mountainriver

joined 2 years ago

One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!

To be fair to the radium people, I don't think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Depending on how AI-pilled your boss is, maybe you could just "ask the AI" if it is being used. If the magic eight ball says "yes", then it's being used, and everybody should be happy.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Can it really be that stupid? Was he just prompting it wrong?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn't inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the "AI" into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.

Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Does moral cowardice matter in someone teaching about ethics? Yes, just as much as physical cowardice matters for a life guard. (The other way is fine.)

Does he express his ideas and teachings as something that it would be good if people did, but he totally wouldn't if it causes himself a smidgen of inconvenience? If he didn't, we now know that he was lying. Which matters if your moral framework cares about truth.

If you have to read his works for some reason, do it with open eyes and try to figure out who and what he is lying in service of.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (18 children)

My argument is that if he hasn't spoken out on Gaza, if he hasn't urged people to do what he thinks would be the best way to stop the genocide, then he is either a fool who can't see what is in front of him or a moral coward who can't act on his convictions.

Either way it makes him a poor ethics philosopher. We can be pretty sure that unless he himself is an experienced life guard, he would in fact not dive in to the river to save the child.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (20 children)

There is a genocide going on right now in Gaza. Has Singer, the great utilitarian, said anything about how the common man should act to stop it?

Is it more effective to protest or block ports or destroy weaponry? Do we have a moral obligation to overthrow governments supporting genocide, in particular if that government is in our country? If we come across one of the perpetrators of the genocide do we have a moral obligation to do something?

Or are these all to uncomfortable questions, while the donation habits of the middle class is comfortable questions?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

That was entertaining!

Get well soon! Drink lots of fluid and watch some good movies (the non AI kind).

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Get 2 and the plane will be 120% as good!

In fact if children with AI are a mere 1% as good, a school with 150 children can build 150% as good!

I am sure this is how project management works, and if it is not maybe Elon can get Grok to claim that it is. (When not busy praising Hitler.)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago

Leave it as it is then, I think it works.

Doing another round of thinking, the insistence of "AI is here to stay" is itself a sign of how this is a bubble that needs continuos hype. Clocks are also here to stay, but nobody needs to argue that they are. How was it Tywin Lannister put it - if you have to tell people you are the king, you are not a real king?

 

Capgemini has polled executives, customer service workers and consumers (but mostly executives) and found out that customer service sucks, and working in customer service sucks even more. Customers apparently want prompt solutions to problems. Customer service personnel feels that they are put in a position to upsell customers. For some reason this makes both sides unhappy.

Solution? Chatbots!

There is some nice rhetorical footwork going on in the report, so it was presumably written by a human. By conflating chatbots and live chat (you know, with someone actually alive) and never once asking whether the chatbots can actually solve the problems with customer service, they come to the conclusion that chatbots must be the answer. After all, lots of the surveyed executives think they will be the answer. And when have executives ever been wrong?

 

This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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