Artificial intelligence and the future

[GoCubsGo]

Ya know, I guess I'm missing the boat on the AI revolution.

My dealings with it in the service industry haven't been stellar, sometimes exceedingly frustrating.


Guess it's good for looking up recipes, but can anyone explain how it's really going to improve the quality of anyone's life?

I think I've had at least as good results dealing with AI than I've had speaking with Habib in India who also has a script to follow. I don't have all the answers to all the ways AI may affect our lives, but your question reminds me of myself when the early personal computers came out. I wanted one, and bought one, but remember saying numerous times that "once you have one, you can think of lots of stuff to do with it, but I don't see that it's really necessary to have one." That was back when it probably took longer to pay bills on Quicken than it would have just to write them out, but Quicken was sooooo cool.

You are right about Habib, but they're both fails.

Got my first PC back in the early 90's, I started a small business. Quickbooks was invaluable.

[O Really]

Related, I remember early cellphones. I loved mine - from flip to razr to Blackberry, yada, but I wasn't impressed by the ability to take pics. "I've got a nice camera, who needs their phone to take pictures"

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstor ... 41#image=1

[GoCubsGo]

Related, I remember early cellphones. I loved mine - from flip to razr to Blackberry, yada, but I wasn't impressed by the ability to take pics. "I've got a nice camera, who needs their phone to take pictures"

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstor ... 41#image=1

You, me and my cousin who was had a long career working for CTIA, the cellular telephone lobby in D.C.. As he said, there's a reason I work here and not in development.


Got my first Blackberry in 2009 or so. I wasn't planning on it and let myself be sold by an ambitious sales critter, said it would change my life.

Yeah, not so much, good for getting emails though.

Amazing how primitive it was compared to today's smartphones which have changed our lives.

[O Really]

My first computer was a Leading Edge Model D, that was one of the first to have a "massive" 30 meg hard drive - or even to have a hard drive. Choice of amber or green text screen, dot-matrix printer. Then I got a Gateway 386 and thought it was magic. Next was a HP with a gig hard drive. I remember thinking that nobody could possibly need more storage nor needing any more speed than the lightning fast DSL. Point being, I have no idea what AI will bring us, but it's sure to be more than we currently imagine.

[O Really]

Good article, with reasonable-sounding perspective. Probably AI-written

The apocalypse isn’t near. Why? AI lacks judgment.

By Victor Menaldo

Artificial intelligence can increasingly perform a white-collar employee’s tasks. What it cannot do is vouch for the result.

Yet a new slasher genre, the jobs apocalypse, threatens that AI will displace the regular nine-to-five and claims to be scarier than your grandfather’s zombie flick. Executive interviews menacingly forebode that AI is about to make a lot of high-paying jobs obsolete. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, famously warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

Not to be outdone, executives at JPMorgan, Ford and Amazon (whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post) have forecasted leaner payrolls.

As with all good horror flicks, the fears fueling them are not baseless — “Jaws,” after all, drew on real-life shark attacks, and recent graduate unemployment has been running above 5%, against roughly 4% for all workers.

Worse still, early-career workers in the most AI-exposed fields — software development, customer service — have seen a 16% relative decline in employment since generative AI arrived.

But the doomsday case rests on flawed arithmetic: If AI can do 40% of a job’s tasks, then 40% of the work must go. But a job is not a to-do list of separable chores. Firms employ people for bundles of work held together by judgment, coordination, client trust and accountability. When a job’s tasks complement one another, automating the pieces does not reduce the job’s scope. It raises the value of the human work that remains.

When power looms automated much of weaving in the 19th century, they devastated many handloom weavers. But in the mechanized mills, the workers who learned to tend the new looms grew more valuable, not less.

They still had to tie the weaver’s knot, swap a spent shuttle in seconds, adjust the warp tension so the threads wouldn’t snap and mind several looms at once. The workers who mastered these skills earned more even as the looms multiplied and cloth grew cheap.

For all its fluency, AI is not an all-knowing mind that does your job for you or better than you. It is a prediction engine that has digested a vast share of human writing.

That gives this machine astonishing reach — and several crippling gaps. It cannot tell you how biased its sources are, cannot show its work in a way you can audit, and can sound just as confident when it invents a citation as when it reports a fact.

It is, in this sense, the near opposite of its closest ancestor, statistics, the tool that shows how much to trust a prediction. Statistics implies error bars; AI offers none.

Because AI cannot flag its own margins of error, an organization that deploys it widely can find itself operating in a fog of uncertainty — and that is where the true economic bottleneck emerges. When plausible-sounding output becomes cheap and instant, the premium shifts to the judgment required to tell whether a flawlessly formatted answer to a chatbot query is a breakthrough, a dead end or a hallucination.

The editor who can tell a sound argument from filler, the physician who flags a prescription for an impossible dose, the lawyer who knows the cited case does not exist — in a world flooded with plausible, confident, frequently wrong machine output, the premium rises for each.

A firm that fires the worker who can figure out whether to trust the output is automating away its quality control. It will look efficient for a quarter or two, until a well-formatted falsehood makes its way into a decision that matters.

Accountability does not transfer with the task: When a fabricated citation reaches a legal brief or a bad figure reaches an audit, the liability stays with the humans who signed off. A board cannot answer to a regulator with “the model said so.”

The error in the doomsday predictions is treating AI as a product that arrives and subtracts.

Because AI is a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the computer — not a one-off device, like a toaster — the economy will be rebuilt around it.

Electricity did not transform the factory merely by replacing steam power.

Its payoff came when production was reorganized around the new technology — small electric motors driving individual machines; flexible layouts; and reliable and safe power that workers could deploy across the production process.

The same is happening with AI. Someone has to fold these models into workflows; connect them to existing systems; decide which judgments they may touch and review the ones they do; and retrain staff and clean up when they fail.

The transition won’t be painless. The entry-level squeeze is real, and firms that mistake automation for strategy will do real damage on the way to improving.

But the answer to a tool that is fluent, fast and frequently wrong is not to chase an AI-proof major or let the machine do the thinking.

It is to become the person who knows when the machine has made an error, when it can be made better and when its output is worth putting your name on. In that, AI is like every powerful tool before it — the worker who can master it is worth more, not less. It has only raised the price of judgment.

Menaldo, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, wrote this for The Washington Post.

[Vrede too]

Good article, with reasonable-sounding perspective. Probably AI-written

The apocalypse isn’t near. Why? AI lacks judgment.

By Victor Menaldo

I'm dubious.

The resistance to Skynet is mounting:
Poll Finds Overwhelming Majority Disgusted by Trump’s Relationship With AI Industry, Saying He’s Using the Tech to Tear Down Democracy

[Vrede too]

Judgement Day is nigh.

Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses


A graphic showing one of the AI designed bacteriophage viruses made in the laboratory

... But concerns have already been raised that the same technology could be used maliciously to create new diseases.

In a commentary accompanying the publication in the journal Science, Dr Thomas Inglesby and Dr Moritz Hanke from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University wrote that the findings raise "urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions".

They said it was no longer a question of "whether generative viral genome design will exist" but whether it can be used without "enabling serious harm".

For example, they said new viruses with the potential to cause disease "should not be pursued"....

All it will take is one bad actor with a few million dollars to cause the next pandemic. No need to believe me:

The doomsday threat we’re ignoring



... Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you're infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco.

… And I didn't even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

... You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

AI

... Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don't hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

We're doomed.

[Vrede too]

Not that I use Gmail but . . .


Everyone Using Gmail Must Turn This OFF Immediately!

I can't find that Yahoo Mail has AI reading my email, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

[Vrede too]

You, me and my cousin who was had a long career working for CTIA, the cellular telephone lobby in D.C.. As he said, there's a reason I work here and not in development.


Got my first Blackberry in 2009 or so. I wasn't planning on it and let myself be sold by an ambitious sales critter, said it would change my life.

Yeah, not so much, good for getting emails though.

Amazing how primitive it was compared to today's smartphones which have changed our lives.

They're testing our defenses:


Delivery robots slam into Chicago bus shelters, cause damage

Delivery Robots Swarm Lincoln Park Sidewalk In Viral Video As Pushback Grows
A Lincoln Park resident’s video showing more than a dozen delivery robots clustered on Clark Street has drawn more than 300,000 views.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dct3eKipij0/


Pause the Sidewalk-Robot Program – Chicago Petition
I signed.

[GoCubsGo]

They're testing our defenses:

Why I'm not getting into a Waymo any time soon.

I'm gonna sign.

Edit: used one of old Chicago zip codes.

[Vrede too]

I'm gonna sign.

Edit: used one of old Chicago zip codes.

I just picked the most populous one.

[GoCubsGo]

I'm gonna sign.

Edit: used one of old Chicago zip codes.

I just picked the most populous one.

Used to live in the Lincoln Park/Depaul area, right in the heart of the messages.

As an aside, all three walk up apartments i used to live in have been torn down for massive SFR's.

[Vrede too]

As an aside, all three walk up apartments I used to live in have been torn down for massive SFR's.

Single-family rentals?

[GoCubsGo]

As an aside, all three walk up apartments I used to live in have been torn down for massive SFR's.

Single-family rentals?

Single family residential.

[Vrede too]

As an aside, all three walk up apartments I used to live in have been torn down for massive SFR's.

Single-family rentals?

Single family residential.

Ah, thanks, Wiki let me down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SFR_(disambiguation)

Is that irritating?


AI "model" with an entire life and 13K+ followers :
Sienna Blake ‘Caught Red-Handed’ With Croissant While Braless In Her Car

Another one :
Ava Starz Lifting Braless Shirt Shocks SpongeBob SquarePants
300,000 followers

Reddit:
Thoughts on AI models on Instagram? Is it a scam or the new normal?

Both.

[Vrede too]

If anyone should know . . .

'Gambling with our lives': AI researcher quits Anthropic

An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.

Jacob Coxon, 27, spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach.

Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.

"Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon said on Tuesday.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he said in a post on X.

"This is not a marketing stunt," he added.

Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI's capabilities exceed human intelligence.

Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger backed up Coxon on X.

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" he said, adding that he estimated that risk at more than 10 percent over the next decade.

... In February, Anthropic removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt the development of its models if it failed to control their risks.

... At the end of July, more than 1,000 tech industry employees, including Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.

... On Sunday, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, called for "extreme caution."

"International coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world," he said in a blog post.

AI models are not regulated by federal law in the United States.

In September, Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Representative Greg Casar introduced a bill seeking to suspend AI development until a federal regulator is created.

It would be good to be older.

[O Really]

I haven't read a lot on this - what are the theories on exactly how AI will kill us all? Set off nukes? Cut off food supplies? Shut down all utilities? And who benefits?

[Vrede too]

I haven't read a lot on this - what are the theories on exactly how AI will kill us all? Set off nukes? Cut off food supplies? Shut down all utilities? And who benefits?

Probably not nukes - too much AI infrastructure destroyed.
Food manipulation sounds possible.
Utility cutoffs would have to be targeted so that AI retained power.
Pathogen release?

ChatGPT ( ) says:

AI wiping out humanity isn't inevitable, but there are several serious hypothetical pathways researchers worry about:

Loss of control: A sufficiently capable AI could pursue a goal in ways its creators didn't anticipate. If it could copy itself, acquire resources, or interfere with attempts to shut it down, containing it could become extremely difficult.

Human dependence: AI systems could become embedded in infrastructure—finance, communications, energy, transportation, military systems, etc. A major failure or coordinated misuse could cascade across society.

AI-enabled conflict: Governments or groups could use increasingly capable AI for cyberattacks, autonomous weapons, propaganda, or strategic decision-making, potentially escalating conflicts faster than humans can react.

Biological or chemical misuse: Advanced AI could lower barriers to designing dangerous biological agents or other harmful technologies. The AI wouldn't necessarily need to act autonomously; humans could misuse its capabilities.

Economic and political destabilization: Extremely capable AI could rapidly disrupt employment, institutions, and information ecosystems, potentially contributing to severe social instability.

Super AI would be able to utilize various strategies and adjust on the fly.

Who benefits?

Unintended optimization: The classic concern is not that an AI "hates" humans, but that it optimizes some objective that conflicts with human survival. A system doesn't need human-like emotions or intentions for this to happen.

We are inefficient. I think this was one or more of the Star Trek plot lines.

The important distinction is between plausible risks and science-fiction certainty. Nobody currently knows whether an AI system capable of causing human extinction will ever exist, much less exactly how such a scenario would unfold. A lot of AI-safety research is specifically aimed at making sure increasingly capable systems remain controllable and aligned with human interests.

Of course AI would say that.

[supesalemgr2]

I haven't read a lot on this - what are the theories on exactly how AI will kill us all? Set off nukes? Cut off food supplies? Shut down all utilities? And who benefits?

How dare you ask a logical question with all the hand wringing going on concerning this subject?

[Whack9]

I haven't read a lot on this - what are the theories on exactly how AI will kill us all? Set off nukes? Cut off food supplies? Shut down all utilities? And who benefits?

Supposing that AGI can actually be achieved, a massive societal change unlike anything we've ever seen will unfold.

AGI means AI systems will be able to reason at or above the level of a human. At that point, what's even the need for most of humanity? Any professional service requiring years of education is now obsolete. You have a machine that can reason and think at minimum at the level of any human that requires no respite, no education, has no emotional needs, and can "think" and work and reason 24/7 far beyond the capabilities of any person.

It's all still theoretical at the moment though. But given the how quickly things are progressing you never know. But what's not theoretical is that AI companies are in fact actively working towards archiving AGI. That's the goal.

AGI aside, what Vrede posted.

As for as who benefits in this scenario, a small select few at the top. Listen to some of the stuff these AI execs spew. They're giddy about these prospects.