this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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So, you're basically saying an effective leader is someone who can convince people to go along with them for a sustained period. Jim Jones was an effective leader by that metric. Which I would dispute. So was the guy who led the Donner Party to their deaths.
This is why I see a problem with this. You and I are able to discuss this and work out what each other means.
But in a world where people are time-poor and critical thinking takes time, errors based on fundamental misunderstandings of consensual meanings can flourish.
And the speed and sheer amount of global digital communication means that they can be multiplied and compounded in ways that individual fact checkers will not be able to challenge sucessfully.
I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he'd been ineffective, he'd have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn't have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.
This is true, I guess the difference in the Jim Jones scenario is whether you define effective leadership as being able to get your plan carried out (even if that plan is killing everyone you lead) or whether you define it as achieving good outcomes for those you lead.
Hitler didn't do either of those things in the end so I still don't rate him, but I can see why you would if you just look at the first part of his reign.
AI often produces unintended consequences based on its interpretations - there's a great TED talk on some of these - and I think with the LLMs we have way more variables in our inputs than we have time to define them. That will probably change as they get refined.
Huh? Yikes this feels like being back on reddit.
No I am not trying to "fight" you or "straw man" you at all!!!
I thought we were having a pleasant and civilized conversation about the merits and pitfalls of AI , using our different ideas about the word "effective" as an example.
Unfortunately I didn't see that you're handing me downvotes until just now, so I didn't pick up on your vibe.
I’ll fight you
"What do you think, darlin, should I hate him?"
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What the hell are you on dude? Someone literally is just trying to have a discussion with you on a public forum you posted in, how are they trying to drag you ham fisted in to a debate by simply replying to your comment? Someone's gwumpy..
Your anger has decorated my poop break with laughter random internet person.
You can do it. Best of luck on your journey friend.
If AI can only think at surface level, we are beyond doomed.
Honestly AI doesn’t think much at all. They’re scary clever in some ways but also literally don’t know what anything is or means.
They don't think. They think 0% of the time.
It's algorithms, randomness, probability, and statistics through and through. They don't think any more than a calculator thinks.
LLMs don't think.
Yay yet another person saying that primary information sources should be verified using secondary information sources. Yes, you're right it's great actually that in your vision of the future everyone will have to be a part time research assistant to have any chance of knowing anything about anything because all of their sources will be rubbish.
And that's definitely a thing people will do, instead of just leaning into occultism, conspiratorial thinking, and group think in alternating shifts.
All I have to say is thank fuck Wikipedia exists.
ai ain't going to be much "worse" or "better" than humans.
but re earlier points I don't think things should be judged on a timescale of a few years.
relevant timescales are more like generation(s) to me.
Nobody said we were relying on that. We'll all keep searching. We'll all keep hoping it will bring abundance, as opposed to every other tech revolution since farming. I can only think at the surface level though. I definitely have not been in the science field for 25 years.
LLMs aren’t AI… they’re essentially a glorified autocorrect system that are stuck at the surface level.