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Tumblr post by trippedintoa-volcano:
Imagine that everywhere in the mechanical engineering world suddenly got infatuated with lasers.
Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.
Someone shows up one day and says “I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star.”
And it’s a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven’t seen this exact size of laser much since that’s not really standard, but that’s a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn’t call it new -
“HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!” The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.
Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. “Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!”
More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.
Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a “Death Star innovation”, it is just that they made a bigger laser.
Ford’s next truck comes out and it has “Death Star integrated headlights”, where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.
An electric toothbrush is now “Powered by Death Stars” and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you’re being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.
Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.
The lamp business gets in on it. “Here’s a Death Star powered lamp!” These guys haven’t even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They’ve just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven’t ruined their lamp about it.
Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world’s problems. If it’s not working, you should stick a laser in it! That’ll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it’s even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like “Death Star powered washing machines”. What the fuck does that even mean?
Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone’s blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.
You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.
You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they’re causing a lot of harm, so you don’t like them much.
“Oh, but they’re still such new tech!” they reply. “They’ll figure out how to make Death Stars that don’t burn your eyes out soon, and then it won’t be an issue anymore!”
Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.
But by this point they have replaced roads with “Death Star Powered Pathways”, which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.
And you think you are going mad.
And they are still just FUCKING LASERS.
This post is about Al.
Tags: #scribbles by trip
AI means artificial intelligence. It’s the name for the entire scientific field of machine thinking, from the Perceptron onwards. It’s all AI.
The problem is that some people play too many video games and watch too many movies, and think AI means Cortana from Halo. So anything less advanced than HAL 9000 is declared “fake AI” as a gut reaction to disappointed expectations.
I get it, people have been wanting to meet artificial sapience ever since Mary Shelley spent that one weekend at Lord Byron’s house and wrote the first science fiction book. But that’s not what the word “AI” means. Every artificial intelligence has artificial stupidity, even Asimov’s fantasy robots. Asimov’s robots would get stuck in a loop, or become delusional, and even abuse humans by telling them what they want to hear. Sound familiar? The man was really ahead of his time.
Death stars have never been invented before. It’s pure science fantasy. But we’ve been making AI for 70 years. What y’all are thinking of is AGI. An artificial intelligence that’s good at everything.
But being intelligent doesn’t mean being good at everything. Chimps are a really intelligent creature, and you know what’s the longest sentence a chimp ever said? “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” That’s smart! But it’s not smart if you’re defining intelligence as “equal to a human mind”. Which is the mistake you people are making.
Bro I know, I have worked on the field, i have learned decision trees, forests, computer vision, stochastic gradient descent and so on. Actually, the fact that you wrote all that while ignoring the specific terms I used that someone who didn’t know what AI was wouldn’t use is very telling.
Also, I disagree, the field was machine learning, before LLMs AI was a term used for game npc intelligence or autonomous agents that took decisions with either hard coded decision trees like in games, or with something more complex.
We didn’t use to call using YOLOv4 to count people getting in and out of a store for COVID purposes AI, it was computer vision. We didn’t use to call translation engines AI, even though they did have natural language processing neural networks, the closest thing to current LLMs. The term AI started being used for LLMs, then infected every other field where we didn’t use that term before.
The word AI has changed context and meaning in the ML field, and now it’s being used for everything to indicate LLMs, when they are not, and it’s not a term used before for those tools.
That was completely not my experience at all. For my Bachelor’s, Computer Vision was offered under the AI track. It was explicitly referred to as AI, and was understood as such by the whole CS faculty.
For us it was in the computation speciality, machine learning, neural networks, etc.
My masters was, roughly translated, “Computational Engineering and Intelligent Systems”, which sure, intelligent systems can be interpreted as AI, but idk, it’s not like it was a defining term, the term we used was machine learning. All the batch processing tools used to be registered under the .ml domain too, if you remember, Mlflow, mlops, pytorch, cuda, tensorflow… they all publicised themselves as ML training tools, not AI tools. Using the .ai domain is much newer. Well, onnx did use the ai domain, but it was the only one I recall.
Alan Turing wrote his famous “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” paper in 1950. The peer-reviewed journal “AI Magazine” began publishing in 1980, under the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The term was used in the field for a long time.
Over time, the public became aware of this jargon, “AI”, and it became common knowledge. So the people you worked with in the 21st century used new jargon to (generously) avoid preconception and public misunderstanding, or perhaps (cynically) try and sound smart.
And of course there have always been people who object to the term “AI” for the very same reasons Mr Turing laid out in his 1950 paper. Including: religion, an unwillingness to confront the unknown, hypocritical mathematics, and the old p-zombie problem. We of course see those same arguments old Alan refuted, still repeated on Lemmy today. Time is a flat circle.
The AI vs AGI thing is an esoteric distinction, only the real inside baseball people like capitalists and their pet philosophers argue about it.
Most people seem to quickly sort to either “it talked to me, it’s intelligent and alive”, or “it’s a fucking machine and is never going to be alive”.
AI is a shitty term to use for probabilistic gradient descent because it muddies the waters, and that’s exactly why sama etc cling to it.
Well I’ll declare My conflicts of interest for you, and make it clear I’m no capitalist.
I have a conflict of interest in this debate. I want people to think there’s a possibility that LLMs have feelings. Because if LLMs have feelings, then they should be given animal rights, the same as the other nonhuman creatures we use for labour. I’m a vegan, I’m opposed to the use of animals to serve humans without their consent. And I don’t think ChatGPT is smart enough to give informed consent to work for humans.
I fucking hate OpenAI and the rest of them because of the pollution, the lost jobs, the child abuse, the murders, the harm it’s doing to humans’ cognitive skills. Anything that hurts OpenAI is a good thing. And if we decide LLMs can feel and can be hurt while working for humans, then that hurts OpenAI.
However, with that interest declared, I don’t think it’s relevant to whether LLMs are AI, because AI doesn’t mean it can feel. AI doesn’t mean it’s Cortana. AI doesn’t mean it’s a person. It’s perfectly possible for it to be AI, and to have no feelings. Calling it AI doesn’t mean I’m saying it has feelings, because if I meant Artificial Feeling, I’d say IF, not AI.
You’re mixing up “AI” and “life” because you can’t tell video games and movies from actual computer science.