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Brillante Gedanken aus Perspektiven, die ich so noch nie gedacht habe. Und sehr treffend sind.

Cross post von technology@lemmy.world https://reddthat.com/post/58429512

It’s wonderful to run a company that has a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeros into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors.

This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they do not trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI.

The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

…. ….

They want to fire a lot of tech workers – 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AI’s code.

And because AI is just a word-guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are nearly indistinguishable from working code.

For AI to be valuable, it has to replace high-wage workers, and those are precisely the workers who might spot some of those statistically camouflaged AI errors.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24287458

I don't usually keep the author's name in the suggested hed, but here I think he's recognizable enough that it adds value.

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn’t change it.

Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think science-fiction writers are oracles. Even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that we can “see the future”.

Then there are science-fiction fans who believe that they are reading the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI.

That’s something I used to strenuously resist doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentlessly bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, they insisted that I must be a paid shill.

This is literally what happens when you argue with Scientologists, and life is just too short. That said, people would not stop asking – so I’m going to explain what I think about AI and how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.”

I don't usually keep the author's name in the suggested hed, but here I think he's recognizable enough that it adds value.

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn’t change it.

Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think science-fiction writers are oracles. Even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that we can “see the future”.

Then there are science-fiction fans who believe that they are reading the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI.

That’s something I used to strenuously resist doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentlessly bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, they insisted that I must be a paid shill.

This is literally what happens when you argue with Scientologists, and life is just too short. That said, people would not stop asking – so I’m going to explain what I think about AI and how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.”

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots