The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
So many people have spent a lot of energy dehumanizing others on the basis of their “contribution to society”. Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc. I can only hope that AI can force people to rethink whether their value is tied to their work output or not.
It goes beyond that. There is inherent classism in this, because it implies that you do not question the value of wealthy people who put in relatively little actual work output due to their privileged position. Take for example the unemployed person in your example who might have literally been 100 times more productive in their career solving substantive problems than a VC who lucked out on their startup and has been cruising on a few boards for ten years.
see what you don't understand is that the owning class actually bring crucial long term strategic vision. i wonder though: we always talk of ai replacing the working class, but wouldn't it be more economical for ai to provide that long term strategic thinking? i'm sure the operating costs for ai would be way less than the operating costs of billionaires. everyone would be better off.
if we optimize the billionaire class everyone's better off, like i said. of course we can go orange catholic, but my comment was premised on how we might apply ai.
The billionaire class don't want universal childcare, they don't want medicare for all, they don't want a public jobs program, they don't want a welfare state, and they sure as fuck don't want to be told no.
I'm failing to see how caring about billionaires is suppose to help everyone else. The current American society, via neoliberal economics, is already optimized to help the billionaires (hence why they extract all the wealth and why income inequality is at its highest in the US since ever).
How do you figure that "the billionaire class" doesnt want those policies? Plenty of examples of them supporting those policies. Seems like the opposition is more to the tax hike they know is coming along side it but even then we still see billionaires supporting those policies.
> Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc.
Fucking hell, there are so many bullshit jobs. I'm doing one of them. I'm sure a homeless person having a few heartfelt conversations per day because he has the time and is open to it is giving more value to society than me right now.
Agreed, TFA is lamenting the loss of a golden age that never existed. I was there. IE6-only plain JS was replaced by buggy jQuery which was replaced by unmaintainable Angular SPAs which was replaced by monstrous React codebases.
On the other hand: In terms of building software using agents I wouldn't call developers students, specifically when it comes to letting AI write the code, but its a similar concept: Good developers know how to architect and guide the coding agent, bad ones keep asking it to do the work they don't understand, or even if they do understand it, they don't take the time to stop and architect the problem. I've had amazing output from Claude Code, but apparently a lot of devs feel it is inadequate, some people it seems want the AI to code it perfectly in one shot, I go back and tell it what to fix, to add tests, to not change existing tests, etc.
Your comment captures the most objectionable mentality behind AI zealotry so well. So much display of hubris, no appreciation of science, engineering, art, or anything at all.
Agreed. Like you, I went from hand-written cgi-bin html to jquery to angular v1 to React. I will willingly reach for React as a tool - it does what I want to do.
I remember in 1999 being so psyched about changing a button image on mouseover. Went hard on jquery, little bit of angular and bootstrap. React was big for me because it’s one way data binding solved the kinds of bugs I had spent years dealing with. Vue svelte and others are cool but they are all very similar to me. I always encourage people to work at first without any framework because then you gain an appreciation for why these things exist (or you stay vanilla and constantly blog about it)
However the TFA doesn't make clear that this: "It's long been accepted that the smoother the surface, the lower the aerodynamic drag. That turns out not always to be the case" was already known to NOT always be the case (e.g. in golf balls).
This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.
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