Random Thought Thread

vkp78 said:
So the "like" button in the "For sale" section disappeared sometime on Wednesday?
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Yes, throughout the "Exchange"...and not a moment too soon...as we (supers) were spending an inordinate amount of time putting out fires generated by members being chapped about other members posting inappropriate reactions / emojis in their sale threads. (And sometimes it was third parties also reporting the issue.)

Some may find it inconvenient, but it was brought about by the behavior of their fellow members and ultimately Spark removed the option.
 
Everyone seems to be freaked out about AI. I do not get it. Musk and Wozniak are technicallly smart and gozillionaires, but they seem dumb to me in all this grave concern about AI. It reminds me of when Bill Gates called the Internet a fad back in the mid 90s. If you want some laughs, go back and read "Future Shock" or even "An Inconvenient Truth." The only person I know who ever consistently successfullly predicted the future was Biff Tannen.

Are you afraid of AI? Can anyone articulate a specific fear about some horror show that AI is supposed to cause?
 
The Amazing Virginian said:
Are you afraid of AI?
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For whatever it is worth, I've worked in software engineering and technical operations since before the web existed, mostly for internet startups.

"AI" in general is going to change a lot of things. It is already putting commercial illustrators out of work, lawyers are both fascinated and a bit apprehensive, and in my field, programmers are beginning to figure out how to use it as assistive tech. There are a lot of productivity angles, and that means jobs will be changing and lost, this time mostly in white-collar fields.

I'm not afraid of it overall. I think insanely wealthy folks like Musk are more concerned about shifting power relations that may not favor them than gray-goo scenarios. But I also don't think the capabilities are entirely benign - I do think it is going to cause a lot of problems.

Scammers are also figuring out how to use it, and fluent, persuasive robots that never get tired are going to make them a lot of money. There will be a lot of political and social chaos - photos and video are very close to no longer being "proof" of anything, but there will be a messy period while humans figure out what that means. And so on. Longer term, education is going to change a lot - robot instructors are actually close to being a reality. (I personally have started asking GPT3 questions when I'm learning something new - you have to know enough about the topic to know when the robot is hallucinating nonsense at you, but it is actually extremely useful as a sidekick-tutor.)

It is a big deal. And we can't see all the implications yet. And not all of them are going to be positive. But I don't see it as a serious threat in the same way extremely rich and powerful people do.
 
Random thought:

The stupid autocorrect on this S22 Ultra is annoying me more and more. I now need to review things before posting, because I've confirmed that the Artificial Idiocy built into the S22's autocorrect HAS been replacing correctly spelled words with what it 'thinks' would be better.

How does it not recognize the word 'knob', and think the sentence, "Turn the know clockwise", makes any kind of sense? It replaced the correctly spelled 'knob' TWICE with 'know'.

It's also completely idiotic in how it chooses to correct mistyped words. For example, if I mistype the first letter in a 9 letter word, instead of looking at the other 8 letters and figuring out that there's a word that's only off by 1 letter (the first letter in the word), it instead, randomly picks a word that starts with the first 2 typed letters (including the mistyped first letter), and replaces the entire word with something that requires changing 4 or more letters, and even changing the number of letters. (It also randomly changes the 's' and 'd' that I'd correctly typed, eg. turning 'typed' into 'types' or vice versa for present/past tense).

My old S8, which is years older, never did any of this stupid shit 🤬
 
Murphjd25 said:
I think the real question is, WHY do we need AI? Why? I don’t get it.
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I'll give two quick examples, although AI and machine learning is gaining popularity in science quickly.
1) let's say you want to manufacture a new drug as cheaply as possible. The molecule could be complicated and chemists have to think about a sequence of reactions that get you there efficiently from simpler starting molecules. The old way is to ask the oldest guy with the dirtiest lab coat. Now with AI assisted synthesis, the computer can work backwards using as much data about chemistry as can be crammed into it, and hopefully suggest a scheme that someone didn't think of. Ideally it can find multiple methods and you can pick the cheapest or most convenient.

2) you want a new semiconductor material with specific electronic properties. To make and test each of billions of possibilities is slow and expensive, so you try screening many of them using modeling to find a few good candidates to actually make. People feed all the existing data into machine learning models and hope that some behavior relationship that they didn't notice pops out. That's the hope anyway. There are lots of open challenges.
 
There are a lot of intelligent and experienced people who have developed a lot of very valuable skill sets that may become unuseful or unvaluable.


Hell, I have spent a lot of time becoming a pretty good machinist. A lot of that stems from a deep understanding of machining strategy and the ability to operate the CAD cam tools to create the machine motions that I want.

There is a lot more to it than most people realize and a lot of the excellence that we achieve here is uncommon for good reason.

A good artificial intelligence could look at a machine's capabilities, a setup, the materials and cutters available, and generate all the toolpaths needed to successfully and efficiently manufacture geometry in a way that would require a highly skilled and experienced machine programmer or machinist.

That will probably be good for the world as a whole, because the cost of complex machined goods would come down and the availability of complex machining operations could be applied to mundane things that typically wouldn't justify it

But those people who spent years and years becoming experts at their craft may feel a little sad to see the one thing that made them special (and well fed) become a $5 smartphone app.
 
I recall reading an account of people discussing the use of excavators in the construction of the Panama canal.

The argument was that the use of the machines would put a lot of people out of work. People that were digging the canal with shovels.

Someone pointed out the absurdity of this argument by stating that the best thing to do would be to take away the shovels and have them dig it with spoons.

The future is coming and improvements in productivity are, overall, a good thing. But change of such a dramatic nature frequently make some people rich and other people poor.

The rate of change in recent human history is staggering and has probably outpaced our ability to comfortably evolve.

We live in interesting times.
 
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