I don’t think we’re ready for A.I.

Unsurprisingly, everyone is talking about A.I. these days. Usually in a very positive or negative light. I think it’s a tricky subject because we don’t know how to handle it.

A.I. is flawed. In the hands of the wrong people it leaves people uneducated, it helps with scams and sway people towards extremist positions with fake information.

In the hands of experts who care about fact checking and verifying the output, it can be a powerful tool.

Data centers seem to bad for the people who have to live near them and for the climate in general. I think that could be solved with exceptional strong green policies and regulations.

A.I. is heavily reliant on the previous work of humans without compensation, and we are in no way prepared for how we can handle that.

Some of the best people to educate people and fight back on A.I. would be tech workers. Unfortunately, often, tech workers are often happy to collect their large salary and shares while thinking they’re unique and edgy by being anti-tech. We typically mock MAGA people for being anti-vaccine. It might be forgotten that before MAGA, it was Silicon Valley people that were causing problems by being anti-vaccine and selfishly thinking it’s fine to push ‘tech’ on people to the benefit of their salary and shares while they ban their kids from social media and raise their chickens.

While many tech people might still not do that, they want to be anti-A.I. while reaping the benefits from it. While not directly targeting tech folks, I think the book ‘We Have Never Been Woke’ by Musa al-Gharbi covers this hypocrisy.

If you work in tech, and you think A.I. is bad, you should be fighting it or at the very least trying to educate people using your educated view on the subject.

But regardless of that, I don’t think A.I. is that bad. It is very useful, at least on the subject of code, in the hands of a professional. From my experience, give it small targeted tasks where you can clearly explain what you want allows it to produce reasonable code quicker than you. Meaning you can then review it and tweak it to be even better in an overall time that might be faster than had you done it all on your own.

If companies accepted that and realized you can’t do away with junior developers or even expect 2 senior developers to produce the same output as 4 senior developers, then I think we would be in a better place.

Where they can be of some use is also as a search engine replacement. Again, more often with a narrow, well-defined subject like programming languages (vs something like what’s the best style of clothes for whatever). Some reasons they can replace search engines though is because search engines have degraded because some search engine companies have pushed too many ads and are also focusing on their own A.I. You can still have a nice traditional search engine experience, but you probably need to pay out for it and use something likeKagi. I’d definitely recommend Kagi, but I understand not everyone can afford to pay for search, even at the lower price brackets.

Because of that, we’re now in this weird space where nothing works very well. This would have been acceptable in like 1995 when everyone wasn’t dependent on the internet, but things have changed. The internet in 1995 was also slightly more honest and less scammy. Whereas now, everything is all about the money and squeezing the most out of people. Even legitimate businesses feel slightly scammy. Even while I think subscriptions in the current ‘App Store’ model are completely reasonable, the fact everything has to be a rent seeking business is unfortunate. I think Apple and others need to better support versioned software and if someone wants to stick with version X until it breaks, that’s on them.

This is sort of a random rant of various things and I don’t know where we’ll end up with A.I. but I don’t think it will go away.

I think it does provide value. Not enough to warrant the valuations that the current companies have. As an example, I think it could only end up most useful as a coding tool. What coding tool has ever been worth billions? Selling developer tools hasn’t ended well. Just ask Code Warrior.

A.I. feels like something that would be best done as a community project where the models are created in a GPL-3 sort of way where we have one set of models where everyone is free to use them but must contribute back for the benefit of society. This could minimize the issues around the climate and as far as stealing people’s work, at least you can say that people can freely benefit from the result. No company should be able to swoop in and take over (i.e., web standards and Chrome) if the GPL-3-like licensing was strictly enforced.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that will ever happen. While some western countries are more of a tire fire than others. Even the more ‘respectable’ ones are more than happy to throw their citizens under the bus for a quick buck.It’s concerning for myself because I may be an old, feeble person when everything goes really wrong, but I feel bad for those who are younger and will have to live on the other side of it going really wrong. Hopefully, we can realize we need to change course with everything and especially with A.I. Regardless of its benefits, it’s also really good at spreading fake news and I think that’s going to hold us back.