Fuck AI

It is a sad thing to see. The education system especially here in the US has really failed many people. I was always super curious and excited about machine intelligence from a young age. I was born in the mid 90's. I've been dreaming about automation myself out of work so I could create and do what I love and spend more time with the people I love, and just explore and learn and grow. As a kid I noticed two things that made adults miserable:

1. Overworked with too little pay and too little time off. Monetary stressors.
2. Having kids they didn't want but lied to themselves about. (Only some obviously)

I went to school for CS and eventually had to drop because of personal life and mental health struggles, but I'm still interested in joining the field and open source. People sometimes make me feel really sad, and misunderstood, plus discourages me from even bothering because they're so negative. I know how we got here, but it's sad it's this predictable a reaction.

By 2014-2015 I was watching a lot of machine learning videos on YouTube, playing with style GANs etc. The fact a computer could even "apply a style" and keep the image coherent was just endlessly fascinating and it made for a lot of cool photos etc. Watching AlphaGo beat a world champion in Go using Q-learning techniques and self-play was incredible. I just love it. I love future tech and I think we can have social and economic equity and much less wealth and income inequality with all this.

A lot of people don't realize labor adds a lot to the cost of what they buy and there are only so many workers. Having even today's LLMs fully implemented and realized as agents (this is very quickly coming about) things will slowly get cheaper and better, then likely more rapidly. Software development will be cheaper. Engineers, game designers and artists will bring to life incredible things that we haven't thought up yet, and will likely use these tools/entities to enhance their workflows. Yes there will be less artist grunt work, and there will be affects on jobs. It's just not going to stop anyone from doing what they love however they like to do it. It's so odd to me.

Cheers and keep your head up. If we get this right I think people will change their tune, but probably not until they see economic and quality of life improvements. Though, I'd say machine learning and machine intelligence has added a great deal of value and opportunity in my life. I wish everyone a good future regardless of how your feel about this. I just hope people who aren't in the field or weren't enthusiastic before will at least remember there are a lot of real, kind, and extremely intelligent people working really hard on this stuff, and truly believe they can make a substantial positive impact. We should be more trusting and open. It's really hard to do it, we can get burned, but most people want decent things for most others despite disagreement and don't strife. We've made it this far. Let's go to the stars 🤠

The only way to enact utopia is by making it so popular an idea that the propaganda machine gets drowned out. This is going to be a very long and slow process that may never end. But we can always aim for "not worse" and if we can do that, we can also aim for "a little better". Anything faster than those baby steps feels really far from possible, but those baby steps are always worth taking.

This is why the term “AI” sucks so much. Even “machine learning” is kind of misleading.

Large-scale statistical computing obviously has uses, especially for subjects that lend themselves well to statistical analysis of large and varied data sets, like astronomical observations.

Sticking all of the text on the internet into a blender and expecting the resulting statistical weights to produce some kind of oracle is… Well, exactly what you’d expect the tech cultists to pivot to after crypto fell apart, tbh, but still incredibly dumb.

Calling them both “AI” does a tremendous disservice to us all. But here we are, unable to escape the marketing.