Absolutely. Wealth isn't competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to a physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.

"New" wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they "earned" their position. "If everyone else just does what I did, they'd be wealthy like me. If they don't do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me."

Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to "earn" more points.

Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There's lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that's not what we're complaining about.

We're complaining about all the people who are asking, "Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?"

“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).

Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean "AI" can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."

Only because it is.

Not at all. It's not "how likely is the next word to be X". That wouldn't be context.

I'm guessing you didn't watch the video.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that's because the gigantic server farms powering all of this "AI" are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC's, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

The airline industry does this with hundreds of dollars worth of airplane tickets all the time.

But but but, Daddy CEO said that RTO combined with Gen AI would mean continued, infinite growth and that we would all prosper, whether corposerf or customer!

Almost like those stupid monkey drawings that were "worth money." Lmao.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

Doesn't stop companies from trying to deflect accountability onto AI. Citations Needed recently did an episode all about this: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-217-a-i-mysticism-as-responsibility-evasion-pr-tactic-7bd7f56eeaaa

I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?

I was thinking more along the lines of the "human in the loop" model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.

Most places don't have all good system analysts.

Have you ever played a 3D game

What is a systems analyst?

I never worked in a big enough software team to have any distinction other than "works on code" and "does sales work".

The field I was in was all small places that were very specialized in what they worked on.

When I ran my own company, it was just me. I did everything that the company needed to take are of.

Systems analyst is like a programmer analyst without the coding. I agree, in my experience small shops were more likely to have just programmer analysts. Often also responsible for hardware as well.

If it's just you I hope you didn't need a systems analyst to gather requirements and then work with the programmer to implement them. If you did, might need another kind of analysis.

The kind of AI I mentioned isn’t a massive resource sink. I can run that sort of thing locally on my own computer. They don’t need supercomputers for level 1 material.

This was all via chat so much faster than the painful voice prompts. I agree those are terrible.

I love text chats with a person, but I feel most of the time that when I start with a text chat with a bot and get transferred to a real agent, they ask all of the same questions, like info gathering name, phone, email, etc. it's almost as if the real people can't see the transcript of the conversation I had with the bot.

The thing is, most of those chats that I've worked with for years are simple chat bots, not AI, and those are plenty effective for their purpose. They have their preset question tree and that's it. I may also be a little skewed in my experiences compared to a lot of people, since I've worked in IT for over a decade, so often when in reaching out to service, it's something more advanced where I need a person to actually talk to. Also, anything billing or containing private information. I under no circumstances want that fed into an LLM or accessible to an AI agent so it can be shared accidentally to someone else.