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Comment Google's AI does not impress. (Score 1) 82

When I test the different AI systems, Google's AI system loses track of complex problems incredibly quickly. It's great on simple stuff, but for complex stuff, it's useless.

Unfortunately.... advice, overviews, etc, are very very complex problems indeed, which means that you're hitting the weakspot of their system.

Comment Re:There ARE corporate entities that force chrome (Score 1) 59

Same happens where I work. They default everything to Chrome but allow you to use Firefox and a couple of others as well. I just restrict my use of Chrome to the corporate intraweb stuff (training, help desk, etc). Overall, it's laziness of design of those intraweb sites... they force the developers to use one methodology over another instead of building things to a browser-agnostic standard.

Comment Re:Billionares Using Our Resources to Replace Peop (Score 1) 41

I've designed a few machines - some rather more insane than others - in meticulous detail using AI. What I have not done, so far, is get an engineer to review the designs to see if any of them can be turned into something that would be usable. My suspicion is that a few might be made workable, but that has to be verified.

Having said that, producing the design probably took a significant amount of compute power and a significant amount of water. If I'd fermented that same quantity of water and provided wine to an engineering team that cost the same as the computing resources consumed, I'd probably have better designs.But, that too, is unverified. As before, it's perfectly verifiable, it just hasn't been so far.

If an engineer looks at the design and dies laughing, then I'm probably liable for funeral costs but at least there would be absolutely no question as to how good AI is at challenging engineering concepts. On the other hand, if they pause and say that there's actually a neat idea in a few of the concepts, then it becomes a question of how much of that was ideas I put in and how much is stuff the AI actually put together. Again, though, we'd have a metric.

That, to me, is the crux. It's all fine and well arguing over whether AI is any good or not (and, tbh, I would say that my feeling is that you're absolutely right), but this should be definitively measured and quantified, not assumed. There may be far better benchmarks than the designs I have - I'm good but I'm not one of the greats, so the odds of someone coming up with better measures seems high. But we're not seeing those, we're just seeing toy tests by journalists and that's not a good measure of real-world usability.

If no such benchmark values actually appear, then I think it's fair to argue that it's because nobody believes any AI out there is going to do well at them.

(I can tell you now, Gemini won't. Gemini is next to useless -- but on the Other Side.)

Comment Marshall Brain's "Manna" depicts similar things (Score 3, Insightful) 113

Thanks for your insightful posts. I expanded on that idea in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

That said, indigenous ways were "the original affluent society" (even if such ways might have been harder to practice on a restricted reservation after extensive conflicts with Europeans wielding "Guns, Germs, and Steel"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The basis of Sahlins' argument is that hunter-gatherer societies are able to achieve affluence by desiring little and meeting those needs/desires with what is available to them. This he calls the "Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate"."

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