Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

As someone approaching their 50s, I do appreciate your diplomacy. You could have just posted "okay Boomer" or an old man shaking his fist at the sky meme. This essay bothers me for a number of reasons. I missed the em-dashes, because I listen to it, (un?)fortunately. But even in audio, it does sound a bit like AI slop. Essentially, it just reiterates every single short-sellers trope that's been developed over the last few years. And if it is, in fact, a real human being — well, that pretty much tells you all you need to know about America, its think tanks, and the caliber of human beings leading this nation for the last 40 years. But I do believe one thing for sure and that is that it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff and consolidate. There will be a lot more of this — the market demands men tilting at windmills, and margins to exploit.

I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.

A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.

The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.

So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.

That professor at Brown I think was able to verify that all but one of like 90 students had used AI on the midterm. The heroic naïf improved on the final. The part you miss, if I follow, is that the going view is that youre a chump if you don’t.

It really is absolutely clear that higher education is over for good unless radical measures are taken. You can calculate the economic conquences. Colleagues are adopting 19th c tech and it may be well for universities to enforce them across the board https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...

This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.

> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

But I don't know anybody that uses iPads? To me it clearly out sold the market it is actually useful for.

Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.

“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that borders on tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings (or their feelings).

This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally, due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.

My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured.

At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.

> [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions

This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.

> Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments

Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?

> it’s definitely a revolution in access to information

Did you mean: Google?

There's some 98XXX codes that make the list too.

hey now there's plenty of ai fanatics in zip codes starting with 100 and 11

Hey, there are some AI-affirmative people in Marin County (949).

Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.

> It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI.

There, fixed that for you.

I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.