[weego]

"What should the future of humanity look like?"

Some of these people have lost their damn minds.

People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior.

Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protocols should be, and they, at least, actually did something credible.

[orbital-decay]

Most of those people are rationalists that genuinely believe they can predict the future and infer just about anything based on game theory and similar rational constructions. They don't understand that it all depends on their initial assumptions, real life grounding, and fidelity of their model. Or rather they say they do, but in reality they never update their basic assumptions, because they already played all potential scenarios in their heads and pink-elephanted themselves into believing it. It's a cult of rogue AI, actual new age religion with all attributes. They are completely detached from the reality in the way the Wright brothers weren't, it's rather similar to Richard Gatling who believed that his invention will reduce battlefield losses and the size of the armies, which I'm sure sounded pretty logical and convincing in his head. They're deaf to any critique and arrogant to an unbelievable degree.

The problem is they really did something credible, and this will let them concentrate huge amounts of power pretty soon (not hold it, but collude with those who will hold it) and define your future. The longer you dismiss it, the bleaker it will be.

[dominotw]

we have a google calender bot type ai that you can ask in slakc to make a meeting with participants. It gets it wrong about 80% of time .

i try to think of this whenever i am going into ai psychosis.

[snailmailman]

I asked “Alexa+” (the new AI/LLM Alexa), what time one of the upcoming World Cup games is. It was off by two hours due to time zones. This was a big enough mistake that I caught it, and followed up with “I’m pretty sure that’s wrong” and then it tried to correct itself and gave me a new time that was off by hour in the opposite direction.

I guess my time zone wasn’t in the context? So it just hallucinates the wrong coastal time zone twice when I’m not in either one. But who knows where exactly it messed up because it could have just picked a random hour and a would have had the same outcome.

I’ve only used Alexa a half dozen times since the release of Alexa+ but it has been confidently incorrect about 100% of the queries.

[therein]

I am seeing a lot of people suffering from AI psychosis getting interested in writing a trading bot using large language models. They give them access to basic market data and then ask the model for analysis of the current market conditions. The bot talks about seeing high volume here, that being a confirmation for this, and that doing an invalidation of that etc. I looked into it after someone pitched me theirs, only to realize it doesn't even have access to the trading volume. So it was hallucinating a whole narrative about that and the guy shilling this to me hadn't noticed it didn't have access to trade volume yet coming up with a whole rationale for what it is observing.

[eddythompson80]

It boggles the mind what AI is doing to some people’s brains. A few months ago we released various vibe-coded SDKs in few languages and a CLI for a rest API we had. Then an immediate ask after that was a dashboard that shows the usage of those various SDKs and CLI. I thought it would be straightforward to check the userAgent on all the API calls, but realized that all the user agents across all SDKs and CLI were the same. So I made a couple of simple PRs to all of them to have the language name in the user agents, and was composing a reply about how we only have data for the overall new SDKs/CLI usage but once these PRs are merged and released we will have the breakdown. Before I could send my reply, I got a reply from another fairly senior dude saying “Here is a dashboard for the usage” with fairly convincing and organic-looking usage pattern for all the SDKs and all sorts of breakdowns and charts etc.

I was confused, how did he figure it out? Is it somewhere I missed? I checked the query in the dashboard and it was this insane looking query that was correctly looking for the shared userAgent, but also doing a shit ton of odd functions and weird looking math. I asked the guy and he pointed me to the obligatory 1,400 line markdown file describing the “plan” and “approach”. In between all the raw LLM-isms and very sophisticated “weighted normalized distribution of language spread over time” sounding sentences, there was a sentence that said “Since we only have one userAgent for all tools, we use industry standard distribution of language popularity to approximate the usage, and apply some randomness to emulate an organic usage pattern”

So basically the AI just made up some numbers that look plausible (python 20%, JavaScript 30%, CLI 25%, etc) with some randomness thrown in “to look organic”, and the guy was like “that checks out”. When I pointed that these numbers are wrong because X, Y and Z, the person who asked for the data said “that’s ok, it’s a great start and gives me something to use for planning with other teams. Feel free to refine them if you want, but it’s good we have some numbers”. I’m planning my exit soon.

[jagged-chisel]

I found a scam online about 18 months ago that was selling access to some "AI trading platform" that was supposed to have the kind of bot you mention. I used the live chat to talk to someone and asked about demonstrable proof - like given data up through the end of last month, make picks for this month, then look at this month's data to see how it would have done.

"Then this product is not for you." Right, not for anyone thinking critically about how any of this works.

[dominotw]

but wouldnt that depend on your pompts though?

[cyanydeez]

I'm fairly certain the smart people driving AI are also sociopathic either via position (MBA) or via legit Autism.

[Humorist2290]

I can't remember right now where from, but I do remember some 10ish years ago listening to an NPR spot from some philosopher who claimed there was an existential crisis in the field of philosophy. The premise that I do remember was that our technology, our policy, and our society has all outpaced our ethics and our philosophy. The person was making the argument that we as a society would struggle to cope with the continued development of technology when we could barely cope with personal loss and structural inequality.

At the time it felt prescient; now it just feels too late.

[paradoxyl]

The entire bubble, boom if you prefer, is built on this. Basic knowledge work can be done by robots, goodbye humans. It's serious and profound. It will come in fits and starts unless there is popular revolution against the elite criminals.

[coffeefirst]

Unless it’s all just fanfic, to be relegated to the same junkyard of ideas where the flying cars, airships, and vast underwater cities are kept.