It is notable that so many publications try to salvage "AI" ("need for new pedagogical approaches that integrate AI effectively") rather than ditch "AI" completely.
The world worked perfectly before 2023, there is no need to outsource information retrieval or thinking.
Speaking as someone that communicates primarily through text (high likelihood of Autism) the internet was the first chance a lot of us had to ... speak.. and be heard
People have a need to be heard and understood. That’s half of what we are doing here posting.
Many (“not disabled”) people don’t fit in with their local peer group / society. The internet gave them a way to connect with other like-minded individuals.
Do I need to give examples? Let’s say: struggling with a rare disease.
There are far, far too many people who genuinely think disabled people should just disappear or die for it to be "safe" to be facetious about that without a clear sarcasm indicator.
Not much has changed, only people get diagnosed now. I think GP makes actually a good point that, with all its downsides, there are also net positive upsides to the internet.
there are upsides but I dont know if its net upside. In this particular example, communicating by text - letter writing has existed for millenia and has arguably degraded considerably in this age of instant messaging
Sorry, i know it's a bit "flavour of the month" but I mentioned it because I have a difficulty communicating face to face, which is common amongst a certain group of people, and I figured that mentioning it would help people understand my thinking.
Ah yes, the perfect world we had when governments could get away with anything because the press was not enough to showcase their attrocities. A beautiful, perfect world, with rubella and a global population living in extreme poverty close to 50% (compared to today's 10%).
I see this mentality almost exclusively in americans and/or anglo people in general, it's incredible... if you're not that, I guess you're just too young or completely isolated from reality and I wish you the best in the ongoing western collapse.
(... I actually wish you're joking and I didn't catch it, though).
last sentence in your first paragraph has nothing to do with the current state of the internet and certainly not AI. first sentence? turns out governments can still get away with pretty much anything and propaganda is easier than ever.
It is so much harder now. There are people who are willfully ignorant now, almost proud to be; snooty about it. But it's impossible for governments and institutions to lie like they used to be able to. People are trading primary source documents online within the day.
It's why the popularity of long-ruling institutional parties is dropping everywhere, and why the measures to stop people from communicating and to monitor what they're saying are becoming more and more draconian and desperate.
beyond irony that you pose as some tech optimist while also mentioning “western collapse” and then speak about a uniquely American pessimism, a nation that is presently under the thumb of a government that does not respect the rule of law and actively manipulates capital/big business.
and you cannot simply hand-wave away the massive acceleration of the surveillance state and characterize it as a tool of the “institutional parties”
Calculators give wrong answers all the time. The differentiator from AI is that you can trust that a garbage answer from a calculator was caused by bad input, where bad AI answers aren't debuggable.
>Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and logically sound.
Because arithmetic itself, by definition, is.
Human language is not. Which is why being able to talk to our computers in natural language (and have them understand us and talk back) now is nothing short of science fiction come true.
My point is, needing to use something with care doesn't prevent it becoming from wildly successful. LLM's are wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a calculator.
> LLM's are wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a calculator.
LLMs are wrong infinitely more than calculators, because calculators are never wrong (unless they're broken).
If you input "1 + 3" into your calculator and get "4", but you actually wanted to know the answer to "1 + 2", the calculator wasn't "wrong". It gave you the answer to the question you asked.
Now you might say "but that's what's happening with LLMs too! It gave you the wrong answer because you didn't ask the question right!" But an LLM isn't an all-seeing oracle. It can only interpolate between points in its training data. And if the correct answer isn't in its training data, then no amount of "using it with care" will produce the correct answer.
There's no such thing as a correct result to a search query. It certainly delivered exactly what was asked for, a grep of the web, sorted by number of incoming links.
They also don't use it at all anymore, they barely even care about your search query.
Google is successful, however, because they innovated once, and got enough money together as a result to buy Doubleclick. Combining their one innovation with the ad company they bought enabled them to buy other companies.
Did you learn how to do long division in schools? I did, and I wasn't allowed to use calculators on a test until I was in highschool and basic math wasn't what was being taught or evaluated.
The world worked perfectly before 2023, there is no need to outsource information retrieval or thinking.