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Comment Re:What's AI? (Score 4, Interesting) 64

Trump has AI stocks in his portfolio. He makes money when AI does well. So long as that is true, he is going to continue to promulgate the wonders of AI. That is something you can trust, because it is motivated by greed.

If he ever divests those assets, his position may change, of course.

Comment Re: CEO's can't control their own companies? (Score 2, Insightful) 64

They also want to manage their reputations. They don't want to appear glib about the harm that their products have already caused and are likely to cause, because they know they will be held accountable at some point.

Incidentally, any talk of guardrails for the AI agents risks making people feel too safe. Guardrails will only inhibit AIs that were trained by and are in use by legitimate law-abiding institutions. The cat is out of the bag, and governments and criminal organizations absolutely will acquire and/or construct AIs of their own that have no guardrails, and use those to attack anything they care to.

What we desperately need is a global shift to a higher gear on the implementation of good technical security measures, so that all our important systems can repel these new attacks. We can and should use AI to help us achieve this quickly.

Comment Re: Good riddance (Score 2) 149

There is a real and large market for buggy software. Nobody likes the bugs, of course, but everybody loves for the software to be cheap. Many business ventures are deliriously happy to use cheap buggy software that sometimes creates problems for their team, so long as most of the time it makes a lot of money.

For such markets, Agile is great. Developers very quickly churn out buggy software which can be sold for cheap precisely because it was churned out quickly. The magic phrase is "good enough." It's not perfect, it was never intended to be. It's cheap and "good enough," and so it outsells everything else on the market because the other packages are priced way too high. And they are priced too high because they spend too much time developing perfect software.

Many technicians have a really hard time with this. They want to take pride in their work, do things well, make software that is reliable and performant and not buggy. They will go on and on about how unwise and short-sighted it is to churn out buggy crap under deadlines that are too short to allow for property quality control. And, in a different market, they would be right. But in a market where the client wants cheap software quickly, and has a tolerance for bugs, the way the business wins is by churning out cheap buggy crap.

In other words: Agile.

Comment Re: Good riddance (Score 4, Interesting) 149

When I use AI to generate my code, I generally do it in small steps. I do all the design work myself and just break out the implementation for the AI, and I never give it too much work at once, for the very reasons you just complained about.

Its a bit more of an issue when I must code review work done by junior devs who literally did just try to tell the AI to do it all for them. That experience has been similar to what you are describing, for me at least. I am unsure if these devs are actually getting better at coding, or if we are moving towards a peculiar future in which the generation of senior devs who actually understand code well enough to make effective use of AI have all retired, leaving behind a generation of people who can only feed requirements to an AI and then flail when it doesn't work.

Comment Re:This is how (Score 5, Interesting) 285

It seems like the issue of AI hallucination is widely promulgated and widely known. I mean, this site has an overrepresentation of technicians who tend to think of highly esoteric tech information as common knowledge just because they work with it every day.....but I don't think this quirk of AI behavior is in that category.

And yet, people keep making this same mistake precisely where it matters. We get stories like this every other day. I have seen it at my own job, where my own boss who still has some semblance of technical talent was downplaying the risk of AI hallucination in a pipeline that would have the AI directly manipulating mission critical data prior to an import.

It is surreal how people want the AI hallucination problem to just stop being a problem the moment it is inconvenient for them. People who should know better let their wish for a reliable AI override their knowledge that AI is not reliable, and they just move forward with it.

I fear things are going to get worse, because we really seem to be failing to learn the obvious lesson here.

Comment Re:Cui Bono (Score 1) 85

Everyone acts in their own best interest.

Big Tech messaging about what kids should learn is designed to benefit Big Tech in some way. Any truth-value to their statements would be secondary.

The fact that a message comes from "Big Tech" should never be used to give it credence, but merely to determine who would benefit. Evaluation of benefits to anyone else must be done independently.

Comment Re:How specifically could AI kill all humans? (Score 1) 133

We might create a powerful AI that manages to acquire control over weaponized robots, and send them out to do the job.

But humans are so frightened of this that anything we might call "warbot" or "killerOS" or whatever will be dead on arrival. It would require a different marketing strategy.

Someone will sneak it under the radar by making it sound like some sort of positive, joyful AI operating system. Maybe we would call it something like....

Joyful OS.....
HappyOS....

Or maybe...

GLaDOS........

Comment Re:As expected (Score 3, Insightful) 128

"Staying ahead of everyone else is hard. It costs a lot of money, and we don't have effective monetization in place yet. So, we want everyone else to slow down so it will be easy for us to maintain our position of top dog while we figure out how to become profitable."

That's what I took away from the call for a slowdown, anyway.

Comment Re:Train robots to play doom (Score 4, Insightful) 51

I think it is funny that the tech community tends to take a very dim view of AI drones and other weaponization of artificial intelligence, and yet, the very instant we get our hands on something that we can train to play doom, we do.

"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
  Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

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