I’m guessing he’s saying companies are still using the same human written code, but since AI is sexy right now and is being used to describe even simple programming logic, everything is “powered by AI”
I've heard this talk where I work. Senior plebs describing things that are obviously algorithms as AI. And this of course means we had AI before it was cool.
Nothing new here. Buzzwords are the only thing senior managers can understand.
Even more likely is that AI’s that write code are trained on human created code. So they aren’t coming up with new, novel ideas to problems in most cases, they are just a far more advanced “copy and paste from StackOverflow”
They are paying $100,000. $1 to copy and paste code from stack overflow, and $99,999 to know where and when to paste the code and how to make it work.
Domain knowledge is real, and AI might level that up, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a junior engineer armed with the same tools as a senior engineer that gets dropped into a gig and can properly utilize AI or even StackOverflow to be on the same playing field. AI can write me a function. But to figure how broken a legacy codebase is and how that function can solve an issue is why engineers are still valuable…for now
(This isn’t my opinion, just saying what I think they are)
They are saying it’s not intelligent in any way though. It sees a bunch of words as numbers and spits out some new numbers that the prediction algorithm creates.
What you're thinking of as AI is actually a narrower version, while true intelligence is termed AGI.
Explanation:
The term 'AI' (Artificial Intelligence) refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence, like recognizing patterns or making decisions. However, most AI systems are specialized and focused on specific tasks.
On the other hand, 'AGI' (Artificial General Intelligence) refers to a higher level of AI that possesses human-like cognitive abilities. AGI systems would be capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks, much like us.
So, the distinction lies in the breadth of capabilities: AI refers to more specialized, task-focused systems, while AGI represents a more versatile and human-like intelligence.
The term ‘AI’ (Artificial Intelligence) refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence,
That’s everything computers do, though, isn’t it? Pocket calculators would have fit this definition of AI in the 1970s. In the '60s, “computer” was a human job title.
Yea, but not really. The algorithms are available for free, but they don’t do anything useful by themselves. The RNN is built by training the neural net, which uses grading/classification of training data to increase or decrease millions of coefficients of a multi-layer filter. It’s the training data, the classification feedback and the processing power that actually creates the AI.
Fair enough. What evidence have you got that it’s any different than what humans do? Have you looked around? How many people can you point to that are not just regurgitating or iterating or recombining or rearranging or taking the next step?
As far as I can tell, much of what we call intelligent activity can be performed by computer software and the gaps get smaller every year.
Creationism has the “god of the gaps” where every new fossil forces them to set the goalposts closer together.
The people who think that human intelligence is something special have to adjust the spacing on the goalposts every time a corvid solves a new problem and every time someone figures out how to make a computer do something new.
If you pull the lever after the trolley's first set of wheels has passed the switch but before its last set of wheels has passed the switch then you'll derail the trolley and everyone lives.
The group of kids on a school trip in the trolley.
That’s also another fun layer of metaphor to this whole thing. What’s in the trolley? Nobody knows, and has to make decisions based on that incomplete information.
Except that somewhere down that chain someone is almost certainly going to choose to kill people, so by passing the trolley on down to them you're responsible for killing a lot more than if you ended it right now.
And since every rational person down the line is going to think that, they'll all be itching to pull the "kill" lever first chance they get. So you know that you need to pull the kill lever immediately to minimize the number of deaths.
Only the person pulling the lever is responsible for his/her action though. There is a difference between passively passing on and actively murder someone
If I hand a machete to Jason Voorhees I think I'm at least partly responsible for the people he hits with it. I know what he's going to do with that thing.
I guess it comes down to the weight you give the word "possible" in your sentence. If possible means extremely likely (and there are logical reasons to believe so) then taking responsibility makes sense.
Except you're not passing a machete to Jason Voorhees. That would be "double it and pass it to the next person who you know is going to pull the lever."
You're passing a machete to the next person in line. You don't know who that is. They may or may not pass the machete down the line. Considering I would not expect a person chosen at random to kill someone when handed a machete, it seems unethical for me to kill someone with a machete just to prevent handing it to someone else.
Or it keeps doubling even well after its surpassed the human population, and we all have to keep hitting "pass" in turns forever, and if even a single person gives up then boom.
That’s only if he’s next in line though. If you pass a machete to someone who might one day eventually pass it onto him, is that as bad? I suppose at some point there’s an ethical cutoff lol
The farther away he is the worse it is because the more people he gets to kill. If for some reason I absolutely had to pass the machete down the line then the best case is for the very next person I hand it to to be Jason. But even better if it's me.
In this case it isn’t even a guarantee that anyone has to die as the problem is presented, the tram can just continue to be passed along. The default setting for the lever is “go to next” so to not pull the lever is easier both physically and morally.
The individual that pulls the lever is the same individual that would take action to harm others for no benefit, and even in real life I can’t morally take responsibility for a person who runs over a child by purpose after I let his/her car merge in front of me just before a school crossing
I guess then the issue would be: do you ever find out the result of your actions? If no, then I guess it’s sort of a “glass half empty/full” kind of thing, because you could just pass it on and assume the best and just go live your life quite happily.
Although if you did find out the result, imagine being first, pulling the lever and then finding out nobody else would have.
If it’s infinite (up to the current human population), we’re all tied up on the tracks. Unless we’re leaving out the exact number of people that would bring it to approximately the full population, I guess.
As long as I’m not on the tracks, I’ll take the hit and kill one instead of risking a potential genocide.
I’d pull the lever to kill one person immediately. Assuming the decision maker at each stage is a different person with different opinions on moral, ethical, religious, and logical questions, then it’s a near certainty that someone is going to pull the lever to kill the people at their stage. If you’re lucky, it’s the very next guy. If you’re not, it’s the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later. If I’m the first guy, I’ll take the moral hit to save the larger number of people.
Exactly. If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act. At the risk of taking a shitpost way too seriously, if you were in that situation and actively chose to leave the decision to someone else to kill double the people, then you acted unethically.
Technically the 2nd guy could just let it go through and nobody dies. However if it was to double over and over forever until it stopped, then technically the best option is to just double it forever. Nobody would ever die? If someone decided to end "the game" as it were and kill some people, then that's on them.
Yes, say there are 2^33 people for illustrations sake, by 33 decisions you (the first puller) are guaranteed to be dead too. At 32 it’s 50/50, the odds increase as the decisions get made. From a self preservation standpoint the best thing you can do to minimize your personal risk is pull the lever. It also happens to kill the fewest other people.
There are 1.3 million km of railroads in the world. At 200km/h, a trolley could travel them in little over 270 days.
Rearrange them in a circle and, providing everyone is cooperating for the sake of philosophy, there’s plenty of time to tie 8 billion people to the rails and run them over.
True, since we’re analyzing a hypothetical ethical question I shouldn’t leave any open assumptions. I made the assumption that at some point, at least one person will have to die, as in I see this trolley problem as a situation where at the end there is no choice and the maximum number of people die.
I think that’s bad logic. The choice everyone has is kill or not kill. I can’t be held responsible for someone deciding to pick kill when they have the ability to pick not kill.
Ok, and what does that actually mean for/to me? It’s not the same as intentionally putting somrone in a situation where both choices knowingly result in death. And even if was in this situation, wouldn’t it ultimately be the fault/responsibility of whoever set up the scenario to being with?
On the one hand, the possibility exists that the buck gets passed forever, especially as the kill count numbers grow substantially making the impermissibility of allowing the deaths grow with it. It’s not likely the any given person would kill one stranger, let alone millions.
On the other hand, in an infinite series, even something with miniscule odds will still eventually inevitably happen, and some psycho will instantly become the most infamous murderer in history, followed immediately by the person that didn’t just kill one person and end the growth before it started.
Now if we assume the victims tied up are frictionless orbs, and the train is also a frictionless orb, and the two of them are travelling in a frictionless void than I reckon we could kill a few more.
But then would they die if they don’t slow the train down? The train would necessarily have to impart some energy in order to effect a change in their bodies.
I mean if you’re going fast enough with a pointy train, you could chop up people pretty easy. You just need to make sure that each person is a tire width apart to make sure the wheels don’t lose traction. Assuming a person is roughly half a metre across and a tire is 75cm in diameter, we get 1.25m per person, so a track of 1250km for a million people. Not very long at all.
I agree with your logic, so far as it goes. However, there are, currently, just over eight billion humans in existence. If my quick, over-tired math is correct, that means only 34 people have to say no, until we run out of people to tie to the tracks. Assuming, at that point, the system collapses and nobody dies, I’d guess 34 people would refuse - might be the better choice.
Would you trust the entirety of human existence to be decided by 34 people? In my experience from watching reality TV, the last one always screws the rest over for their own benefit.
Imagine being the last one. You could singlehandedly wipe out half the global population. This would normally be a bad thing, and it is, but it would also make every surviver twice as rich, solve food scarcity and halve the pollution, perhaps even saving humanity from itself.
If that’s not enough, think about everyone now having double the amount of kittens and half the traffic on the roads.
I’m not sure reality TV is a good basis, it’s very manipulated and set up for drama. I have a lot more faith in humanity in general than I do in reality TV stars. But you still have a good point, it’s definitely not a sure thing.
Society and the economy are not a zero sum game. Killing half the population wouldn’t make the survivors twice as rich. It would send society into chaos which would make the remaining people’s lives far worse.
Oh yeah. I was assuming an infinite series (somehow). Also, odds are good that out of 34 people, one of them would misunderstand the rules or be crazy enough to do it anyway for various reasons. I’d probably still do it.
I think this is a good metaphor for how humanity has “dealt” with problems like climate change.
If you make a tough decision, it causes hardship now, but prevents hardship in the future. If you don’t make a tough decision now, someone in the future has to either kill a lot of people, or just pass the buck to the next guy. People justify not making the tough decisions by saying that maybe eventually down the line someone will have an easy decision and there will be nobody on the side path, even though all observable evidence says that the number of people on that path just keeps growing exponentially.
But what if you’re the tenth person with 1024 on the line? Or the 20th person with 1,048,576? Etc. Is there ever a point (before it’s everyone, in which case risk doesn’t increase) where you stop pulling it?
Apart from making it political for no reason, how on earth did you come to the conclusion that doubling the kill count and putting the responsibility on someone else makes you a decent person?
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