Thread: Artificial Intelligence

Originally Posted by grandpamac

Greetings @Moa Hunter and all,
I think that the quote sums up things well. When we abandon critical thinking we give up control of our destiny to an extent. The world seems awash with groups blindly following the baseless utterings of their favoured leaders (I am not picking on any one person here). Perhaps like @Gamehunter it is just me having been born in 1949.
Regards Grandpamac.

hark -the sage wisdom of age born of education in the university of life.

He left out the bit where his father took to him with a length of wood for his naughtiness

I'm guessing he only ever painted one cow once then.

Which is half of whats wrong in the world today - no consequences for your own actions. Bring back that father with his piece of wood .....

Originally Posted by winchesterM69A

......no consequences for your own actions. Bring back that father with his piece of wood .....

I agree with the need for consequences but society has moved from the corporal punishment of children. I was brought up in a family where a good skelp administered at the appropriate time taught us a lesson. However, there are now too many adults in NZ (and around the world) who do not know how to do this. When I read that another child has been killed by an adult who is supposed to be protecting and nurturing them it sickens me to the bone. When stats show that ELEVEN percent of homicide victims in NZ are children under 5 (I can't find the numbers on kids that survived horrendous hidings) I understand why there is such a strong move way from this kind of punishment. It takes more thought and imagination but there are other ways to teach kids the consequences of their behaviour.

Originally Posted by Andygr

I agree with the need for consequences but society has moved from the corporal punishment of children. I was brought up in a family where a good skelp administered at the appropriate time taught us a lesson. However, there are now too many adults in NZ (and around the world) who do not know how to do this. When I read that another child has been killed by an adult who is supposed to be protecting and nurturing them it sickens me to the bone. When stats show that ELEVEN percent of homicide victims in NZ are children under 5 (I can't find the numbers on kids that survived horrendous hidings) I understand why there is such a strong move way from this kind of punishment. It takes more thought and imagination but there are other ways to teach kids the consequences of their behaviour.

Seems that it has been all down hill since the abolishion of corporal punishment in schools. Nothing like being sent to the Discipline Master to make you reconsider your actions

Originally Posted by Moa Hunter

Frank Herbert writing in 1965 wrote in Dune:

“Men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted the men with machines to enslave them”

Those who beat their swords into ploughshares will plough for those who don't. There is very little new under the sun.

Theres a huge differance between a whack administered at the time of the indescretion , to beating a wee kid till its dead.
You need to look at the people who kill children and ask yourself why are they like that - before you afflict society with do-gooder rules that make real life more difficult.

Originally Posted by winchesterM69A

Theres a huge differance between a whack administered at the time of the indescretion , to beating a wee kid till its dead.
You need to look at the people who kill children and ask yourself why are they like that - before you afflict society with do-gooder rules that make real life more difficult.

Bad cases make for bad law.

Originally Posted by winchesterM69A

Theres a huge differance between a whack administered at the time of the indescretion , to beating a wee kid till its dead.
You need to look at the people who kill children and ask yourself why are they like that - before you afflict society with do-gooder rules that make real life more difficult.

Agreed, I hate the idea of making the rules for many based on the actions of the few. Unfortunately those who make the rules tend to be off in their ivory towers, set apart from the real life of the majority of us.

@Micky Duck

The future we envisioned never included machines doing art, writing essays and making music, while humans slog at menial jobs just to make ends meet.

Originally Posted by Bol Tackshin

The future we envisioned never included machines doing art, writing essays and making music, while humans slog at menial jobs just to make ends meet.

1984 described humans being deliberately bred with low IQ for menial work while the Alpha's enjoyed the perks. I can't remember when that was written but it does not take much effort to see in our world today, perhaps without the selective breeding.
GPM.

FYI, I have been studying AI (ie Machine Learning) for the past year or so. It has gone from something that only 'geeks like myself' were interested in and knew much about, into something that most people have now heard of (eg Chat-GPT) since references to AI exploded in the mainstream news media.

I have a few thoughts about AI, which might partially allay some fears.

I wouldn't get too freaked out about AI just yet, as AI systems do not have an inherent ability to truly think, reason or to be contextually aware of the world that we live in. They are essentially a large mathematical model that has been trained on a large amount of training (example) data, and once trained they are basically able to mathematically guess/interpolate/extrapolate how to behave or act in some unknown future situation.

A valid concern is there is definitely potential for some *repetitive aspects* of some jobs to be carried out by an AI system, which is obviously a real concern for society as a company might not need to employ quite as many people as they used to. This will probably increase as time goes on and as the systems get better. However, you still need a human involved in the process somewhere as AI systems can get things horribly wrong at times (example below). At some stage you will need to interact with other humans and you will also need to make decisions based on a wide variety of contextual information. Remember, AI systems do not fundamentally understand the world we live in, they are just really sophisticated BullS**ters.

If an AI system encounters a situation well outside what it was trained on, it will typically just 'hallucinate' an output result. There are some well publicised examples of this recently, where a lawyer submitted to a court some legal document which he used Chat-GPT to write, instead of bothering to do it himself. The document looked ok and referenced a number of legitimate looking prior legal cases. However when others went to lookup these prior legal cases, no-one could find any reference to them whatsoever. Chat-GPT basically just made them up. Having seen many references to a legal prior case in it's training data Chat-GPT knew roughly how to generate a reasonably plausible sounding prior case, but it had no true awareness of them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769

I like to think of AI (Machine Learning) as both more amazing and capable than you could have thought possible a few years ago, and at the same time, way dummer than it might appear on the surface.

Like any technology, there are going to be lots of really good (useful for society) uses for it, and a lot of really bad uses of it. AI systems can be used to 'double check' cancer scans to pickup and highlight cancer growths than a doctor missed (something that probably happened to my Dad). Self driving cars could enable someone to move around who has some sort of illness or disability (eg poor eyesight) that prevents them from being able to drive. Likewise I am sure militaries the world over are in the process of creating mechanised weapons that identify targets and can automatically pull the trigger on anything that is flagged as being on the opposing side. Scary stuff.

In summary, I do think there will be some negative disruption to society from AI, but likewise there is also potential for real gains for society. In many ways AI is a bit like a firearm. Firearms are neither good nor bad. What matters is the person behind the trigger and the use to which it is put.

Originally Posted by grandpamac

1984 described humans being deliberately bred with low IQ for menial work while the Alpha's enjoyed the perks. I can't remember when that was written but it does not take much effort to see in our world today, perhaps without the selective breeding.
GPM.

Interesting and as it turns out way ahead of his time. We all know him as George Orwell.


Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic.[1] His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.[2]

Orwell produced literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Born in India, Blair was raised and educated in England from when he was one year old. After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, before returning to Suffolk, England, where he began his writing career as George Orwell—a name inspired by a favourite location, the River Orwell. He lived from occasional pieces of journalism, and also worked as a teacher or bookseller whilst living in London. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, his success as a writer grew and his first books were published. He was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, leading to his first period of ill health on return to England. During the Second World War he worked as a journalist and, between 1941 and 1943, for the BBC. The 1945 publication of Animal Farm led to fame during his lifetime. During the final years of his life he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and moved between Jura in Scotland and London. It was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime".[3][4] In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[5]

Whilst it might seem like a ways off, our computing/processing power increases al.ost exponentially. It doubles every couple of years.
Now if they do start to work out algoriths for AI that can start working it out on its own or even if it is implemented after being developed by what ever supercomputer is available, then it could be problematic

Originally Posted by 7mm Rem Mag

It's either the begining of the end or it could be the end of the begining

But, the fact is there, the father of John Connor....you know I mean?