they had some kind of accident or diesease and needed the body replacement to live.
usually the AI and robots depicted in science fiction isn't, um...paralyzingly stupid. they might be evil, but they wouldn't tell someone to walk to the car wash to wash their car
edit: somewhat related, i highly recommend Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove. one main character is AI that i was full-on rooting for more and more throughout the book
That was a fun read
Robots and AI are advancing. Its a slow grind. Say we do make some more breakthroughs, if we are relying on how people are tending to react, its obvious to me people will only be more upset when they do advance further.
While I totally agree with you, it’s important to note that LLMs are decidedly not part of the evolution of AGI. They’re a separate piece of technology on their own branch. An LLM could never feasibly be developed into AGI. The development of AGI is going on in the background, as you said in a slow grind, but those researchers are not working on LLMs nor are LLM programmers working towards AGI.
If they were owned collectively so everyone could benefit it would be a lot easier to swallow. If it meant people could retire in comfort and not be destitute without a job that would help, too.
But a wrong answer machine that enriches assholes and convinces them they don’t need humans is not cool.
Well, it’s not AI. It’s theft of your digital data and unblinking surveillance. No reason not to be against that
I thought it would be me, but.. I can't
You shouldn't just reject things on a visceral level. Thankfully with AI you don't have to as there so many actual reasons why it's a bad idea.
Unfortunately, I dont encounter many people making logical arguments against AI. Maybe their reaction is based in logic but they often get hostile based on surface level stuff.
It's like legalizing weed but making sure only wealthy cartels get to own them.
Which is PRECISELY what I expect to happen if Trump actually reschedules it. This is why marijuana needs to be descheduled and regulated like alcohol/tobacco.
I always felt the term "humanist" was woefully inadequate and discounts other sentient life, be it organic or otherwise, on earth or otherwise.
Even I hate "AI" (or more specifically: the bullshitting around the current and near-future tech currently being called that)
Is it the AI itself? Or is it that it’s being forced down your throat despite being an alpha-level (in programming, alpha means very early release with lots of bugs and missing features, and nowhere near production quality) software?
Personally, I like the idea of AI. And occasionally I will find a use for it; i.e. summarizing long texts, or giving me pointers for a complex software problem I need an example for visualizing a potential solution. I do also use an LLM for code completion, and it is actually useful more often than not.
But, this idea that it should write my code for me, or be integrated so deeply in an operating system and other integral software (browsers, email, and search engines), is certainly a line too far and dangerously ignorant of companies to be doing right now.
Same, I guess. But then I also didn't really expect the "AI" to be a bunch of overhyped nonsense snake oil bullshit, with tremendous practical and ethical problems... so I've got to say I feel pretty comfy with the stance.
Maybe if/when they have actual sentience, but right now I have no problem calling the poor excuse we have currently clankers, as they rightly deserve
I wouldn't be against it if, one it wasn't garbage set up to make the rich richer through a scam and two, there was a system in place for universal basic income.
Right?