Invasive AI

Mary Stetler said:
As I understand it you will be able to tell AI what you want and it will produce it.
Today, with the internet, kids no longer know how to write cursive. They can't read or appreciate Declaration of Independence. Many can't read a road map. Or make change without a computer.
Modern tools save time and make things easier but we are slowly losing knowledge that might be important in a Carrington type Event.
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I'm on another forum with thousands of members Online at any given point in time...so it's busy. There are some number of folks who have used AI and/or use it at work. Opinions are mixed.

-Some folks have used it to help with their Annual Job Performance Assessments and claim that it's really really helped...it has come up with suggestions and angles they never would have thought of themselves.
-Some folks have used it for writing computer code and claim that it does an OK job, but you have to know what you're doing in order to QC (and plug) the holes it leaves.
-Other folks have used it for research and say the same thing that the programmers say...you better have some foundational knowledge because AI is not always accurate, nor is it factual.

There are varying opinions as to the jobs impact it's gonna have. Some folks think the general business admin/management types are in trouble. Other folks think that the biggest impact is gonna be when all this AI investment yields poor results and massive amounts of dollars have been wasted. There are lots of opinions that businesses are only investing in it because it's expected by their shareholders, not because they really have any goals for it.

The largest jobs impact right now is one that is feeding the Doomsday Machine: Businesses are laying off staff in order to fund AI, yet the assumption is that AI has replaced those jobs when it's not even been implemented yet. The MBAs and Bean Counters are driving much of this, with no idea what realistic expectations to have. All they see are massive payroll savings versus in initial investment with minimal maintenance. Lots of folks think a good percentage of the staff will get rehired, if the businesses survive what AI does ( or doesn't) do to/for them.

Regarding @Jacob Petersheim video...the Chinese may be creating fear so they can corner the AI market, but that does not necessarily mean that the AI market has value. The Chinese could be wrong on this.

Regarding The Surveillance State...lots of jurisdictions that implemented police body cams and Flock traffic-monitoring cameras are pulling back on them because they are showing that the bad actors are not victims, as these things were intended to prove. "Minorities disproportionally impacted" is causing the surveillance infrastructure to be dismantled in lots of places. Hoisted by their own petards, as it were.
 
Definitely good and bad to AI. I stay current on the technology that I need. I use very little. I need to make plane reservations which requires some knowlege. And someday they may make cash for clunkers mandatory. I have some faraday cloth. Two grandkids who speak technology.
I'm old. I have good soil, wood burners, a natural water source, an adult tricycle and a book on bike repair.
 
John Brunner said:
Regarding @Jacob Petersheim video...the Chinese may be creating fear so they can corner the AI market, but that does not necessarily mean that the AI market has value. The Chinese could be wrong on this.
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I wouldn't just assume that because the CCP is blowing wind up the skirts of the emotional chattering class about large datacenters that instead it must be a good thing.

However with the same source and media spiderweb that brings us Code Pink, Antifa, No Kings, BLM, and on and on... well it sure does make me wonder.

At the very least the hyped up alarmist "facts" and warnings should be more closely examined. But the chattering class is more than a little bit of a chickenyard ba-bawking like mad at each other about hawk attacks when some bratty kid is just flying a kite over them to cast a shadow. Tickling the confirmation bias is a well-worn tool in the propagandist kit.

I'm not here to advocte for this stuff, but when there is solid evidence of nefarious action to bias me against it I can smell the smoke and try to avoid the fire.
 
Businesses have been forcing staff to learn and to use AI. Here's a story of an engineering business who gave every engineer a User License for ClaudeAI (an expensive engineering-specific AI) and failed to put limits on their usage. In one month they racked up $500,000,000 in fees!!! I have no idea what that business' annual revenue is.

Uber reportedly hit a similar wall. They burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April after heavy adoption of AI coding products. The company’s COO admitted that AI costs were becoming harder to justify. (I will say that burning through a budget might just be caused by bad budgeting, if the costs are generating a benefit.)

Part of the issue is that a user can start AI on a project, and AI might work on it round the clock, racking up billable computing minutes. It's like turning your hose on and then going on vacation. The article echoed what I have read before...businesses are jumping on the bandwagon so they appear to be on the same cutting edge as everyone else, merely for the sake of being on the cutting edge with no real business justification.

It will be interesting to see if AI is really a major disruptor, or if it picks at the fringes of some labor-intensive technical trades. All it's gonna take is for a couple of businesses getting publicly burned badly by implementing a stupid AI recommendation or product, then everyone else will have the cover to back down from their zeal and take a more measured approach...if they survive it.
 
Hedi Mitchell said:
I wish I had good news on AI and the future,but since I do not will refrain.:confused:
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I wanna be around when the acceptance level/use hit a critical mass and businesses start getting screwed because they require their employees to use it and all this proprietary data is on someone else's servers and no longer under direct control/security. Hackers can focus on one entity and hit the jackpot on a bunch of businesses.
 
John Brunner said:
I wanna be around when the acceptance level/use hit a critical mass and businesses start getting screwed because they require their employees to use it and all this proprietary data is on someone else's servers and no longer under direct control/security. Hackers can focus on one entity and hit the jackpot on a bunch of businesses.
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I am against the demand of farm land by water sources and no one really taking responsibility for paying for it all.
 
It is hard to even skim the tech trends and surrounding legislation. Even in the process of trying you can run into some... freaky stuff.

Here's a video advocating the use of "quantum computing" technology along with "artificial intelligence" technology. These two things are more camps or schools of thought about approaches than actually fundamentally different stuff. AI gets associated with the hyperscale datacenters, but mostly because that label is applied to some brute-force methods of abstracting "products" from massive amounts of data. Thus the need for very large "compute farms" of hardware. "Quantum" is a different approach, but solves a different kind of problem as well as going about it differently.

The alarming thing for me here is that after the technobabble "pitch" for quantum we fall into a bit of an advertisement for services. The ad isn't the disturbing part though, its form is. Pretty soon you can't tell if the first part of the video was a real person or not, whether the ad was just a CGI-enhanced spokesperson, or whether there was an all-AI-generated avatar speaking to you.

It might be all three or it might all be an actor with some CGI post-production.

 
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