The latest episode of Search Engine discusses Google AI and why it is so detrimental.
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Weāre all fucked. AI is going to be forced into every possible part of our lives whether anybody actually wants it or not.
https://bsky.app/profile/vortexegg.regretfully.online/post/3kt3pbencn42r
This whole thing will just be an accelerated version of what has happened with every alleged tech innovation - it will be ruthlessly monetized at the expense of its users, there will be little to no actual benefit to humanity, and some of the worst people ever will make billions of dollars.
Remember when Obama told us 3D-printing was going to replace steel foundries? Heās not a dumb person, but thereās an army of busnessbros and weird freaks whose job it is to over-hype and over-promise every new gizmo to absurd levels. Like, the more you overpromise what AI will do, the more every newspaper thinks it needs to get in on the ground floor.
Explaining the difference between the real world and fantasy to an AI may be a completely unsolvable problem. If all you have is info scraped from the internet, how do you reliably get a robot to understand that Gondor is not a real place but Italy is? Thereās no way AI can write a serious news piece without heavy human guidance.
This shit is going to be making live-or-death decisions for people within a few years. I assume thereās probably going to be some weird loophole that lets Google off the hook if its untested AI product tells someone to drink paint thinner or whatever.
Teslas are already killing people left and right, nothing happens.
Iāve been using Microsoft Copilot for Office applications for the last couple of months and I have yet to find a use case where I went āwow, this was really useful!ā
Email drafts are not very useful
Summarizing documents somewhat useful
Summarizing email chains is meh
PowerPoint drafts - lol
Excel I didnāt even try
Yeah speaking as someone who has put a couple of hundred hours of time into trying to find a business use case for AIā¦ I want my couple of hundred hours back. I honestly donāt think the juice is worth the squeeze for a lot of applications it should crush like content creation and sales emails.
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This seems less problematic to me overall given the risks of it causing real problems arenāt there. Seems obvious to me that AI type stuff going to be incredibly powerful in this sort of application someday in future and rolling out some partially cooked word/office product isnāt dangerous and may get us there sooner (if it doesnāt suck so bad that turns everyone away).
But Tesla is trying to do this with moving vehicles which is a lot more 
Think there needs to be a greater focus on the specific contexts/risks instead of having an overall positive or negative view of AI as a whole.
Itās clearly coming someday, just because it used to take a whole room of punch cards and equipment for a computer to do some trivial tasks doesnāt mean computers were forever going to be useless.
Every now and then I try asking AI a programming/command-line question, and I think yesterday was the first time I got an actually helpful answer showing a use of sed that solved my problem. But yeah most of the time it misses some important details in the question and regurgitates stuff from the same Stack Overflow posts I already found on my own that werenāt quite what I was looking for.
Imagine the lawsuits if any low-level employee of literally any business told this to their customers.
In fairness, sometimes the AI is 100% correct:
Latest OTM has a good run-down of the whole situation. The whole thing is a dog-and-pony show, the business media is completely in on the scam, and the weirdest techbro freaks on Earth are prepared to burn though all the worldās energy and water to make it happen because they want a sexy AI girlfriend like in the movie Her.
sam altman really deserves a mike-lindellesque outcome
Itās incredible how much of all this unwanted tech bullshit is just dudes who want toys from sci-fi movies. They talk to computers on Star Trek and use cool touchscreen keyboards, so we get Alexa and all the tactile controls in my car have been replaced with a touchscreen. Sam Altman obviously wants a Scar Jo AI girlfriend, so everyone is getting that now. etc. etc.etc. Itās all driven by techbro fantasy and not consumer demand.
In other news, I saw my first Cybertruck in the wild, only a quick glimpse. I think they gave it an aftermarket paint job so it didnāt look as pathetic as the pictures Iāve seen on the internet.
https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208?t=fWkYT_N4bsPo0u9ybQVZog&s=19
Lots of great and sometimes fatal AI answers in that thread.
I feel like, in 100 years from now, skynet will get a good giggle as it reads these search results over the skulls and bones of human civilization.