Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis, get rid of poverty, and unleash the full potential of human creativity?
Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
iirc, there were some statements from companies (Microsoft?) that we won't have to worry about AI's effect on climate change because it'll also come up with the solutions
Same kind of people that think we can effectively pump enough CO2 out of the air, and other idiotic climate solution magic. Wishers that want to keep consumption at all time highs, basically.
Only if it changes laws of physics. Which I suppose could be in the realm of possibility, since none of us could outthink a ASI. I imagine three outcomes (assuming getting to ASI) - it determines that no, silly humans, the math says you're too far gone. Or, yes, it can develop X and Y beyond our comprehension to change the state of reality and make things better in some or all ways. And lastly, it says it found the problem and solution, and the problem is the Earth is contaminated with humans that consume and pollute too much. And it is deploying the solution now.
I forgot the fourth, that I've seen in a few places (satirically, but could be true). The ASI analyses what we've done, tries to figure out what could be done to help, and then suicides itself out of frustration, anger, sadness, etc.
There was a Twitter post about great uses for AI but it's not being developed. The one I aligned with was scraping grocery store ads and creating a shopping list based on the best prices and personal preferences.
AI is solving problems for the business class. They are trying to stop paying people. AI has use cases to actually make our lives better but are antithetical to the capitalistic companies and would likely try to stop any AI use that undermines their bottom line.
You don't need AI for that. All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org and a discoverable price list page that can be read and understood by everyone.
We already had something similar with RSS, where you subscribe to your favorite blogs and forums, and the RSS reader on your computer would tell you which sites have new posts, so you don't need to scan all of them each day. For some reason people stopped using RSS, and instead published their stuff (or notifications about new posts) on Facebook, twitter etc.
The same system could be adapted for (grocery-) price lists. However the big brands would never do that, because then it would be very easy to discover which products suddenly got more expensive.
All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org
Which is the problem AI is solving here - getting every supermarket chain to agree on this (when it's actually against their interests to do so, since it increases price transparency) would be an impossible task, but AI can get around this requirement with minimal extra effort.
I'm hardly an AI evangelist, but this is actually one of the rare situations where it's a good fit.
I'm not sure how that's a useful thing besides convincing people to spend money on something they done need? Like, you either need a product at the grocery store or you don't. I don't need corpo bullshit ad bots to beg me to buy shit.
I shop at 4, maybe 5, different grocery stores. Some products I have preferences whereas others I don't.
For example, say this is my grocery list for the week:
grapes (never buy at Walmart)
composition notebook
ground turkey (only buy at Wegmans, unless there's a sale)
oat milk
chocolate chips
eggs
I want an AI to scrape every grocery store's weekly ad or their website along with any coupons that are available, and determine the best price and, based on patterns of sales, what I should wait on and what time of day I should shop.
Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is
And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like
It could potentially one day do that (except the unleash creativity part). Issue is, none of that is profitable, and even if it was, AI that can manage that is still a long way's off and sure as hell won't be found by a for profit venture