remember when tech companies did fun events with actual interesting things instead of spending three hours on some new stupid ai feature?
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Depends on what we mean by "AI".
Machine learning? It's already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
LLMs and the like? Yeah I'm not sure how positive these are. I don't think they've actually been all that impactful so far.
Once we have true machine intelligence, then we have the potential for great improvements in daily life and society, but that entirely depends on how it will be used.
It could be a bridge to post-scarcity, but under capitalism it's much more likely it will erode the working class further and exacerbate inequality.
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No surprise there. We just went through how blockchain is going to drastically help our lives in some unspecified future.
I dont believe AI will ever be more than essentially a parlar trick that fools you into thinking it's intelligent when it's really just a more advanced tool like excel compared to pen and paper or an abacus.
The real threat will be people who fool themselves into thinking it's more than that and that it's word is law, like a diety. Or worse, the people that do understand that but like various religious and political leaders that used religion to manipulate people, the new AI Pope's will try and do the same manipulation but with AI.
"I dont believe AI will ever be more than essentially a parlar trick that fools you into thinking it's intelligent."
So in other words, it will achieve human-level intellect.
Experts are working from their perspective, which involves being employed to know the details of how the AI works and the potential benefits. They are invested in it being successful as well, since they spent the time gaining that expertise. I would guess a number of them work in fields that are not easily visible to the public, and use AI systems in ways the public never will because they are focused on things like pattern recognition on virii or idendifying locations to excavate for archeology that always end with a human verifying the results. They use AI as a tool and see the indirect benefits.
The general public's experience is being told AI is a magic box that will be smarter than the average person, has made some flashy images and sounds more like a person than previous automated voice things. They see it spit out a bunch of incorrect or incoherent answers, because they are using it the way it was promoted, as actually intelligent. They also see this unreliable tech being jammed into things that worked previously, and the negative outcome of the hype not meeting the promises. They reject it because how it is being pushed onto the public is not meeting their expectations based on advertising.
That is before the public is being told that AI will drive people out of their jobs, which is doubly insulting when it does a shitty job of replacing people. It is a tool, not a replacement.