A Penigma - a mystery, under a pseudonym

Robert Reich doing a rant which I wish I had the time to have come up with, but I'll let him do it. Too bad he's a hardcore Democrat. And I rag on him for it.

We need to revive the Luddite movement since computers truly will never replace humans, unless companies want to lose customers due to poor customer service. And we can't forget how bad AI and the blockchain are to the environment.

I would add that businesses need to take responsibility and not try to push it off on machines.

Then again, I would love to see the tech bubble burst bigtime. And it sounds like its coming soon:

AI is scaring both sides of the political spectrum. Both JD Vance and Cenk Cygur are pointing out how AI can go out of control.

Just remember that a market economy requires a market, which are customers. Businesses exist for customers, not customers for businesses. The Jevins paradox meets the Ai paradox.

 It's nice to be able to laugh at a genocide, especially since that's pretty much what the world has been doing for over a year now. This is the show Bad Hasbara laughing at the Bad Hasbara bot.

Would you trust Siri with your life?

This story is so wild, that I had to fsct check it to make sure it was for real. While I agree with the politics espoused by the "sentient" AI, it demonstrates that machines are not to be trusted.

Israel likes to point out that it has a lot of "experts" in High Tech.  Case in point, comes from this article in the Jerusalem Post:

I am back in Israel in search of the country’s secret, not-so-secret weapon: world-class software engineers...

Israel is the perfect place for an essential development center in this AI revolutionary moment. It is the perfect place for Modelcode, which is building AI for AI, the DNA source code for software that transforms every field on earth. Israeli engineers and Machine Learning gurus and Artificial Intelligencers are fresh off the battlefield, experienced in inventing and assembling novel applications, and rightly confident in their abilities to solve impossible problems. This is not the AI of theory and whiteboards. This is the AI of nailing real-world solutions, of shipping products, of saying when you see an intractable obstacle, "Ein Baya." No one does this better than Americans – and Israelis.

The Israelis puff their competence as a military force and as a technological haven. On the other hand, this shows that technology really is something that needs a human check. On the other hand, the Nazis used gas chambers for their genocide, the Israelis have developed Lavender to assist in theirs. The Zionists can use machines as well as their WWII allies.

OK, if Zionism came about in the 19th Century, why did the Holocaust happen? a couple of hints Haavara and Kastner, but that stuff is now coming to light.

Now, the Zionist cause has its technology turning against it. Didn't they learn the lesson of the Golem?

Anyway, I definitely would not trust AI on a question of my survival.

Sure, it's neat to see videos of robots jumping up and down while doing things that would be impossible for most people. On the other hand, I wonder how fake those happen to be. Are the interviews with AI chatbots staged by people who know what to ask.

Yes, yet another attempt to get information from a computer "gatekeeper" which ended in failure.

You can't really complain to the company since the AI won't let you talk to a person: especially if your query isn't in their menu of options. This is why a human is far better than a machine--no matter how "intelligent" it may appear.

In this current case--I have received notice that a shipment is on its way from a company I am not familiar with. I contacted the company, but this shipment appears to be a mistake. So, I thought I would try to find out more from the carrier.

Unfortunately, the AI works as a gatekeeper to prevent me from actually getting help with my issue.

As I said, AI is more useless than trying to talk to someone in a call centre who happens to speak my language as a second language: if even that. At least the person in the call centre will make some effort. The machine lacks empathy and understanding of the actual issue.

The only thing to worry about artificial intelligence is that there isn't some form of human check to keep if from doing what it does best.

Fuck things up.

Hang around me and start talking about technology and you will hear the term Luddite. The Luddites were people in early 19th Century England who hated technology. They are the ones who put the spanner in the machine. These days, they would just unplug the thing. Or to quote History.com:

“Luddite” is now a blanket term used to describe people who dislike new technology, but its origins date back to an early 19th-century labor movement that railed against the ways that mechanized manufactures and their unskilled laborers undermined the skilled craftsmen of the day.

I'm not exactly sure where I stand in this spectrum, but I am less enthusiastic, or frightened, about AI than most people. On the other hand, it does tend to replace humans who are actually much better at interacting with other humans than a machine. 

Machines are like people who have a limited understanding of a language, yet are working where they need total fluency and proficiency. Sometimes, they don't even rise to that level as the Comcast "intelligent assistant demonstrates". I kept asking it the same question and wanting to speak to a human, but it ended up disconnecting me.

I find interactions with Artificial Intelligence to be more frustrating than helpful. And once one sees past the illusion, AI proves to be totally useless. One doesn't need Luddites to smash the machine: the machine is useless. Still, the bosses would prefer to spend the money on technological toys than hire people to actually do the job.

I was going to give ChatGPT a try to see how long it would take to show it isn't worth the hype, but I would need to sign up for an account. That doesn't make me trust it since there is no disclaimer as to what this company will do with my information.

I have tinkered with AI art programmes with varying results: most of which I would consider crap. Of course, some people find the results to be incredible.

On the other hand, AI is worse than the call centres in some country where they do not speak my language as a first language. Although, in reality, they are both pretty bad. At least the human is making an effort to communicate.

A computer can't.

It cannot truly empathise with your situation. It doesn't really understand what is happening. It only compares what it is being told to possible scripts, but life is not scripted.

So, don't worry--just unplug the thing. And hope that business will realise that it isn't saving money in the long run--especially if they start haemorraging customers.

I've had this problem quite a bit with voice recognition, which shows as anyone well versed in this technology will tell you: "it would make more sense to call it artificial stupidity, than intelligence." In fact, it was dealing with artificial intelligence only to be shunted to a call centre where they don't speak my language (yet again) that led to me writing this.

Yes, a computer can appear intelligent as can someone with dementia appear lucid. But as Alan Turing pointed out, a human can tell the difference. Where artificial intelligence appears superior is that it can process a lot of information quickly. But there'a another computer saying: "GIGO" or "Garbage in, Garbage out." I wouldn't trust a machine to make decisions without a human there to veto that decision. And computers need electricity or some sort of power. They can only run things as long as their batteries can power up. Otherwise they are just expensive paper weights. The reality is that they can only deal with what they are written to do. They might add some other variations to their data base, but it might confuse them since it's really just pattern recognition and not true knowledge. Or as this cartoon points out:
Of course, later versions of the Daleks could fly. The aliens in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs were able to achieve interstellar travel, yet were unable to deal with doorknobs. Or the fact that Earth is covered with water. I think Robots would have even more difficult tasks to deal with if they had to actually deal with the real world instead of their limited universes.

I definitely agree with this: AI needs to be taken with careful skepticism. My car can pretty much drive itself, but I wouldn't trust it to drive anywhere without me having a veto power over what it does.

Lets toss in mistakes Siri and other voice recognition systems make. I used to collect them, but they became overwhelming.

AI cannot be trusted blindly, but it can help make life better when used WITH a human check on the system.