Freddie deBoer is also an AI skeptic and has Four Direct, Reasonable, and Important AI Questions (Which the AI People Will Ignore):
Roose would like you to know that he finds skeptics very unserious, that we don’t engage sufficiently with the facts. Well, two can play at that game: I’m tired of AI maximalists dodging very basic questions about not just AI but about epistemology, the burden of proof, their own emotional motivations, and when and how they could be proven wrong. So here are four questions, just four little questions from little old me. If you’re an AI hype-type and would like to actually argue, here are questions that you should be able to answer.
You might have gathered, gentle reader, that although I am an LLM user myself–I use LLMs to build apps (but not apps that rely on LLMs to run!), I think that the hype train oversells what LLMs can do and the finances of the whole industry are going to go pear-shaped sometime (probably soon!).
Of course, in the middle 1990s, I was also an Internet skeptic, but by the middle 1990s, I had been online for a decade already and had seen online services like Quantum Link, Prodigy, and America Online not to mention BBSes. So I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I mean, I was already doing those things: Email, games, GUI over the phone lines, newsgroups, et cetera. What really changed things was broadband, when that functionality was always on. And, three decades later, has it really improved things for people? Not as much as it has made money for corporations. But I’m an outlier, I suppose, and I shouldn’t grouse too much. I made a career out of information technology. And I don’t really use the Internet now much differently than then–online bill paying, I guess, and a little online shopping, but my time on social media is dwindling as it’s less social, more media these days. And lest you think that this blog is a great change for me, remember I had a ranty email newsletter in the middle 1990s.
Librarian of Calaeno The Danny Go! Challenge:
Not everything is a competition, and there is a lot of joy to be found in running and jumping and climbing and throwing for ends that are personal and simply fun.
I might have mentioned that one of the things I like about my karate/tae kwon do school is that it’s the only place where I play. Not so much during the classes (too much during the classes, probably, as sometimes I’m more chatty and glib where I should be focused), but in the fifteen or so minutes before class where I can just do physical things for the fun of it, like trying to throw spin heel kicks or tornado kicks (at 50-something! Because I can!). We don’t drill the crazy tae kwon do stuff much–the classes for the last ha’decade have been kids and adults, with a preponderance of kids, so we occasionally touch on the advanced drills. But for those few moments, I do something physical for the sheer joy of it. I used to do front rolls and back rolls, too, but now they are often part of the warm-ups at the BJJ school, so they’re now, you know, work.
