That's news to me. Bias is always possible in a person, and that may result in poor observations, the accuracy of which is the lifeblood of science.

What's impossible is for a body of science, writ large over years and multiple experiments, to exhibit bias. It takes a lot of science to remove bias by a process. It takes a whole bunch of time to reach bias-free, settled science, however.

But scientists are biased as much as anyone else. I think he was either misquoted or misspoke. I believe "settled science" is what he's referring to.

Because that's not how language works?

Decimate no longer means "kill one out of ten men." It means to mostly destroy something. Yet it used to mean cut down 10% of something.

That's why everyone's jumping on it. If you use language this way, you are not communicating with the living language. You're communicating with your own preferred language and others will not understand.

TL;DR: It doesn't matter that you "like" that a word means something that it doesn't actually mean.

Yeah. And the word "beard" used to mean a joke. I'll laugh at your facial hair if you have some.

Just because a word used to mean something doesn't indicate anything about what it means now. Put down the OED. Etymology only tells you where it came from, not what it is. There's nothing wrong with your definition, of course. It's simply archaic and confusing.

Honestly, I'm gonna go with the scientific method is really good at disproving the large amount of bunk that was generated over millennia, to weed out a few good ideas. The first few hundred years of the scientific revolution was a massive review of every idea we thought was true. It was also related to things that were easily observable.

But we've exhausted that pool of ideas. Without novel ideas, science flounders.

Debunkers don't tend to be creative thinkers. Data collectors don't need to be either. Science needs to wheel around from its original, highly successful method of discarding bad ideas. You can't test what you haven't thought of yet, and what's left to be thought of is more and more esoteric and nuanced. We need a more generative process. Inductive processes are more important than deductive ones now.

So science, in the near term, is going to be extremely wrong. A lot. Being right isn't a luxury for scientists any longer.

The low hanging fruit is gone. Being a scientist in this day and age is hard.

Honestly, most of the time the engineers go first, and then the scientists explain why it worked.

Applied science is pretty rare.

Sure, 60% of Americans use AI for search. Because the search engines default to it now. There is literally no way to turn it off. You Google something, you get "Gemni." They also stealth activated Gemni on Android phones as the standard "Assistant" and I had to jump through hoops to turn that off.

See here. Yeah, it's a year old but it's still true.

For Google, I almost always click on the "web" tab as soon as it generates the AI slop, so Google does what it used to do in the first place. The results are far more useful, and actually go to actual websites.

But guess what? I just "used" AI. Let me know what the figures are when they give us a CHOICE.

I'm now using the udm14 search addon for Firefox to append &udm=14 to my queries. It adds a search engine shortcut that Googles with an append.

If you were stupid to begin with, ChatGPT will help you look smarter, but you will still be stupid. Anything you produce with its aid will look nice on first look, but lack depth and accuracy.

If you are intelligent, ChatGPT is a shortcut, but you know you have to do your own work in the end. It becomes a tradeoff of how much boilerplate nonsense you need to include.

ChatGPT is a tool. This always happens with new tools. Plato thought writing affected memory and reasoning ability.

Why is this still a thing? FFS. A stack overflow? Why. Is. This. Still. A. THING?!

Could we cut it out with the C# already? Computers are powerful enough that you no longer need that sort of latitude.

I just got mod points, and looked in on responses, and I couldn't agree more too.

I almost want to delete the OP and mod that one up.

The thing here is that you're burning coal for the purpose of not having to burn coal again. You'd have to have an attention span of a gnat to not see that far ahead.

We can't go straight to zero emissions guys. There's gonna be a transition. This feels like clickbait, lacks long-term thinking, and is not a reasonable argument.

What are you on about? I've used Thunderbird since version 2. There was some update that broke extensions, but they literally haven't broken in years.

If this is an exploit in the anti-cheat driver, that's a far more serious matter.

I hope it's a userspace hack.

AGI is not jargon. It's to distinguish an important milestone from the original term, "AI," that has become a marketing gimmick as opposed to the technical term.

It's kind of how European scholars have to distinguish liberalism from classical liberalism because US marketers ambiguated the original term.

None of this is AI, and LLM natural language prompting is a loser of an application.

There are lots of better uses for large scale pattern recognition, and once we get over how human a LLM actually sounds as a gimmick, we'll find actual uses for it, like detecting heart disease. It turns out patterned natural language output is fatally flawed in my opinion, but pattern recognition itself is game-changing.

That it actually fooled some people into believing it was "sentient" is the reason we're faffing about with this dead end tech niche that has no real appeal to anyone but fans of Microsoft Bob.

And you thought pop rocks and coke was a killer combination.

Imagine what would happen if you ate a laser, drank some diet coke, and had a mento. Pew Pew Pew!

Is China, an ancient society and the second most populous country on earth, in the same ballpark as the United States when it comes to the future of the human race? Could they even do it better? Aren't they some third-world country? When did this happen? Why are all of our scientists leaving, for that matter?

Humanity is advancing and it's not the USA. Stop the presses.

But... ZOMG! Is this actually a problem?

Only if you're an American. Honestly, I've got my popcorn out, because I'm not sure "beating" other nations to something closer to AGI is going to work out well for the country that invents it. It's 50/50 if it creates a new global hegemony, or wipes their culture off the face of the earth, imo. It's a race I don't want to win. At least not for nationalist purposes. I think application of what we're calling AI for national dominance might just backfire on those who use it.