Good

When a pal of mine was a PhD student in Cambridge he was hired by “the tech” to give some evening classes – Science for Hairdressers. What on earth was he to say?

Inspiration! He taught them to recognise skin diseases and their causes.

So he probably added more to the sum of human happiness than all the Grievance Studies departments in the world. And he probably did less harm than Harvard Medical School.

Never mind universities.

Given that this stuff is in the foothills of its infancy, it’s going to be increasingly hard to persuade people that there’s any point in even learning anything at school.

People – certainly several billion of them – are now completely redundant.

Makes you wonder what the powers that be intend to do about that 😉

https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=eT8KWRsWcS_Glkxh&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&v=mvFTeAVMmAg&feature=youtu.be

People – certainly several billion of them – are now completely redundant.
Depends which people though doesn’t it? The people most at risk are the university educated classes. The education is to handle & process information & that’s something that AI is proving to better capable of doing than humans. However there’s a whole host of tasks where humans do & possibly always will be better performed by people. Even a floor is better swept by a person than a machine. You can’t beat the onboard wetware & software people carry round in their heads. And most of those are the vital tasks, can’t be done by machine, essential for society to function.
Problem being of course, currently the decisions about all this are being made by the university educated cvnts. Can’t see it’s going to work out well.

Western Bloke

An interesting debate with ‘Interested’ a veteran of these parts and arguably one of the most insightful and original commentators on here.

While I tend to agree with your assessment of the tool’s long term usefulness, that does not stop the powers that be from justifying making vast swathes of people redundant to line their own pockets on the basis that the AI, however flawed is substantially cheaper to run.

The fact it might cause mayhem in the longer term is not something that is going to give people that embrace concepts like ‘Net Zero’ ,’DIE’, Transgender’ and other manifest absurdities even one nanosecond of a sleepless night – so while the use of AI is extremely limited I am wondering if perhaps the 1973 film ‘Soylent Green’ might be a back-up plan for the WEF assuming insects aren’t made mandatory on the menu….

@BIC

Depends which people though doesn’t it? The people most at risk are the university educated classes.

Not sure.

I get that we’ll always need plumbers and hairdressers. But I don’t think we’re going to need 50 million of them.

Take the population of Liverpool.

There was a time when pretty much every man in Liverpool who wanted a job to support a family could find one.

Now, OK, those days are long gone, obviously, and Liverpool just about struggles on as a human settlement.

But there are still opportunities for the brighter and more industrious Scousers to move on

They do this essentially two ways, through education or entrepreneurship.

(I’ll leave out the drug dealing element. I’ll also leave out the parasitical State employee element, which is usually cunning and lazy, not bright and industrious.)

You differentiate yourself educationally as a doctor, lawyer, pilot, engineer, accountant etc etc via education.

Watch the scene in the video where the young Indian lad is (or pretends to be) taught about the hypoteneuse.

Quite useful for engineering to understand stuff like that.

Until about three minutes ago a differentiating factor for him whas that he understood about angles and Kyle from Aintree didn’t, bacsue he had listened in maths classes and done his homework.

But Kyle from Aintree is no longer at any sort of disadvantage (or at least, he’s at less of one – he may be less urbane).

Now Kyle has all the angles he needs in real time on his phone, and not only that he can point his phone camera at something and it will tell him what to do.

Or it will tell a robot what to do.

So I would argue actually that engineers are fucked.

In fact, we’re all (potentially) fucked.

There is no incentive for the Indian lad (as a cipher for all lads) to learn about angles – why the fuck would you, when the phone can do it quicker and better than your teacher or the university professor that taught your teacher?

Disastrous for the remaining interest in getting educated which, despite your (and to an extent my) downer on education, is still quite important.

The devil really does make work for idle hands.

Our society works when there is some sort of critical mass of important people engaged in reasonably important stuff.

Some of it is make-work, true, some of them could be more productive, nothing is perfect.

But we are entering a world where it will be arguably stupid to bother going to school and there are profound second order effects to this of all sorts.

What is means for the already quite useless populations of hundreds of western cities, and indeed much of the population of the ‘global south’ is obscure.

But I’m not sure it’s good.

@Western Bloke

If you understand how all this stuff works, you’d know why this isn’t true. This stuff is a stochastic parrot. It doesn’t actually understand what you’ve asked, it’s just constructing a response based on probability. Throwing even more parameters at it will make it a fractionally better stochastic parrot. It’ll marginally improve the parroting. But it isn’t actually smart.

What’s not true? I didn’t mention AI qua AI (and certainly not AGI).

AI isn’t even a term that makes much sense to me, but that’s also irrevelant.

I’m not on about what it can’t do, I’m on about what it can do.

As per my reply to BIS (not BIC, sorry) above, I’d have thought this stochastic parrot – which was born about three months ago and is developing quite rapidly – will take away the jobs of eg bridge designers in a far more profound way than CAD has done to date.

For funs and to amuse and irritate my wider family, I signed up to an ‘AI’ music producer and asked it to create a song about me in the style of an old blues artist (Bobby Bland) which extolled and exaggerated my virtues and talked about how shit they all were.

Thirty fucking seconds later, I kid you not, I had a song – music and lyrics – which did the above delivered to me.

I have been listening to Bobby Bland’s stuff for thirty+ years and have his entire Duke Records output on original singles. I know me my Bobby. It was fucking amazing, even allowing for the fact that I was primed to be amazed.

Now, yes, all it was really doing was stochastically parroting the well-worn and time-honoured rhythms and tropes and chords and solos of the blues and R&B.

But so what? That’s all most blues artists do.

@VP

You’re too kind.

I genuinely have gone a bit tonto, I am aware of that.

The problem is that I simply cannot explain by recourse to any of my usual anchors – economics, markets, the media, politics even – what has been happening since 2020, and arguable since 2016.

All I can say is things are weird, and getting weirder, and authoritarianism is building dramatically – look at the proposed law in Canada, which will see people jailed for life for things they wrote on social media ten years ago, and given house arrest for literal pre crime, for instance – and that the only way in which is does make sense is if some group of powerful people looked at Trump and Brexit and thought, fucking hell, and have decided that we are approaching some sort of perfect storm of economic collapse and machine-capability which means that the world is about to be home to about 7 billion people who we can no longer even pretend have anything important or useful to contribute, and who are, in their idleness and frustration and possibly rage, going to do frightening things, including to the aforementioned powerful people and their families.

I even understand it.

The world would be nicer if we hacked back the population to 500 million beautiful woman and me, and lots of tech to do everything we needed, with a suddenly re-abundant source of fossil fuels.

Interested

Not at all – I come to this blog to be enlightened (and to comment on the evil of Murphy there’s no denying!) and I always find your posts deeply thought-provoking and to a large degree quite terrifying.

Hence my reference to ‘Soylent Green’ as a potential future. Certainly would agree that the post 2020 world is only comprehensible if one believes in either manifest incompetence across almost the entirety of society in the Western world or some conspiracy that will culminate in some end state dystopia. Anyway, do keep posting as and when you can. To quote Bill Rawls from ‘The Wire’ – ‘you have my undivided attention’

VP

When I was a bit younger, I considered myself a Maoist or more accurately a Chou En Lai conservative. Sounds a bit strange, but I believed in Permanent Revolution. There were always new dragons to slay, new challenges to overcome. The unions, nationalised industry, Deep State in the UK and US, the EU, hegemonic China, terrorist state Iran – they were all there to be defeated. Thatcher did a great deal to start the process, but like Emmanuel Goldstein, I despair at how the Revolution has since been betrayed.

We now are in the Wrong Revolution and everyone running it is incompetent. They all think alike and are all equally clueless, but are deluded – thanks to their uniform education – into believing that they are the natural managers of the world. This is why I don’t really think that there is a ‘conspiracy’ as such, we instead have a kind of Hive Mind full of people who have had their own versions of PPE taught to them. ‘Others’ such as Boris, Truss or Trump have not been conditioned to think the same way and have to be ejected ( Treason May is just a thicko ).

I also don’t believe that there is an “end state” to our dystopia. It will simply become worse and worse, ratcheting notch by notch. The only way to break this cycle of doom is actual and bloody revolution. But who will lead that ? Where is Mr Ecks ?

Ottokringstein

‘Where is Mr Ecks’

That is a question I often ask. I do hope he hasn’t departed this mortal coil or suffered some other calamity. Would be great to have him even for a single post. If anyone knew how to take it to as yet unborn Rough beasts it was him. If you’re out there – let us know!!!

@Addolff

Interested @ 10.32, After reading your posts (which I found extremely interesting BTW), I was contemplating getting out the Smirnoff, razor blades and putting a Coldplay record on…….(Then I remembered that I wasn’t that devoid of taste and don’t have a Coldplay record).

I’d rather people told me I was wrong, and why 🙂

That said, and despite my gloomy outlook in many of my contributions here these days, I’m actually pretty cheerful. I like a fight, for one thing. If it were not for the fact that I have a wife, and kids in their 20s, I would be quite sanguine. It’s them I worry about, and I object also to the absolute piss take being foisted on us by men and women of low character and no intestinal fortitude.

I don’t think the armies and police forces of western countries will turn on their own in the final analysis, though this may be why what do look quite like barracks full of fit young blokes from other cultures are springing up all over the shop.

At any rate, it will be interesting.

Then…. I thought about the comments from our host in the past regarding all those agricultural workers made redundant by the tractor, and all the buggy whip makers who went on to do something else when the motor car turned up.

Unfortunately here is where I do differ from Tim.

I know everyone always says ‘This time is different’ and it turns out it isn’t, but actually I do think this time it’s different.

The car replaced the horse and cart, which was shit for the horses (in that they got shot) but OK in the end for the cart manufacturers and drivers, because the horse was waht was being replaced.

Still needed people to build the new automobiles, and to drive them, and in fact they ushered in lots of new job opportunities (yes, yes, I know jobs are a cost – but if we could invent a magic machine which gave everyone everything they wanted instantly, merely by combining available atoms, I somehow don’t think it would lead to utopia).

This time, we are the horses.

I am sure there will be some new jobs created and lots of other benefits accruing from the adoption and development of this new way of doing things. But as I say above, if it can replace the creativity of Bobby Bland, the accompanying musicians and the recording studio and allied staff well… sure I get to hear a new ersatz R&B style track but do I actually benefit in a holistic way?

John Donne might have said not.

I used to think Ecksy was off his head. Told him so many a time.

I still think he was a good deal further down various rabbit holes than anyone else on here, but the difference is I at least now think the rabbit holes are worth entering.

I expect he’s dead, btw.

Boganboy: «’Bloody hell’ says I, imagining myself in that situation. I’d really feel sorry for all those poor girls!!»

For about thirty seconds before you started feeling extremely sorry for yourself. I’d feel sorry for you too only I’ve been written out of the script!

Now Kyle has all the angles he needs in real time on his phone, and not only that he can point his phone camera at something and it will tell him what to do.

50 years ago, kids were being told that there was no point learning arithmetic, when a calculator can do it faster and more accurately. But if you can’t do order of magnitude sums in your head (or, in extremis, on paper), you’ll have no way of knowing if you missed a digit or a decimal point.

Current “AI” (LLMs) isn’t, and can never become, AGI – from that perspective it’s chasing up a blind alley, and building bigger faster LLMs won’t change that. It has an alarming tendency to parrot any old rubbish it encounters on the Internet (or wherever the training material is drawn from), and if you don’t have enough of your own intelligence to tell when it’s spouting nonsense, you’re liable to come a cropper.

@Chris Miller

50 years ago, kids were being told that there was no point learning arithmetic, when a calculator can do it faster and more accurately. But if you can’t do order of magnitude sums in your head (or, in extremis, on paper), you’ll have no way of knowing if you missed a digit or a decimal point.

That is true, but if you’re building a bridge you don’t miss by orders of magnitude, and in any case calculators were/are a) a glorified abacuses and b) actually have taken over, pretty much.

My daughter’s boyfriend is doing a masters in maths at Oxford and despite being a borderline genius he uses a calculator- for the same reason I use an electric screwdriver, not elbow grease.

Calculators and electric screwdrivers just made work easier – they didn’t remove the need for a person .

The game changer in the video to which I link above is (I think) the ability of a calculator to be paired with a camera, and given the ability to identify stuff, describe it, and make what we might call ‘judgments’ about it ie telling the Indian kid that he has incorrectly identified the hypotenuse based only on the information being received by a camera.

If your Texas Instruments job did that, I’d be highly surprised.

Current “AI” (LLMs) isn’t, and can never become, AGI – from that perspective it’s chasing up a blind alley, and building bigger faster LLMs won’t change that.

I keep reading this sort of response and I keep thinking (and sometimes saying, as above), ‘So what?’

This is an argument against the proposition that this is or is approaching AGI.

That’s an interesting question in theory, but in practice it doesn’t matter; what matters is what it can do now, and will be able to do in a year’s time, not what you call it.

In my lifetime we have gone from three or even four men in the cockpit of a passenger jet to having two, essentially to look at computer generated dials and chat up the stewardesses, and actually to *need* zero.

Sure, we won’t quickly divert from two redundant people in a cockpit – who are ever more likely to fuck things up than to make any meaningful contribution in an emergency – to zero, for reasons, but that’s make-work, not really work.

Maybe that’s the way round this, I don’t know.

It has an alarming tendency to parrot any old rubbish it encounters on the Internet (or wherever the training material is drawn from), and if you don’t have enough of your own intelligence to tell when it’s spouting nonsense, you’re liable to come a cropper.

Of course this is true. But a) I suspect it will get better and b) it doesn’t much matter, because within a couple of generations humans are quite likely to be functionally innumerate because no, or very few, kids are going to bother learning hard maths, and maybe even easy maths.

As I say, we’re in the foothills. I might be miles out, I’m only speculating. Anyone who says he *knows* what comes next, six months, a year, five years down the line is bullshitting, frankly.

To echo previous comments an example of dumbing down occurs regularly at the college where i do the occasional invigilation of exams. A lot of the students have to do functional maths papers because they didn’t get gcse’s at school. In the exams they’ll always be at least one question where the answer will be a percentage. In the question it will always give the calculation of how to work out the percentage. The students are supplied with a calculator. If the calculator hasn’t got a percentage button, they can’t do the calculation. Even worse some of the calculators dont give the answer as say 70% but as 0.7. This totally flumoxes them. I shouldn’t be surprised as when i was doing a one on one the student didn’t know what ratio meant.

@Chris Miller

I read the last line of your post as “if you don’t have enough of your own intelligence to tell when it’s spouting nonsense, you’re liable to become a copper.” which I thought was a bit harsh 😉

@Interested

The point I was struggling to make was not that AI (or a calculator) is useless, merely that they can’t (and show no sign of ever being able to) replace human intelligence. As it turns out, the first program what I wrote (at school – to play dominoes) would now be classified (by the Marketing Dept, at least) as ‘artificial intelligence’. I feel a little like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, discovering that he’s been speaking prose for the whole of his life

@Chris Miller

The point I was struggling to make was not that AI (or a calculator) is useless, merely that they can’t (and show no sign of ever being able to) replace human intelligence.

I didn’t think you struggled to make that point – I thought that was your point.

I wonder if you’re struggling to understand my reply, though if you are it’s odd because I thought it was very clear:

“I keep reading this sort of response and I keep thinking (and sometimes saying, as above), ‘So what?’
This is an argument against the proposition that this is or is approaching AGI.
That’s an interesting question in theory, but in practice it doesn’t matter; what matters is what it can do now, and will be able to do in a year’s time, not what you call it.”

In Dickens’ day a calculator was a bloke in a roomful of blokes.

It was shit, though I suppose it kept them off the streets.

Later, electronic calculators replaced all those blokes, bar one.

But that bloke was limited by biology as to how often he could hit a calculator key, accurately, and for how long.

He’s being replaced by computers – call them AI or don’t, it doesn’t matter – which don’t really make mistakes in this sort of thing and work 24/7/365.

That’s ok as long as there’s something else for that bloke to do.

Increasingly, and I suggest at a growing rate, there’s not.

These days you no longer get age verified in the Waitrose in town because the till has a camera and it does the job.

I’m sure there’s a human in ultimate charge but I never see one stop anyone.

So that’s checkout girls gone west, basically.

I am aware of the benefits, I’m aware it was shit in Dickens’ day, I’m not saying there is any easy answer, but I am saying this is (I think) going to hit millions of people like a steam train.

Rather good imo

University Challenged
The expansion of the universities (turning anything into unis) has been disastrous, for, I think, three main reasons:…

Andrew – maybe it’s a trial being done locally then? Either way, it is apparently the future.