Posts by Jeff Smith 63 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2022
Not wanting to be that guy, but in an academic sense all of those things fit under the umbrella term of Artificial Intelligence. It includes stuff like
- Machine Learning
- NLP
- Robotics
- Computer Vision
- Gen AI
There’s also the big theoretical sci fi vision of conscious AI as a living entity, but everyone agreed to refer to that as AGI a while back now and I don’t think too many people are confused as to the distinction anymore tbh
Indeed.
There also needs to be some realism about the time scales involved in a move away from US big tech, acknowledgement of the huge complexities in this task, and an acceptance that (barring a descent into all out war) we will never entirely uncouple from it.
We should push on regardless. This is a great time to be a tech start up in Europe.
This point is much under-discussed. We need more public education around the fundamental realities of user generated content online, such as...
The shoutiest opinions always gain the most traction:
Platforms are designed to push engagement. Emotive content gets more clicks so it floats up, skewing perceptions of wider public opinion (i.e. most people would likely have no strong feelings on the matter).
You can always be proved right:
If you don't know how to question your own assumptions then you'll find an endless supply of people willing to confirm your beliefs, which in turn makes you more easily led (and misled).
You have no idea of the context in which a person is writing:
All you see is text, you're starved of all the other communication cues that humanity has developed over tens of thousands of years. You can't read tone of voice, accent, facial expression, appearance, location, environment etc etc. It's a terrible way to try and understand other people.
Most importantly - You have no idea if the person writing is who they claim to be, or if they're even a real person:
They could very easily be a bot designed to take advantage of the points above to shape your opinion. You have almost certainly interacted with a bot online before without realising it. NLP and LLMs have turbo charged this.
The only logical conclusion is that there is little value in reading any of this stuff let alone taking any of it at all seriously. And there never will be again.
The whole problem is easily solved - everybody should get off of social media. To use social media is to open your brain to a torrent of emotive nonsense, and it can completely twist your world view causing irrational behaviour.
Consider that the most powerful man and the richest man in the world are both heavy social media users who are entirely isolated from normal day to day life - look at how they behave.
There is a great deal of focus on the potential for AI to take over and kill us all, which is a valid concern.
Surely a far more pressing and likely scenario is that small groups of individuals in positions of power use AI as the ultimate tool of oppression. This is much under-discussed.
Given what history tells us about what happens when people wield unassailable power over others It might be preferable to put an AI in charge and hope it’s benevolent.
Our management decided to get an apprentice in recently and I was a bit miffed after being informed that I'd be mentoring.
I needn't have worried though, she's absolutely brilliant. Confident in all the right ways, super keen to learn, loves a puzzle, knows when to ask questions and only needs to be told something once. Fantastic. Maybe we got lucky, but I'm very impressed. It's already clear she'll go on to become a key member of the team, assuming she hangs about of course.
After just a few months I already trust her more than another employee who supposedly has 8 years experience with a multinational. This guy is arrogant, inflexible, a poor team worker, can't deal with adversity and is terrible at actually getting things done. Highly adept at IT business speak though, so hey ho.
If I was asked to choose between those 2 today it would be a no brainer.
Assuming that Europe now moves to reduce their reliance on US tech there will be no replacing that highly lucrative market for US businesses. They must know that Putin isn't gonna let them in no matter how much their president buddies up to him. Meanwhile other regions will be acutely aware of what's going on and will act accordingly.
So it seems likely that we have now reached the high water mark of US tech dominance. What will happen to the share price of US tech firms once that reality settles in?
Surely it's a great time to get involved in a European start up.
Apropos of nothing, a Yale led study published in the Journal of experimental psychology in 2015 found that
"... searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information."
Unfortunately most people are missing the point, perhaps they don't want to face up to the enormity of what is happening.
Ascribing ignorance to explain the behaviour of Musk et al. is to assume that if they truly understood the negative implications of their actions they would see reason and stop.
I'd suggest that this assumption is highly misguided.
Perhaps one lesson the US might take from this is that they need to play nice globally if they want to maintain the same level of influence and dominance over the tech sector.
Everyone rolls thier eyes when the US calls out China for stealing user data.
With tech billionaires in front row seats at the recent inauguration the tech sector feels far more intwined with their government than ever, fuelling suggestion that there is no separation between the two.
All the while the new US administration is busy threatening allies with high tariffs and even annexation.
And so when choosing an AI product a purchaser might well say to themselves “These folk are all just as bad as each other, I can’t really trust any of them” at which point they’ll choose the cheapest easiest to run most open source model available to meet their requirements, regardless of its origin.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
It could be strongly argued (observed even) that we’ve handed far too much control of our information infrastructure to the US tech sector, and by extension the whims of thier government of the day.
We don’t know what will happen in the future, however with an eye on resilience it wouldn’t hurt to consider a hypothetical worst case scenario whereby a hostile authoritarian US government wields enormous power over us via their tech.
If we needed to stop using Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta & Amazon products in short order, what would that look like?
What we need are large private companies lead by innovative individuals which generate wealth AND well paid employees spreading wealth into their communities AND well funded government providing strong public services and infrastructure (and, to your last point, investing heavily in science) to support the above.
I’d suggest that there needs to be balance between these. Perfect balance is impossible to achieve, but that’s not to say that misbalances needn’t be addressed.
I’m far from an expert so this is total conjecture, but say the cpu cooked hot enough to combust the battery, there’d surely be a period of time before an explosion where the device was incredibly hot right? You’d assume most people would put it down? Seems as if they all went off very suddenly catching the users by surprise.
Well… yeah should it happen it would be deeply concerning for us all. Bizarre to suggest otherwise really.
Whilst our governments are no saints I always find it strange when folk kinda loosely suggest that the Russian government are just misunderstood, having been somehow forced to commit bad deeds due to the actions of the meddling west. That notion somewhat strains credulity.
A sensible advertiser will clearly try to keep thier brand as neutral they can, and would therefore place their adverts somewhere that alienates as close as possible to 0% of their market. If they are advertising somewhere that alienates 5% of their brand then they are by definition damaging the image of their product, and doing a bad job.
Prior to this current tsunami of tedious infantile culture war nonsense the lack of advertising on a platform from certain groups might have gone entirely unnoticed.
These days however advertisers face a new phenomenon of bullies with massive social media microphones attempting to damage these brands for having the temerity to try and keep themselves neutral. Said bullies have zero interest in free speech, they just want to force others to bend to thier will and represent their side in a culture war that the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about.
Musk implying that advertisers not supporting his site are ‘leftists’ is beyond nonsense. They’re the biggest capitalists out there.
It was very noticeable on youtube how the grift switched from crypto to AI almost overnight after ChatGPT launched. An awful lot of people who really should have known better got caught up in the hype. To be fair it was quite hard not to.
Machine Learning clearly has tremendous potential (as it has done for years) but so many of the capabilities that were being suggested as the immediate future of computing only last year were clearly overstated. As you say, for the most part it’s merely quite useful.
If the bubble bursting contributes to a market crash and recession there’s gonna be all sorts of repercussions for big tech you’d imagine.
Super. I would like to build a better trading relationship with our closest and largest market, slashing the piles of red tape and unnecessary border fees that are impacting our businesses. Hopefully before long some grownups will be in a position to arrange this obviously beneficial state of affairs.
They’ve taken dolby vision and dolby atmos away from the standard tier too without telling anyone. For the most part this only really affects the content they’ve produced themselves, so they’re enshittifying their own work.
You can see why the likes of Christopher Nolan are so concerned about the loss of ownership. Easy to imagine a future where it’s impossible to watch movies without ads shoved into them.
Not quite. I could choose to go into the office 5 days a week if I wanted to. I choose not to, because it saves me money, time, and improves the quality of life for myself and my family. The choice is entirely my own. These are undoubtedly better terms than being obliged to travel into the office every day, as I was until 2020. Of course having the company also pay my power bill would be even better still, but why stop there! They should really be paying me twice my salary. And they should double my annual leave whilst they’re at it. I must be very brainwashed indeed.
As a polite note starting your argument with a patronising insult only ever serves to make you look silly, particularly when you go on to make a daft nonsensical point. Next time maybe leave that bit off. Unless of course you’re paying £50 a day for electric at your house, in which case I take it all back.
Saving a fortune on transport and childcare is a huge blessing also.
Personally I find hybrid suits me best, a couple of office days breaks the week up nicely and also helps to add structure. Having loads of meetings in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays leaves Mondays and Thursdays free for actually getting things done whilst sat at home in peace. Fridays are still Fridays :)
What I like best about it is finally feeling like I’m being treated like an adult and not a naughty school boy. I no longer need to be seen in the office to be trusted to do a good job, fantastic. I reward that by working harder and more productively than ever. As such I have very little time for those who bang on about returning to the office full time.
Recently needed to use Vue at work, used ChatGPT to teach me and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a new framework quicker. Admittedly it’s not all that hard to learn if you know a little javascript, but still. Being able to query it about specifics and have it explain with examples is great. It might be the most patient and least patronising teacher I’ve ever had.
Achieving a fully conversational voice assistant is surely the catalyst to mainstream adoption of AI. Being able to have a natural and detailed back and forth conversation with your computer to help it understand your requirements for complex tasks will be completely transformative, perhaps even more so than the adoption of the GUI.
Perhaps rather than being the final nail in the coffin of shared truth the oncoming wave of AI bullshit will force people to get their news only from a small handful of sources that the majority feel they can trust. Everyone will quickly learn that you can’t believe anything you see on the internet anymore, and that in itself will defang a lot of the propagandists and fakers.
Of course the question is how will people know what the handful of trustworthy sources are, and therein lies a big can of tedious conspiracy worms. But the point remains that people will always want to know the truth and so they’ll have no choice but to believe something, and it’s not going to be random sources on the internet any more. So traditional news media will continue to do well I think. Of course whether they’re telling you the truth or not is another conversation.
Respectfully, choosing not to be wracked with anxiety every time there's a wave of covid is most certainly not stupid. If anything it's pragmatic. This will be far from the last covid wave, and we'll all catch it numerous times over the course of our lives. Unfortunately with that will come a small chance of developing long covid (and the figures show it's a far smaller chance now than in the original wave). It's for each of us to decide our own balance of risk with regard to that, with the other side of said balance being the restrictions you're willing to place on your daily life in order to slightly reduce that risk.
I encountered anxiety in a big way in 2020 which was partly due to fear of catching the disease, but mainly due to fear of my way of life being gone forever. It's taken a good while to be free of that anxiety and I'm not going to let back in. I appreciate that many will never be free of it their covid anxieties and I emphasise hugely, however I have one life and I intend to live it. If you think that makes me stupid then so be it, and I've got nothing for you but to wish you well.
You might not have immunity to any of those things, their vaccines are not 100% perfect. What you do have is herd immunity, as the vaccines are effective in enough people to prevent the diseases from spreading given thier r0 (provided enough people take the vaccine).
The covid vaccines originally had the potential to achieve similar with a high enough uptake, however the virus quite quickly evolved to become far more infectious and spoiled the party for everyone. Certainly the figures on the efficacy early doors looked very promising indeed, and you could see the real world effects in countries with a head start (things in the UK were looking quite rosy at one point).
Despite the lack of herd immunity what the covid vaccine certainly provided many people with is a layer of protection against serious illness, and enough people took it to keep the hospital admissions low enough to be manageable, thus freeing us from a longer period of lockdowns and countless more deaths.
So that’s nice.
But oh no wait maybe it’s all a conspiracy in order to somethingsomething
Search results on Amazon are increasingly full of sponsored entries, more often than not making said results far less useful.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but a company having such a dominant market position that they have no qualms about making the customer experience notably worse in pursuit of maximising profit is exactly why monopolies are (were?) considered a Bad Thing.
Expect the service to get increasingly worse over the years, the work of maximising profit is never done. Betchya the generous returns policy will start to be eroded at some point soon, the PR team will market it as concern for the environment or some such.
Meanwhile many people can no longer afford NOT to use Amazon, or at least are faced with a choice of buying less stuff for more (which might not be such a bad thing, but isn’t something most will do willingly).
Didn’t monopolies used to get broken up? Or is that just something we tell ourselves?
The dictionary definition of equitable is 'fair and impartial'. You're defining the equitability of wealth possession by the effort that an individual has put in to acquire said wealth. If that were really the case then quite clearly something has gone awry.
As an extreme example take Jeff Bezos, who in 2018 earned 315 times the annual pay of his average worker every hour. Clearly Jeff has never worked that much harder than his employees. Further, Jeff could sit back and do absolutely nothing for the rest of his life and he would still earn that much due to his position. Jeff has so much wealth that his children, and his grandchildren, and many generations of the Bezos family after them will never have to lift a finger. This is the reality of the system.
Meanwhile there are hundreds of millions of people around the world working long hours doing backbreaking work for peanuts. Their circumstance its more often than not an accident of birth, and how hard they work has very little bearing on what wealth they might accrue. Their children will be lucky not to inherit debt.
So I put it to you that your definition is hugely naive of how the world actually works. The reality is that people in positions of power take as much for themselves as they possibly can. It has always been this way.
If we're to apply notions of equitability to the debate around climate science as seen throughout these comments then one has to be mindful that a large number of incredibly wealthy individuals, the richest people in the world no less, have an awful lot to lose from a transition away from fossil fuels. The power and influence they posses is many orders of magnitude greater than that of any group of scientists.
So ask yourself, whose side are you really on?
Strikes me that since 2008 many folk have become incredibly thin skinned regarding any criticism of their chosen idol. So much so that they’ll jump straight into the comments to hop up and down bemoaning bias in an article that merely reports some things that have happened that they don’t like or that don’t meet with their preconceived notions.
The credo of such individuals seems to be: If someone doesn’t agree with you they are bias and are pushing an agenda. If you don’t like the facts presented to you then dismiss them as part of a conspiracy, or feel safe to dismiss them out of hand because of something someone else did once. Believe whatever you want to believe, get mad with people who disagree, be sure to ignore anything they have to say. If someone persists in challenging your beliefs then threaten them.
I find it concerning that so many are completely incapable of stepping back and impassionately applying critical thinking. These are important skills that need to be taught every day from a young age, the world would be far better for it. Instead we seem to be up to our necks in bullshit and sinking deeper.
Whilst there is and always has been a degree of bias to the traditional news outlets (indeed it is impossible to be perfectly unbiased), a big part of the trust issue to my mind is that many people are no longer satisfied unless they’re being told exactly what they want to hear. It’s very easy to head off into the internet and have your biases confirmed. Cynical politicians exploit this.
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