Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause

AI is trained on the writing style of humans, when humans are trained on the writing style of AI it's one step closer to the end—the singularity.

I agree with this other than the last line. 

AI tools available for the public/general masses to use aren't really problem solving on their own. They have access to a lot more information, and are much better at aggregating that information, and summarizing it than we are, but that's about it.

AI tools being used for/against the public/general masses are absolutely problem solving on their own. And increasingly doing so in ways their programmers no longer understand already.

Sure, there is some base code framework that set the AI agent on its way that we get to interact with. "Maximize user retention and engagements" in the example of social media (used for and against the public).

A human comes pre wired with some base code framework from our parents, and then as we grow up we slowly begin running on our own, though we are still heavily influenced and programmed by our environment, and the base framework from our parents.

We've already used AI agents to make fatal decisions in war conflict environments, or influence revolutions, or major changes in political landscape. The insurance companies heavily use AI agents to ensure they support their customers as little as possible. AI is behind predictive programming and targeted ads that we are constantly berated with. AI is constantly refining what we are all exposed to in the digital consumption environment, and doing so not with our best interests in mind - but how to keep us retained, engaged, spending money, our time/energy, etc. Heavily influencing our thoughts and decisions.

The Titanic hasn't even left Southampton yet. 

Just like being good at googling stuff. You feed it fragments/keywords, not full sentence structure aimed to facilitate human comprehension.

What about the errors it's making that you and everyone else doesn't notice? What will keep incorrect info from becoming more entrenched in the same way correct info can? 

This is going to follow the same arc as most tech. When it's new and exciting it'll be touted as being revolutionary, capable of anything, just the beginning, etc, and as time goes by it'll be proven to be a net negative in many areas and only of real value when focused is narrowed. We're making a big mistake letting students and employees just use it for anything and everything. Those that are going to be left behind are those who never learn to think in any meaningful way. Much harder to learn to use your brain than it is to use AI. Those who wait to engage won't have any trouble catching up. A lot of the excitement now is just that little dopamine hit from the instant gratification. 

Three potential outcomes. The human does it better. AI does it better. The human with the help of AI does it better. For most things I believe it'll still be the third option, but not if humans let themselves become functionally retarded AI parrots.

My wife does accounts payable for a food processer. The IT guys asked her a few months ago for some invoices so they can try and use AI to do her job. Basically there were so many AI errors that she spent as much time fixing those as she would have if she did it all herself. But...its just a prototype right? And the IT guys were giddy. My wife, not so much.

My takeaway is that the mindset is going towards errors are acceptable if things get done more quickly the first time. We used to do things right the first time, not anymore. Just like how it was rare to see a grammatical error when reading the newspaper back in the day, now there are many misspellings, but it is close enough. 

The problem with close enough is it is fine in some areas but what about doctors using AI and relying to heavily on it? 20 years from now, "Hey why'd that bridge fall down?" "I dont know why we had a chemical explosion, AI said to mix it this way"

Anyways. 

Look at the degradation in our ability to communicate and effectively problem solve individually or as a group.

You read how gen z is the first generation not as cognitively capable as their parents.

The "truth" is murkier than ever. You don't know who or what to trust. These same tools could also be used to better align us and help us all work together and co exist. That doesn't mean we need to eradicate all nations, religions, etc into one. 

Look at nature, there are lots of different plants and animals that all seemingly make it work through the natural balance and laws of nature. They don't challenge it like we do. Friction causes heat. Too much heat reduces the lifespan of something. Much like we are doing here on Earth. Or if you run your two stroke too lean for max power, but grenade it sooner than you wanted.

As they say, the truth will set you free. It feels like we're quickly trending in the opposite direction at present, however. I think that is from the Bible.

This is from 1984:

War Is Peace

Freedom Is Slavery

Ignorance Is Strength

EDIT - Added example.

That's the problem in medicine. Not too many people filling the internet with boring established science, research, protocols, etc, but there's no end to the absolute nonsense that people become obsessed with and discuss endlessly on the internet. My experience is that most AI summaries cannot distinguish the good info from the bad and just mashes it all together to come up with stuff that is well written and sounds convincing if you have no idea what you're looking at. Frustrating that people are placing their faith it in. 

I always ask people to ask AI a few questions on things you are most personally knowledgeable on and see how long it takes to get things wrong. 

I have a friend who is finance bigwig at a large medical firm. She has a team of people that carry out a lot of her data collection and analysis, guided by her inputs. It takes a lot of time, effective communication and training, making sure her team does this well. You need to make sure people are happy, so you don't have retention issues and need to start over.

Her husband owns his own development company for video game graphics and effects. He's an AI nerd. He helped her build an incredibly effective tool for this. He was good at using AI and creating robust models, she was the subject matter expert in the case of enterprise finance management. She is more effective herself than a team of ten people. And loves it because she's a pretty introverted person herself.

I bet the large medical corporation she works for loves it too...

Yep. Your advice is very good in my opinion. Calibrate it first.

I work in med device development, we are using AI to make our jobs easier, and also in the commercial package we're building. Tools sold to doctors, research facilities, therapy and recovery environment, etc.

When I'm designing something, I do use Finite Element Analysis tools and check it against my finger in the wind engineering intuition, especially for elements that have a lot of cost or risk tied to them.

I make a lot of things people survive on to function (dialysis machine or prosthetic leg for examples), and tools that could potentially inflict a lot of harm on people. We do cadaver and pig labs before we test things on people also, moreso on the surgical tooling side of things. 

I tested a lot of CTI knee braces on myself when developing one of those first, too. Even tore my ACL in one 😂.

I always do a physical test on something and check it against what the FEA says on the computer. We call it calibrating/validating the FEA model.

Something tells me the powerful AI models have and are being tested on us in pilot programs. We get to play with the scraps, mostly so it can learn how we think and do what we do in many aspects of our existence.

EDIT - Spelling 

The truth is…

It’s a voluntary surrender by the fat and lazy populous.

X2 on those who never learn to think getting left behind. There will be a smaller and smaller pool of critical thinkers as the years go by, which is why I trained my kids from day one to be lifelong learners. Understand things, don't just accept them. Those of us who understand that ai is only going to do what follows from logic can already predict what's going to happen. 

Yep. We've been failing the test for a while now. I didn't do good on tests in school either though.

What's wild - the American Revolution (the one that ultimately created this country) was fueled by the British decision to tax us on things like sugar and paper to recoup war costs for themselves that had no benefit to us in the colonies.

Today? We just bitch about gas costs online. Complain that housing is less affordable than it was during the Great Depression.

Taxation without representation. 

Over the past few decades the laws that govern our country have been increasingly aimed at serving corporations, outside entities, etc. Corporations are considered individuals in the political arena, so they backdoored themselves into getting the same rights and pull. The trojan horse of law writing.

I think we're headed in the right direction. People are starting to get it. We are still living too comfortably for meaningful change to happen. Give it time though, I suspect. Us Americans are a resilient bunch of stubborn but good folks.

Have a good one fellas! I want to be productive today haha.

On a positive note it's gotten me off the internet more. This place a few times during the day and a quick look at FB once in a while to see what friends are doing is about it. I got so pissed going "Wow look at that" watching some stupid ass video only to find out it was fake that I don't even look at that shit anymore.   

I've mentioned this before, "If" prop 13 gets repealed and thousands of retired people (who have done everything right) are now forced out of their homes ? I know for a fact that some of them aren't paying, aren't selling, and aren't moving. The only thing they're going to do is start shooting when they come to physically remove them from their homes. I've had 2 different crusty old war veterans tell me that, and I'm sure there's more that feel the same way. They were as serious as a heart attack, they'll fight make no doubt about it.  And $20' says they're going to keep pushing until it happens, it's just a matter of time. Like T-mac says we're all still quite comfortable, when we're not the shits gonna hit the fan 

If anybody cares, new Fed chairman is answering questions in front of the Senate Banking committee today and yesterday. 

A lot of what ifs about AI being asked, mostly about what it will do to our economy. So, our elected officials are thinking about it. 

I see errors in AI search results often.   I think that as a search tool its OK but You still need to weed out the BS just like googling stuff.   

So many people are making up fake info using ai and then AI trains off that fake info after its fed it to enough humans to think that its valid info based off of the engagement VS engagement on the truth. 

 I do see some ways it is useful. Its helped me with customers not wasting my time with designing stuff. They will give me a better idea of what they want to start with and then I finetune the design. and make it into something that works in the real world. AI designs will often look great , until You look closer and then most need a little touch up. And a skilled artist can fix stuff quicker ( as in fewer revisions to get the final version) with the standard digital tools than AI in many cases. 

 I hate how AI and social media are working together to hypnotize us all into being screen addicts. And the flood of AI crap that is on Facebook has resulted in  me spending MUCH less time on it.  There's so much fake stuff and AI that its just annoying.  

I do worry about people not learning how to learn.  With the earth being as old as it is, I've always thought that we are unlikely to be the only point in time to have gotten technically advanced. And often wondered what could have eliminated past advanced civilizations. I always thought that some resource that was to relied on could have been the trigger. Perhaps some element that is no longer in its original form on earth. But I could see AI being the beginning of the end by replacing jobs and  people not learning how to learn.  

 The AI overlords have got to realize that if the little people do not have a way of making money themselves, they will not have any customers to pay for their majical products. Is the plan to give everybody an AI agent that they train alongside themselves and send it off to work? Who would pay for that ?  Its an interesting issue that I really hope that the people running those programs are thinking of that too.  

My oldest daughter was working in the business office at one of the large clinics here. About a year ago they announced that they would be incorporating AI to ‘help improve productivity and accuracy’ in their department. They told everyone that there weren’t going to be any cuts to headcount, just improvements for their work. 

After that announcement, none of the vacancies that arose were filled and after 6 months the department was only about 40% of the original staff. They hadn’t implemented AI yet, but everyone knew that they weren’t filling positions because they’d be cutting them after implementation. 

My daughter knew from the beginning that she wanted to leave and it only got worse after the work had to get done with only 40% staff and no overtime authorized. She resigned about 4 months ago, so upper management called her in and explained to her that they were planning on her managing the ‘department’ after the AI implementation (with less than 5% of the original staff size).  She turned everything they offered down over her last two weeks and left pretty happy. 

Since then she’s received at least half a dozen calls from the clinic upping their offer for her to come back, so it sounds like their AI project didn’t go quite as well as planned. 

Fuck AI and datacenters, but the idea that people are salivating at the opportunity to harm our various interests like infrastructure expenses and probably jobs and our online privacy and everything else, for what effectively amounts to making it easier for all of us to be dumber people.....is wonderful idiocrasy levels of delicious. 

To me, it’s a bit of “Much ado ‘bout the same ol’ - same ol’!”

Data centers are NOT new. Yes, they’re gonna be more of them, but…they’ve been energy hogging holes since ENIAC that ramped thru the tears and for serious in the 90s with the web & it got Full Stupid with The Cloud…and we’re gonna ramp up -again- for these viral search software solutions we call AI. 

We have approximately 225 data centers in The Lone Star State and suddenly number 226 is an issue. 

Zero reports of anyone running out of water. (Can you say "closed loop"?)

There's a local forum where there's a bunch of people who will never advance further up the employment ladder than, burger flipper, of store shelf stocker, who are regurgitating the list of data center fearmongering. 

All while living in between a nuclear power plant, and the oakridge lab systems. 

Data centers occupy...

Less than 0.1% of U.S. farmland (~880 million acres).

Less than U.S. golf courses (2 million acres).

Less than U.S. airports (~3 million acres).

And far less than, combined roadway acreage, urban sprawl acreage, etc...

Use less water than the nearby nuclear power plant. 

Far quieter than ambient noise from nearby I-40, or the mass of bass boats racing to their favorite coves, and fishing spots every morning.

(That particular noise is the sound of $$$ in our area)

Not to mention TVA charges them a higher rate for electricity use, just like the oakridge labs. This keeping their electricity rates stable.

But, like every other place on the internet, fearmongering trumps facts.

And what is stored in these existing datacenters? Mostly a lot of our "junk". Our pictures, videos, emails, web search history, any information you have sent or received digitally. But, they are mostly storing this information until it is called up by external devices.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, though.

Now, we are seeing an abrupt shift from passive data storage to massive parallel computer power. An AI datacenter uses 3-5x more power than a traditional facility. More power = more heat = more demand on cooling systems.

So we are seeing a big push to quickly build new datacenters with massive computing power, disregarding local public voice and concerns, not considering any consequence. They are being built where it is cheap, easy to override local regulation, and in areas where they would've assumed the public would applaud any efforts of this administration and the private sector folks taking advantage of it.

We've been in the data collection phase for almost two decades now. We are entering the phase where it begins to be used against us. Flock and others will have a lot of pictures/videos it has to store, too.

I saw a group of 50-100 people walking down the sidewalk last week. From all walks of life it looked like. None of them talking, they were all looking down at their phones playing Pokemon go or some shit. Like zombies walking the wire, plugged into their receivers for the energy transfer.

Perhaps you are right, and it is fear mongering. I talk about envisioning a digital prison of sorts in the future. 50yrs ago people would've said we live in one already if they saw us today.

EDIT - Spelling 

"Number 226" isn't necessarily just another data center. That's like saying the 226th factory can't matter because there were already 225 factories. The discussion isn't about counting buildings, it's about the resources each one consumes.

What matters is what the data center is doing. AI compute centers consume dramatically more electricity than traditional storage-focused facilities, and they place much greater demands on cooling.

And 'closed loop' doesn't mean 'no water demand'. If it were truly a closed system, you'd fill it once and never need another gallon. In reality, cooling towers continuously lose water through evaporation and periodic cleaning, etc., so they require a constant supply of replacement water from somewhere.

In addition to this, data center construction is utilizing resources that result in increased cost of residential construction which is already sky high as well as increased cost of computer components (RAM and graphics card prices are sky high) for a technology thats main commercial use is replacing human jobs.

Not to mention that fact that half of datacenters aren't closed loop and the ones that are, use even more energy for cooling. There's no free lunch. 

There are also significant subsidies, which due to the low quantity of permanent jobs, is actually pretty gnarly when looking at the subsidy per permanent employee. 

And they corrupt the fuck out of all levels of government, right down to local...

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dagb4OZm9-M/

Some dude made 10 million in royalties by uploading thousands of AI generated songs to Spotify and developing a bot army to like his songs. He got busted eventually

The local data centers in NCW have produced more permanent jobs than originally expected, but obviously not quite the same as a factory using the same amount of energy historically does.  

The tough part about data centers in general and AI computing centers specifically is that they are pretty much a necessary evil at this point.  If we were do decide that we were not going to allow any more to be built in the country, we would fall pretty far behind the rest of the world (especially China) and find ourselves at a disadvantage not just economically, but also when it comes to how these are used for our military plans.  

On the flip side, these facilities should be generating massive amounts of property tax revenue for the localities they are built in, but competition between locations to build them has led to tax exemptions that often keep them paying a micro-fraction of the actual amount of their worth for years and even decades after buildout.  

It's a conundrum from almost every angle, but the one thing that is becoming apparent is something that I said several months ago.  We are getting close to deciding whether water is more valuable for human life or for our modern technology.  

How about chillers? Once you fill them, unless you have a leak, that will last until the glycol looses it's effectiveness. They make small nuclear reactors that would be capable of over producing. 

I really doubt someone would build one of these things knowing that they'd run out of water.

The water thing is a bogeyman, like water for solar panel cleaning or windmills killing too many birds. 

There are no small nuclear reactors just plans for them to maybe pan out. Data centers use diesel or gas turbines or engines, when you hear about 2 year lead time for CAT, those are engines for data center generators not skidsteers. Gas turbines same long leads.