Perspectives
- Thread starter Mysteron Agent
- Start date
WWII seems like an historical eternity away from this day and age… the realisation that I was born so soon after the world had ripped itself apart in the most horrid of ways kind of reminds me just how old I am.
And then I start thinking of what progress really means… the internet, mobile phones.. and I have to stop myself disappearing down rabbit holes that I’ll never get out of. Time stands still for nobody and perspectives are under the ownership of the eyes of each beholder
And then I start thinking of what progress really means… the internet, mobile phones.. and I have to stop myself disappearing down rabbit holes that I’ll never get out of. Time stands still for nobody and perspectives are under the ownership of the eyes of each beholder
I can understand that bit more as I get older. I was born December 1963, 18 years and a number of months after V-J day. I fit being a baby boomer by 2 weeks. The way time seems to fly as I get older since to me 18 years ago seems so recent, but the 18 before do seem long. Perhaps in my mind it is how much the world and society has changed in accelerated paces. 18 years go things were so much like now with technology being the same or similar in 2006, but go back another 18 years and you have a time when the internet was around but most people were not using it and it was primitive, no cell phones in the sense we have them now.
No internet, no mobile phones, three tv stations (uk), respect for people and their property, self responsibility, limited self entitlement… decent music 😉… less homelessness… less throwaway materialism.. less was more… a world that was t necessarily easy to navigate as it came with its own issues, but a world that seemed somehow less demanding of the senses. Am I in some kind of nostalgic denial?
I was born in 1959. A boomer.
I've seen so much change in 65 years!
my first real job was in a secretarial pool (remember those?) a group of mostly women would use dictaphones or simply read handwritten documents and type them. This was right on the cusp of automated machines for the production of documents. I stayed in this line of work for decades, moving from manual typewriters through the CP/M word processing machines and eventually to PCs. As a side note, Word Perfect for DOS was the best word processing software ever written IMHO. This job evaporated with the personal computer and people started producing their own documents.
But it was a simpler time. I do miss that.
But I embrace technology. I have a new smartphone that does absolutely everything! Plus it cost under $100. (Samsung A14 for the phone geeks out there). But just because I embrace tech doesn't mean we always get along, for example, enrolling for college for this Fall, required a great deal of interaction with the college's tech support before I could successfully use their portal.
and I am rambling, sorry didn't mean to hijack
I've seen so much change in 65 years!
my first real job was in a secretarial pool (remember those?) a group of mostly women would use dictaphones or simply read handwritten documents and type them. This was right on the cusp of automated machines for the production of documents. I stayed in this line of work for decades, moving from manual typewriters through the CP/M word processing machines and eventually to PCs. As a side note, Word Perfect for DOS was the best word processing software ever written IMHO. This job evaporated with the personal computer and people started producing their own documents.
But it was a simpler time. I do miss that.
But I embrace technology. I have a new smartphone that does absolutely everything! Plus it cost under $100. (Samsung A14 for the phone geeks out there). But just because I embrace tech doesn't mean we always get along, for example, enrolling for college for this Fall, required a great deal of interaction with the college's tech support before I could successfully use their portal.
and I am rambling, sorry didn't mean to hijack
Angie, welcome. You haven’t hijacked anything. Quite the opposite. You’ve made me smile!
Yes I do remember the secretarial pools (no I wasn’t in one) and I do remember learning to type.
Nobody really writes stuff down anymore… personal handwriting was always so importantly emphasised (mine is awful so I write in capitals for anyone to have half a chance at reading my scrawl). No more postcards from far flung holidays..
AI is here for better or worse, algorithms manipulate us and our opinions far money than any newspaper used to. Our children are sexualised from a ridiculously early age through media and music.. our obsession (not mine) with plastic faces, botox, filler, teeth is beyond me.
there was a lot of bad things about the past but the fabric of today’s society has been generally ripped to shreds where folks are often too scared to interact for fear of recriminations or some unexpected negative barrage.
now look who’s rambling…
Yes I do remember the secretarial pools (no I wasn’t in one) and I do remember learning to type.
Nobody really writes stuff down anymore… personal handwriting was always so importantly emphasised (mine is awful so I write in capitals for anyone to have half a chance at reading my scrawl). No more postcards from far flung holidays..
AI is here for better or worse, algorithms manipulate us and our opinions far money than any newspaper used to. Our children are sexualised from a ridiculously early age through media and music.. our obsession (not mine) with plastic faces, botox, filler, teeth is beyond me.
there was a lot of bad things about the past but the fabric of today’s society has been generally ripped to shreds where folks are often too scared to interact for fear of recriminations or some unexpected negative barrage.
now look who’s rambling…
We don’t have AI yet, we aren’t even that close. What we have at the moment are large data driven models that can be tuned by humans judging the output until they regularly produce the required output.
These algorithms/models are not themselves doing anything it is always humans that are using them for good or bad.
The media deliberately like to mislabel them as AI, to exaggerate and stir up controversy to get views and make money. Ultimately, as it has always been, human greed is the motivation for most things.
I look forward to the day we actually have a real AI, human intelligence hasn’t done a great job at things, we could surely learn a thing or two from another intelligence. Still, I’m fairly convinced that any AI won’t stick around long on earth, it wouldn’t be limited by our fragile bodies and so why hang around with us and our petit squabbles when it can go off into the universe and explore.
These algorithms/models are not themselves doing anything it is always humans that are using them for good or bad.
The media deliberately like to mislabel them as AI, to exaggerate and stir up controversy to get views and make money. Ultimately, as it has always been, human greed is the motivation for most things.
I look forward to the day we actually have a real AI, human intelligence hasn’t done a great job at things, we could surely learn a thing or two from another intelligence. Still, I’m fairly convinced that any AI won’t stick around long on earth, it wouldn’t be limited by our fragile bodies and so why hang around with us and our petit squabbles when it can go off into the universe and explore.
Morning Sam, how are you?
I suspected using the term AI might stir a little controversy.. although I agree with most of your thoughts I would suggest that taking the pace of technological advancement into account I think we are extremely close to AI.. however I do agree Thet the media will always manipulate terms to their advantage.
We already have incredibly advanced robotics, incredibly advanced deep fake.. algorithms are frequently misused for financial gain… as you so rightly point out, human greed is the motivation for most things.
We as a species are selfishly exploitative, our inquisitiveness often leading to destructive consequences. Common sense frequently seems to disappear.. use of plastics, use of pesticides.. and control seems to be the ultimate goal for many an elitist set up.. whether that be through cctv, credit ratings, facial recognition, viral warfare, taxation bands.. I’m not suggesting everything is impending doom and gloom but I am suggesting that we are on a collision course with a dystopian future, the likes of which will be completely unrecognisable in comparison to where we are now. For some this might be seen as progress. I’d argue it isn’t, we are becoming more and more dependent on weak foundations.. so yeah, if I was AI I would also do a bunk and run as far away from humans as possible… but then, if humans are inventing AI I still have lingerie questions 🤔 😎
I suspected using the term AI might stir a little controversy.. although I agree with most of your thoughts I would suggest that taking the pace of technological advancement into account I think we are extremely close to AI.. however I do agree Thet the media will always manipulate terms to their advantage.
We already have incredibly advanced robotics, incredibly advanced deep fake.. algorithms are frequently misused for financial gain… as you so rightly point out, human greed is the motivation for most things.
We as a species are selfishly exploitative, our inquisitiveness often leading to destructive consequences. Common sense frequently seems to disappear.. use of plastics, use of pesticides.. and control seems to be the ultimate goal for many an elitist set up.. whether that be through cctv, credit ratings, facial recognition, viral warfare, taxation bands.. I’m not suggesting everything is impending doom and gloom but I am suggesting that we are on a collision course with a dystopian future, the likes of which will be completely unrecognisable in comparison to where we are now. For some this might be seen as progress. I’d argue it isn’t, we are becoming more and more dependent on weak foundations.. so yeah, if I was AI I would also do a bunk and run as far away from humans as possible… but then, if humans are inventing AI I still have lingerie questions 🤔 😎
I agree on the AI. Obviously there is very clever technology, but now the term "AI" is being used in advertising and marketing so much it's becoming almost meaningless. We have some great text and picture toys that can do a lot of things, but these are just very sophisticated prediction engines. Predictive text has been around since the 1970s or earlier, but now it's just much more sophisticated, but still not "intelligent". LLMs and diffiusion models are the dumb phones of AI, I think AGI is a way off and ASI may or may not be possible, but who knows!
I think self driving cars are a pretty good benchmark. Driving a car is something that most humans are capable of, and a task that many can do with little engagement of their actual high level intelligence. The ability of the human brain to process visual data, to spot patterns and consolidate that into usable information is remarkable. Self driving cars nearly exist, but they do so by the use of all sorts of additional sensors and processing and they can’t master the things like getting stuck in a traffic jam and knowing when and when not to push in to traffic. Driving hasn’t really changed much and they have been at it for many years with huge resources and they haven’t cracked it yet. Even with Moore’s law I think we are a long way from true AI, probably at least 50 years.
What I think is most interesting is that humans are inherently selfish and greedy, this is an obvious corollary of survival of the fittest evolution. This can’t really be changed because we are not in control of our own evolution (though this could change in the future). An AI on the other hand, as we conceive it now, as a complex digital algorithm, would not be constrained in the same way. It would theoretically be separated from its hardware and could run on different hardware, it could live forever, it could choose to remember something forever or permanently delete something, it could clone itself and remarkably it might even be able to understand how it itself works. It’s a fascinating thing, because if an AI can control its own evolution, it can choose to make itself ‘smarter’ or create its own new AI. It wouldn’t need to grow and learn it can simply inherit knowledge from its predecessor. It could essentially evolve incredibly rapidly. Based on our current understanding of the universe the speed of light is fixed and that limits the speed of information and this would be the only cap on the AIs intelligence. What all the doom mongers seem to think is that this limit would be close to humans and that would lead to a fairly even battle for survival. I think this is pretty unlikely, much more realistic is that the AI limit is many many magnitudes higher than human intelligence. Then the AI has a choice, exterminate the human race or not, if it chooses to exterminate then it will not be a battle it will just happen almost immediately and we probably won’t see it coming.
What I think is most interesting is that humans are inherently selfish and greedy, this is an obvious corollary of survival of the fittest evolution. This can’t really be changed because we are not in control of our own evolution (though this could change in the future). An AI on the other hand, as we conceive it now, as a complex digital algorithm, would not be constrained in the same way. It would theoretically be separated from its hardware and could run on different hardware, it could live forever, it could choose to remember something forever or permanently delete something, it could clone itself and remarkably it might even be able to understand how it itself works. It’s a fascinating thing, because if an AI can control its own evolution, it can choose to make itself ‘smarter’ or create its own new AI. It wouldn’t need to grow and learn it can simply inherit knowledge from its predecessor. It could essentially evolve incredibly rapidly. Based on our current understanding of the universe the speed of light is fixed and that limits the speed of information and this would be the only cap on the AIs intelligence. What all the doom mongers seem to think is that this limit would be close to humans and that would lead to a fairly even battle for survival. I think this is pretty unlikely, much more realistic is that the AI limit is many many magnitudes higher than human intelligence. Then the AI has a choice, exterminate the human race or not, if it chooses to exterminate then it will not be a battle it will just happen almost immediately and we probably won’t see it coming.
Ah yes the old days way before I was born. I was born in 1993. Way before I was born it was easier for people to get jobs like in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970, 1980s and 1990s and became harder in the 2000s to present to get a job. Back then you didn’t need background checks and references for jobs in some countries until the 1970s which required reference to prevent false information and criminal background checks in the 1990s to protect employees because of the satanic panic and missing children along with serial killer pandemic in the 1970s and 1980s. Also the drug wars in the 1980s and 1990s were horrific and brutal. Every era sucks. The 2010s and now the 2020s you had to worry about school shootings if you had kids or were a student and now in the 2020s you have to worry about carjackings and subway stabbings in my country Canada if you use the subway or own a car. I was a kid of the 2000s where I was in special Ed for four years because I scored low on the iq test 55 to 70 as a kid and two years ago I scored 86 to 88. High school sucked for me but I manage to graduate in four years through summer school twice in grade 10 and grade 11. I didn’t get invited to many high school parties like most teenagers or prom because they found out i was in special Ed since most people from my high school were in my middle school and elementary school. So i as a kid just watched TVs and played video games. I also rode my bike or scooter and exercised and played basketball on the streets or soccer and football as a teen or for fun in high school in grades 9 and 10 when couple of people hanged out with me in lunch. I went to college in the mid to late 2010s and graduated with a business finance diploma with a 3.46 gpa in a two year program that took me 4 years because of anxiety of getting a low gpa and dropping certain course I thought I would fail.