eevBLAB 106 - ChatGPT AI Has Changed EVERYTHING

[EEVblog]

The whole revolution is going to be social and political. It's a massive political tool, with massive social engineering capabilities.

It's aleady here. My 11yo in high school now just said that one kid has already been busted using AI for written assignments, and the school now has a policy against it.

I predict that within 20 years those youngsters with actual legit "human" skills in writing will find very powerful niches as the general population is so used to relatively mediocre AI results.
And possibly the AI content will get more "mediocre" the more it feeds on the mediocre content being produced and published that it learns from thinking that it's quality content.

[EEVblog]

Will AI results reach a peak inflection point where the quality of the result starts to decrease because there is now more AI content to base the models on than there is good human content?
I.E the photocopy of a photocopy problem.

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/1633292695677595649

[Marco]

Not all AI is big data cargo culting, there's fancier approaches ... they just don't work all that well for now.

Cargo culting is a lot safer too of course, actual AGI makes humans superfluous.

[magic]

AGI makes humans superfluous.

Humans can kill and reproduce, this will always be in demand.
Look at what happens to all the blue collar workers made "superfluous" by machines.
(I mean, those who aren't still working manual labor, building and operating all the machinery).

When machines are able to kill and reproduce without humans in the decision chain, then there will be a problem.

[adx]

That inflection point might be where it becomes human.

[paulca]

I predict that within 20 years those youngsters with actual legit "human" skills in writing will find very powerful niches as the general population is so used to relatively mediocre AI results.
And possibly the AI content will get more "mediocre" the more it feeds on the mediocre content being produced and published that it learns from thinking that it's quality content.

Yep.  We have seen what happens to humans in the echo chamber of social media.  God help us when the AIs get loose in there and start feeding-back through each other at 10,000 messages a second.  Never thought fake news could spread faster?  Now it can.

[paulca]

My preferred use case for similar AI is to let them loose in a private company.  Let it inhale all the documentation, business processes, people directories etc.

Then make it appear as an individual assistant to each employee on Teams or what not, where it learns with that employee how to best help them find stuff or people.

You could even get it to start filling in support tickets and HR forms for you!

[xrunner]

Tell you what I want ChatGPT or a clone to do - replace the *** damn telephone menus companies have implemented. Just the other day I had to get in touch with a property management company about the vacant house next to me. The old shed had been picked up by a big windstorm and dumped upside down on the neighbor's fence. Anyway, the stupid telephone menu really didn't have a menu selection for what I wanted - it was all for tenants, renters/owners, or people who knew the extension of the person they wished to speak with. Many times they don't put a menu item that fits what people want to do, this isn't the first time I have run into that.

But my point is, give the chatbot a voice recognition front end, and just tell the damn thing what it is that you want in plain language right off the bat. I'm thinking it would go like this -

"Hello. How may I assist you today?"

"Hi. I am not a tenant but a neighbor of a house you manage at ________. A windstorm has blown a shed over in the backyard and it landed upside-down on a fence. Please send a maintenance crew out to disassemble it so that it will not be a hazard to the houses around it in the next windstorm."

"Thank you for your report, I understand your concern. Since you are not a tenant or owner I can forward it to Mr. _____ who can handle it. Your ticket number is 12384. If you need to call back tell me what your ticket number is and I will be happy to assist you!

"Thanks!"

Simple as that - no menu just get to the point in plain language and let the thing do what needs to be done with the knowledge it has of the company and people employed there. 

[wilfred]

Yep.  We have seen what happens to humans in the echo chamber of social media.  God help us when the AIs get loose in there and start feeding-back through each other at 10,000 messages a second.  Never thought fake news could spread faster?  Now it can.

Didn't that happen already? Why do you think Fox news needed 40000 more hours of video to digest. No actual person is employed to watch that much video.

[wilfred]

Tell you what I want ChatGPT or a clone to do - replace the *** damn telephone menus companies have implemented.

Or just have a person answer the phone. Failing that have the first option "press 1 to speak to someone". Option 2 "Press # to hear the option again".

[xrunner]

Tell you what I want ChatGPT or a clone to do - replace the *** damn telephone menus companies have implemented.

Or just have a person answer the phone. Failing that have the first option "press 1 to speak to someone". Option 2 "Press # to hear the option again".

Right - just pay a minimum wage person to answer the phone. I tried all the menu options to get through even though they didn't fit what I wanted. I finally got through to someone but they sounded like they had an accent. I asked them if they were in the United States they answered no. This is a local property management company and they still want to outsource a simple job like answering the telephone! I guess it's come down to that - saving every single penny you can rather than have a local person simply answer the phone. I'd much rather have the chatbot than explain what I want through a language barrier. 

[vk6zgo]

Yep.  We have seen what happens to humans in the echo chamber of social media.  God help us when the AIs get loose in there and start feeding-back through each other at 10,000 messages a second.  Never thought fake news could spread faster?  Now it can.

Didn't that happen already? Why do you think Fox news needed 40000 more hours of video to digest. No actual person is employed to watch that much video.

40,000 hours of video is a ridiculous amount.

On the local Fox clone's MSN page, a commenter was raving about it all showing some supposed "agents" stirring up the mob at the Jan 6 incident.
That amounts to just over four & a half years of video.
Maybe all the people at the riot were just making videos!

How would AI help with that?
It seems to me that "garbage in, garbage out" is still a thing.

[SiliconWizard]

AGI makes humans superfluous.

Humans can kill and reproduce, this will always be in demand.
Look at what happens to all the blue collar workers made "superfluous" by machines.
(I mean, those who aren't still working manual labor, building and operating all the machinery).

When machines are able to kill and reproduce without humans in the decision chain, then there will be a problem.

Either way, it's not AI or machines that may make humans "superfluous". It's us humans. We'll put ourselves in that situation and will have no one else to blame.

And, it's not just humans either that it can make "superfluous", but with the same idea and eventually, any form of what we call life.

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

[Marco]

"Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient.

Consciousness on the other hand is pretty transient.

I think they can figure out self repair and recycling easier than we can figure out a way to do snapshot backups of biological consciousness.

[xrunner]

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

Yea like flying. Silly us. We tried to mimick things that can fly (birds), which took billions of years to get to the point they are and look where we ended up. Oh wait ... 

[adx]

I don't think they will replace humans completely any time soon - silicon wafers don't grow on trees, the system still requires lots of different functions like truck drivers, each of which will get upset if they are displaced without reason. Superior AI will be able to bend that reason though, also nothing new there either apart from the margin by which humans can be overwhelmed intellectually (I say, as if that is a surprise). The human body still has a liver, and spleen. Evolution doesn't strictly work by 'survival of the fittest' (a human observation) when things like crocodiles live alongside the species that were supposed to displace them. The parts are useful, and humans are at least of utility to supply power - literally; that lineman for the county might be the most resilient organ for the job. All that is really needed to complete the plot line of The Matrix is for humans to scorch the sky (which is also coming).

[vk6zgo]

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

Yea like flying. Silly us. We tried to mimick things that can fly (birds), which took billions of years to get to the point they are and look where we ended up. Oh wait ... 

We can't fly, though, but we can ride machines that do.

[magic]

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

Yea like flying. Silly us. We tried to mimick things that can fly (birds), which took billions of years to get to the point they are and look where we ended up. Oh wait ... 

Two important differences I see:

Biological life uses basic resources available everywhere on earth - water, air, soil, solar energy. Technology as it exists today relies on rare resources and highly purified materials, which are harder to obtain, easier to disrupt, require more logistics and global cooperation.

Life is fully decentralized. Wherever there is a few organisms and whatever stuff they need to live (not a lot, see above) you can rest assured there will be more of them very soon. Technology is mass manufactured in highly centralized and specialized factories as forced by economic and logistic necessities: it takes a lot of ultra specialized advanced technology to manufacture any other advanced technology and this takes resources and physical space.

Nothing even remotely on the horizon suggests that technology will reach the capability and survivability of human life anytime soon. There is no such thing as AI which 3D prints itself, but any human group can make more humans readily. With some luck and selection they may even become better than their ancestors.


If any technology threatens human life in foreseeable future, it's bioengineering. These guys are messing with stuff where all the difficult problems of survival, replication, spread and evolution are already solved. All it would take to trigger a global scale disaster is to bolt some destructive capabilities on top of that, and there is a lot of destructive potential in various forms of life already. Further advances in biology and genetic engineering are likely to occur because it's a relatively young field of science whose main task is simply figuring out how to make use of things which already exist and have existed for millions of years.

AI is a worry for terminal Dunning-Kruger cases like Yudkowski who think that they are way smarter than everybody else and overestimate the importance of smartness in the first place. Those guys are genetic dead ends anyway, not sure why they even care if they die by machines or by expiry like everyone else.

[xrunner]

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

Yea like flying. Silly us. We tried to mimick things that can fly (birds), which took billions of years to get to the point they are and look where we ended up. Oh wait ... 

We can't fly, though, but we can ride machines that do.

Yep with our machines we designed we can use them to fly farther and faster than birds, all the way to the Moon and back, even in places without air that birds require to fly. Thank you for your keen observation as always. 

[vk6zgo]

Apart from philosophical/metaphysical/religious questions, the missing part here will be resilience. "Life" as we define it has proven to be extraordinarily resilient. I don't think any kind of machine will ever be able to be that resilient. We are again trying to mimick things that have taken billions of years to get to the point they are. That's delirious.

Yea like flying. Silly us. We tried to mimick things that can fly (birds), which took billions of years to get to the point they are and look where we ended up. Oh wait ... 

We can't fly, though, but we can ride machines that do.

Yep with our machines we designed we can use them to fly farther and faster than birds, all the way to the Moon and back, even in places without air that birds require to fly. Thank you for your keen observation as always. 

We can't, unlike a bird, fly up on a whim, sit on a tree limb & poop on those passing below.
What is currently called AI is similarly limited by the formalities of its existence.

[coppice]

We can't, unlike a bird, fly up on a whim, sit on a tree limb & poop on those passing below.

I've taken a flight at an hour's notice, achieved my preference of not ending up in a tree, and pooped on the plane. I know where that poop ends up, so I don't think we are far behind.

[xrunner]

We can't, unlike a bird, fly up on a whim, sit on a tree limb & poop on those passing below.
What is currently called AI is similarly limited by the formalities of its existence.

You said "Unlike a bird ..." I didn't know a Kiwi, or ostrich, or any other of the 60 species of flightless birds could fly up to a tree limb. They are like people in this respect - they can't naturally fly. 

But suppose they wanted to fly - how would they go about solving that problem?

[vk6zgo]

We can't, unlike a bird, fly up on a whim, sit on a tree limb & poop on those passing below.
What is currently called AI is similarly limited by the formalities of its existence.

You said "Unlike a bird ..." I didn't know a Kiwi, or ostrich, or any other of the 60 species of flightless birds could fly up to a tree limb. They are like people in this respect - they can't naturally fly. 

But suppose they wanted to fly - how would they go about solving that problem?

They could always hitch a ride on a human's aircraft---otherwise, it is wait around for millions of years to see if evolution will restore the power of flight to them.
Strangely, weird stuff like that can happen, which is why humans aren't colour blind like other mammals.

[madires]

When you think that you can trust the AI doing the right thing: How Medicare Advantage Plans Use Algorithms To Cut Off Care For Seniors In Need (https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/03/13/2332231/how-medicare-advantage-plans-use-algorithms-to-cut-off-care-for-seniors-in-need).

Anyway, who needs AI ethics? Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams (https://www.platformer.news/p/microsoft-just-laid-off-one-of-its).

[coppice]

When you think that you can trust the AI doing the right thing: How Medicare Advantage Plans Use Algorithms To Cut Off Care For Seniors In Need (https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/03/13/2332231/how-medicare-advantage-plans-use-algorithms-to-cut-off-care-for-seniors-in-need).

Anyway, who needs AI ethics? Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams (https://www.platformer.news/p/microsoft-just-laid-off-one-of-its).

Expert systems, which are a non-AI approach to gathering the proven wisdom of humans, and deploying it reliably, have done a terrific job of things like medical diagnosis since the 1980s. I watched them do so well in well paid professional problem diagnosis, from things like telecoms to patient care, that the backlash from people who's jobs were in danger got them marginalised. That backlash was so strong that even simple but effective measures, like check lists, in patient care took years to become normal practice.