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Home » xyzzy » Dungeon » AI, AI (A, Yi Yi Yi)
| AI, AI [message #99640] |
Sun, 02 August 2026 10:59  |
Rusty
Messages: 1451
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
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Illuminati (3rd Degree) |
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I'm half way listening to the Sunday morning talking head shows. And one is going over regulation of the AI industry. And the grow out of data centers in this country that more headlines speak of the public's resistance to.
Not knowing myself all the technical aspects of what AI is and entails with it's working properties. Wayne's the guru on that here. My layman's approach from what I've read and listened to is that this whole AI mania, at least here in our country, is hyped by large corporate and our oligarchy behind it as the whole future of humankind, so get with it!
Personally I can see it as a tool amidst the creativity and logic of human brain power to augment greater efficiencies with problems and processes. But not the all encompassing knowhow to put faith in for our human development. The hype has inflated to proportions never before with overspeculation in Wall St.. The AI bubble as it's known has a potential to harm our economy as the housing crisis did in 08 should it go pop goes the weasel in the market.
Another aspect typical to our country and economy is that for this buildup of AI data centers, our infrastructure is woefully inadequate. As has been shown just with its capacity without the extra draw from these hungry buildouts. China, our rival as always portrayed and bombastically claimed we'll have to go to war with. They have as with all their planning, the infrastructure already built up to a standard the rest of the world envy. And yet I've read, their AI isn't regarded as the end all as made out here in the US. There's is I've read a utilitarian approach with it.
Ours I've read is an economic rent approach. Which through the usual operation of finance capitalism leading to monopolization where a few big corporate entities that create a cabal to manage pricing for its use. And to get to that point they want governmental social support and tax abatement in the build up of this proprietary "service" industry for their future benefit. Where people in districts these loud, utilities hungry centers are known to affect the quality of life and the financial burden on their lives.
Yet, the mania driving this is that "China" will get ahead of us. Just as the computer chips were and the telecom industry was and the electric vehicles were, TikTok, on and on. This pattern I feel shows we can't compete with the inherent flaw with our economic principles. And a captured legislative structure. All, self defeating.
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| Re: AI, AI [message #99669 is a reply to message #99640] |
Sat, 08 August 2026 18:12  |
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Wayne Parham
Messages: 19079
Registered: January 2001
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Illuminati (33rd Degree) |
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This one is close to home and personal for me, although probably not in the same way it is for you. The hype for most people is a curiosity or annoyance, or both. Maybe something of a fear, actually, for many people. That one is like so many others in the last 200 years.
For me, those are all beside the point. I see any new technology as displacement, not replacement. That has always been the case. Of course, displacement can be uncomfortable, so I don't discount that. But I would remind everyone that even the "lowly word processor" was a game changer just 50 short years ago.
In the 1970s, there were almost no word processors. If you had one, it was a dedicated machine. There wasn't one in your company's million dollar mini-computer, not even one in your corporation's multi-million dollar mainframe. Secretaries typed everything on typewriters, and they had a healthy stock of whiteout for corrections.
So when word processors came out - seems like just yesterday - secretaries were probably pretty scared. But there was actually nothing to fear - they just changed keyboards from their IBM Selectrics to their IBM PCs, first running WordStar, then Word Perfect and then Microsoft Word - Which is what they still use now.
Same timeframe - there was no internet in the 1970s. Well, there was one, but it wasn't anything anybody knew about but us computer guys. Now people don't think they can live without it.
I was a computer guy then and I'm still a computer guy now. Back then, I was kinda isolated from acquaintances in that most had no idea what a kilobyte was. None knew what a CPU was. Nothing in my world was familiar to anyone I knew, other than the few folks that were also computer professionals. It was truly a very small field.
And back then, the folks into machine intelligence were an even smaller group. Marvin Minsky was at MIT and Douglas Hofstadter was at Indiana University. Those were the only two that had any visibility at all. Others made significant contributions, but most people had never heard of them. For that matter, most hadn't heard of Minsky or Hofstadter either, but they were at least somewhat visible in the tiny tech community.
Hofstadter wrote a best selling book about AI, but most people that read it weren't actually into machine intelligence. It was just an entertaining read for them. Actually, it had entertaining excerpts for them. Good coffee table material for intellectuals to philosophize about. Nothing wrong with that at all - it was fun to talk about - but my point is that not many people at all were truly into this stuff.
I was. I was into it then, and I'm into it now. I started at a time when one could completely understand every aspect of the machine - its hardware, it's operating system and its applications software. You programmed your machine in its native language - machine code, written in binary. And you sometimes had the luxury of writing in a higher-level language too, but not always.
I now write modern software, and have applied for patent on the next generation of AI, which I call Concepts Models. Yann LeCun calls his creations World Models, and they are somewhat similar. I'd like to use them together. LeCun's stuff is cool - he's from "those days" too. These are the next evolutions, and they're awesome.
LLMs have proven themselves to be surprisingly useful, but they aren't ever going to be that "singularity" that the younger generation of computer engineers and scientists hope they will be. They just don't have what it takes, even with a few thousand datacenters, each with hundreds of thousands of processors.
So it's very weird to me to see a world where everyone knows about this stuff, at least enough to talk about it. Everyone these days knows computer jaron. Many know moderately sophisticated computer technologies and most know the "basic stuff." It's weird to me 'cause I've been around all this so long. It's my whole life.
And it's weird to me also because I hear so many people talking about these technologies in the media. I see so many executives talking about it too. Most of them actually know almost nothing. They can't even spell binary. Yet it's the latest buzz, and it's oh-so popular to talk about.
Best example - How long have we been hearing about self-driving cars?
We really need a delete button for the talking heads out there.
So it's weird to me 'cause I'm no longer isolated with knowledge that is not popular. Now it's popular for everyone. But I'm not sure that's better. It actually seems quite annoying. Way too many people talking with absolutely nothing useful to say. They're just making stuff up. Maybe they're the chatbots?!! 
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| Re: AI, AI [message #99674 is a reply to message #99669] |
Sun, 09 August 2026 10:12 |
Rusty
Messages: 1451
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
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Illuminati (3rd Degree) |
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From your perspective Wayne is perfectly understandable. This is a natural extension of what technological development is all about. What has warped this has been it's financialization and politicalization. It's what I admire of the Chinese. Their economy isn't hampered by deindustrialization and manufacturing. Their finance is geared towards enhancing technical prowess in benefit of industrial and manufacturing. As well as scientific advancement.
Where our country has succumbed to the narrow interests of wealth advancement over and above the greater good of the public. So, Wall St. is engorged by speculative mania with AI and our infrastructure capacity and public concern over this buildout is fraught with being on the hook of making it happen at their expense.
I like technology too. Having recently watched how the advancement of precision machining took place and precision motor control led to all the capabilities of today's world amazing things. AI is just that as well.
When it's been used as a geopolitical hot button issue as our government has promoted. As has been done with all the tech oriented competition with China is where it goes off the rails for what it really is. Our last vestige of dominance is now challenged by a nation and its economic and political orientation.
Another reason to try evaluating a rational introspective of what our own economic and political orientation is now.
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