The photo of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signing a woman’s chest in Taiwan will be the image of peak AI hype. More on that in the Disconnect Roundup, along with recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed!
@parismarx Thanks for this in general and in particular for the archive link to to that WSJ article. The analog to the fibre optic boom of the 90s is particularly apt. (Here we are in 2024 and last year we ditched AT&T's fiber to go back to a cable modem and it's absolutely plenty.)
So glad I came across @parismarx podcast Tech Won't Save Us. Highly recommended if you haven't come across it yet. Listened to this yesterday and embaressed myself doing fistpumps out in public - so many good points
What's going on is that Anthropic "prompt engineers" have redefined self-awareness to mean 'has contextual information.' That the system is using language then allows them to delude themselves into universalizing their definition.
Saw a similar problem in AI research in the 80s: researchers might define a "frame" holding contextual info, & when their program produced solutions that referenced the frame, construed that as a form of self-awareness. #AIHype#Claude
@pluralistic brilliantly clarifying our modern world for us, as usual:
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.
I've noticed an about-face on AI by the layer of management just under the layer under C-suite--the ones who actually have to answer for KPIs or for causing giant data leaks. They're now mostly trying to get the people above them to slow-walk AI stuff outside of a handful of things it was already doing before the hype train kicked off (like running the chat box). The hype cycle seems to have waned, and none of them want to be left holding the bag for the contrepeneurs.
Long before the current wave of #AIHype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"
@pluralistic I would argue that they have already turned AI into a Paperclip Maximizer.
Power-hungry and water-thirsty AI data centres are being built in a world that's in the middle of a climate crisis. Google is planning one in Uruguay, where potable water has been so scarce that salt water is being mixed in the tap water. And all that so we can generate corporate word salad and phishing scams at the touch of a button.