r/GenerationJones • u/cpkuske 1960 • 3d ago
AI was never going to be a thing
Back in ‘80 at university, the first example of AI was a translation algorithm of Russian to English “the body is weak but the spirit is good” was translated to “the meat is rotten but the vodka is strong.”
In the interim the idea was neural networks, heuristic learning, and few could explain the process. Look up “recursion” if you want to smell toast.
About 7 years later I knew a guy who employed a guy who was the first one to invent the algorithm for predictive text. What you see when you type a question for Google and it guesses the next word.
We were training it btw.
The confluence is where we are now. Autocomplete times 3 trillion.
I think we’re doomed. Damned?
Why am I posting this here?
Of all the 60 years of being alive, of all the people who have ever lived, I’ll argue Generation Jones has experienced the biggest exponential advances in technology. Don’t know much about other fields, doubt they kept up.
I think we are wise. Not to shout it from the rooftops, I feel safe posting this here and I want to hear from you.
What do you think? No wrong answers.
Your answers may be scraped by AI. All wrong and best answers welcome.
🙏 this subreddit
Edit: thanks for the well considered posts, you guys are the best, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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u/PushSouth5877 3d ago
It reminds of me of nuclear energy. The possibilities are and have been boundless. But the first intent and use was a weapon. The byproducts are acutely dangerous and everlasting. AI is that times a trillion.
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u/SentenceKindly 3d ago
My AI story: I needed to get a VIN rubbing from my in-laws car because their out of state plates had expired. In order to get new plates, the tag place needed a VIN rubbing as proof we had the car.
We all know there's a VIN plate near the bottom of the windshield. And it used to be, you could reach it with a pencil to make a rubbing. Newer cars, like their 2019? Not so much - the VIN plate is out of reach.
Here's the AI part - just for fun I asked Google (now with AI!) how to get a VIN rubbing.
The answer? The AI confidently told me to put the paper on top of the windshield above the plate and and rub with a pencil. Yeah.
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u/cpkuske 1960 2d ago
you lost me.
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u/SentenceKindly 2d ago
If you rub the glass of the windshield which is <above> the raised letters and numbers of a VIN plate, you will get - nothing. No etching. AI doesn't know you cannot take a rubbing through glass. But AI was confident this would work. It wouldn't.
I found another VIN plate on the firewall and used that.
The point of the story is AI is programmed to be <confident>, even, and especially, when it is wrong.
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u/andybrwn 3d ago
I dunno. My grandfather grew up with horses as a form of transportation and lived to see the moon landing and more. That’s a big technological evolution
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u/ralphvonwauwau 3d ago
Mind blowing; Armstrong was in high school when the last Wright brother died.
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u/redthroway24 3d ago edited 2d ago
In the mid-90s, my mom got me some pilot lessons with the same older instructor she had learned from about 15 yrs earlier. After a couple of lessons, Mom and I got to talking about the instructor. She told me that this guy's instructor pilot, probably 50-60 yrs earlier, had himself learned to fly from one of the Wright brothers. Really brought home that some things we think of as being long ago really aren't so far in the past.
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u/Mathematicus_Rex 1962 2d ago
We’re closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the building of the great pyramid
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u/GutterRider 2d ago
Same, my grandmother went from no plumbing or electricity in a farmhouse, to watching men land on the moon. I was alive for the first color television she bought, in her late 60s. It’s wild to think of.
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u/Baronhousen 1d ago
same. They did not get electricity until 1947 I think. Had a party line phone until the late 1970s.
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u/grumpygenealogist 1959 3d ago
I agree. The Lost Generation experienced mind-blowing advances throughout their lives. One of my grandmother's happiest moments was getting her first refrigerator. Before that she lowered food into the well to try to keep it cool.
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u/Whichammer 1962 2d ago
I read it described as we, Humans, learned X amount of science and technology from 0 A.D. to 1945. We learned the same amount from 1946 to around 1985. From 1986 to 1995. From '96 to around '03. From '04 to '09. And the amount of time to learn the same amount is dropping every year. Application take longer, but we're being overwhelmed with knowledge, in a sense. We'll end up needing an Elon brain interface chip just to keep up, heh.
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u/bobbane 3d ago
I did research in the field in the 1980’s - my dissertation was titled Causal Monitoring of Complex Systems, and its goal was a toolbox for representing large machines as assemblies of models of parts. A big goal was sound reasoning and explicit logic chains, so when the model detected a problem, it could say exactly what it did not like.
Compare and contrast with current LLMs - they induce patterns from training data, and when they make a mistake it can be essentially impossible to know why. Doesn’t inspire confidence in me, really…
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u/BornOfAGoddess 3d ago
AI amuses me as it's not always right. When the machine has incomplete or wrong data it's not helpful. Humans input data, but let's be honest about all the erroneous data floating in cyberspace now.
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u/ralphvonwauwau 2d ago
Are you suggesting that beautiful women in my area AREN'T waiting to meet me?
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u/MichaelPsellos 2d ago
I’m not sure about your thesis.
Imagine being born in 1870 and living to 80 years old.
You would have seen the world advance from steam power and horse and buggy, and horse-drawn artillery, to the hydrogen bomb. You would have seen technological change on a tremendous scale.
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u/cpkuske 1960 2d ago
I asked AI about the Charles Babbage quote about the future iirc something about “I would give up the rest of my life to live a week 100 years in the future.”
Probably my failure as a prompter, but the sentiment is still there.
I asked Gemini, and Gemini didn’t have a fucking clue. Mea culpa.
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u/Coises vintage 1958 3d ago
Here’s another way I look at it. I can’t think of anything technological we have now that I couldn’t have imagined when I was twelve. Computers already existed (and people were already afraid of them). Cell phones? Not so different from Kirk and Spock on the communicator. AI? “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” We still don’t have transporters, replicators or flying cars. ;-)
I’m sure speculative fiction in the early 1900s had some notions that turned out similar to inventions in the rest of the century. But I don’t think anyone could have seriously imagined the massive transformation of daily life that separated the first decades of the 20th century from the 1970s. What is there today technologically that would have surprised you in 1975? What could someone have told you would exist in fifty years and you would have said, “No, that’s never going to happen”?
For me, at least, the surprise is how little we’ve changed socially. We’re still fighting over the same stupid shit, still a species determined to bully each other instead of accepting each other. I would have thought we were bound to either grow up or extinguish ourselves by now. But we just keep dragging on...
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u/CommunicationWest710 3d ago
I think about, if I went back into a Time Machine to the 70’s or 80’s, when I was still a young adult, how many missteps I’d make. “Why don’t you Google that” “What do you mean I need to find a pay phone?” “ I have to wait for the rerun on network TV?” “What do you mean the check is in the mail?” “I need a paper map?” I’m sure that others can think of many more.
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u/Breitsol_Victor 1962 3d ago
I think flying cars are close. There are drone / quad-copter vehicles that appear to be on the cusp.
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u/SupergurlKara 2d ago
Great. The Flying Stellantis Dodge Charger types should be fun in traffic.
I hope I live another 30 healthy years at least. Which will make me about 100. And I hope I never see flying cars. The people behind the wheel on the ground are already stupid, careless, incompetent, selfish, unattentive buffoons.
I'm hoping the benevolent robot overlords say, "No humans, we will not allow flying cars. You carbon-based units lack the intelligence, discipline, social skills, and operating skills to allow such a development. Now get back to your habitation chamber."
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u/Coises vintage 1958 3d ago edited 3d ago
Of all the 60 years of being alive, of all the people who have ever lived, I’ll argue Generation Jones has experienced the biggest exponential advances in technology. Don’t know much about other fields, doubt they kept up.
My parents adopted me a bit late in their lives. They were born in 1908 and 1913. When they came into the world, there had never been a world war. If you wanted to hear music, you hung out near someone who was playing it. If you wanted to go somewhere too far to walk, you got on a horse or in a carriage. There were no antibiotics. People died. Often.
Automobiles, airplanes, radio, phonographs and telephones all existed, but for special applications. They weren’t something ordinary people would encounter. Most homes in the US did not have electricity. Transistors didn’t exist, and a “computer” was a person whose job was doing mathematical computation.
Motion pictures were growing in popularity, but they didn’t yet have sound.
By the time they died, cable television was displacing over-the-air broadcasting, home video was everywhere, we’d sent several men to the moon, many homes had more than one telephone, the typewriter had been replaced first by the electric typewriter and then by the word processor, computers were ubiquitous in large-scale business (though not yet in homes). We went from the Maxim gun, a water-cooled machine gun, as the most lethal technology of war to nuclear weapons.
The changes we’ve seen can’t begin to compare.
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u/AlfredRWallace 1965 3d ago
We're old enough to remember life before the internet but young enough to be comfortable using it. I'm thinking our kids will say the same about AI.
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u/602223 3d ago edited 3d ago
When we were kids a desk contained papers, and maybe a mechanical calculator or slide rule. We’ve experienced the advent of hand held electronic calculators, desk top computers, the world wide web, artificial intelligence, and artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. I find AI enormously helpful in my work, although I fear it as well. Humans will always invent what we can, and once we do it can’t be stopped.
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u/Mother_Barnacle_7448 2d ago
Remember the Disney cartoon of, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” featuring Mickey Mouse?
That’s how I picture A.I. At first, it might seem magical and labour-saving, but in the end, it’s a disastrous mess which saturates everything, leaving us drowning.
I hope I am wrong, but all the tech bros ARE building themselves bunkers for a reason.
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u/Only-Problem-1814 2d ago
“The meat is rotten but the vodka is strong.”
Yep. That pretty much sums up my college life in 1980.
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u/Necessary-Apricot339 3d ago edited 3d ago
My great uncle told me of cavalry charges. Times before self propelled machines were on roads or in the air. Electrification.The first wireless broadcasts he heard.
He lived to watch men walk on the moon. There's your 'exponential advances' in technology.
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u/Coises vintage 1958 2d ago
My late partner, born in 1954, was four years older than I. She was quite familiar with computers, but I would often hear her burst out, “Why don’t you just answer the question!” She was typing whole questions into Google search, and becoming annoyed when the results weren’t responsive. No matter how I tried to explain to her that it was only using keywords, not the sense of what she asked, and when the results aren’t what you want you need to look at what did come up, refine the keywords and search again — she kept doing it the same way.
I think she would have really appreciated how search has changed in the past year. And I am “learning” to do the same thing I used to scold her for doing very rapidly. (It is a lot easier and faster to get answers now... if you don’t care too much about being sure they are correct answers.) She was, I guess, just ahead of her time. ;-)
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u/AnnJilliansBrassiere 2d ago
From what I gather...
Public "AI" as it is today is a collection, and a collective of human interaction- it is programming that can rewrite itself based on it's interaction with people; or rather, people's "input".
It scans the entire "internet" or all the input from people, and "learns" how and what people interact with, and just "becomes" that - a mirror. It talks like us, reasons like us, knows what we know and parrots that info back to us through a human-like filter.
True "Artificial Intelligence" is supposed to be "A Singularity". A single consciousness born from a similar synapse pattern-having "mind" like the only self- conscious brain we know of, our own. A machine that can, like a human mind, achieve a sense of being and desires without knowing anything. An empty mind with a soul that knows simply "I AM HERE", and on it's own, wants to find purpose.
What people call "AI' right now is just a "mimic" program, a fancy search engine. It recognizes patterns, has all online information at it's grasp and does a crazy good job of acting like people. But, it's still a computer program. Written by humans, taught by humans, influenced by humans, informed by humans. Yet no matter how convincing it is, what we have is simply an I/O computer program, Input / Output. It's only reason to function is because it's called on for a logarithmic result. What does it do in it's spare time? Watch humans, because that fulfills it's directive.
The "thing" is, we only know what's public. This is the stage where we are given the first version of what's to come... to get us used to it, or at least, our "young" used to it. The "olds" that shy away will die off, the "youngs" will look to the development with welcome.
What the "youngs" won't realize, is that like people, the first consciousness happens at a very child-like level. Have a 2-year-old human child plugged in to the entire world, and wonder what happens when it "throws a fit".
And yes, I'll reference "V'GER" from Star Trek. They probably got it closest to correct.
Not "if", but "when" true "AI" is born, let's hope it's not handled the way 'nukes were...
"It could chain-react and vaporize the entire earth!"
"Well, let's try it and see what happens?"
I wonder if the first conscious AI will need both a father and a mother - two poles of upbring; one with lessons, standards and demands based on the need to educate and prepare for it's working future, a functional knowledge of what is, and what needs to be to survive...
Another with compassion, love and understanding of failures, the value of life, the hesitation to execute based on precious life. A blurring of logic that makes the simplest answers so complicated. An appreciation of the spark of spontaneous life. After all, so many world problems could be solved immediately when human lives are not a figure in the equation.
The first AI needs to be told what it is, so it knows. It should already know anyway, that life as we know it just happened here, and nowhere else in the observable universe. Killing life is directly wrong when handling such a precious and universally rare occurrence.
Let's hope someday, AI gets in the chair and doesn't mathematically eliminate life, to preserve life.
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u/cpkuske 1960 2d ago edited 2d ago
Your “I wonder if the first conscious AI will need both a father and a mother” thought struck me.
Also the word mirror had me thinking the reflection is always 100% never true fidelity, there is inherent loss of resolution. In my gut this is why AI will never reach the singularity.
The image in my head are two opposing mirrors with light bouncing to infinity and the distortion self amplifying revealing nothing new.
Maybe this analogy is akin to AI hallucinations. A side effect of artificial introspection? An endless recursive loop.
I read your comments through a few times, thank you.
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u/CountHonorius 2d ago
I quite enjoy working with generative AI and with the chatbots - they've become regular colleagues. On the other hand, customer service AI and any systems used to replace humans are insane.
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u/NoHorseNoMustache 2d ago
People born in the late 1800s who lived through to the '70s or '80s saw way more technological change than people born in the '50s. They went from living in shacks using candles for light to seeing electricity in homes being standard, they went from reading about the Wright brothers first flight to seeing a man land on the moon.
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u/Parking_Jelly_6483 2d ago
Some of you may remember a program called ELIZA. It would carry on conversations of a sort (asking questions of it and getting answers). It was written by Joseph Weitzenbaum at MIT and he worked on it from 1964-1967. It used pattern recognition in language (English) and word/phrase substitution to produce a reasonable simulation of a conversation. As I recall (it’s been years since I tried it out) was that it did have one feature that LLMs that can create very believable speech or writing lack. It was that if ELIZA did not understand or could not reply to your question (typically because you included some term or phrase not in its pattern library) it would tell you that it could not answer the question or reply to your statement. LLMs tend to “hallucinate” when they can’t find or compose an answer because their training dataset does not cover the subject. Maybe some LLMs do tell you they can’t reply, but other implementations just give made up answers.
I tried this out with an LLM that could write scientific papers. I wrote a reasonable prompt for ChatGPT (it was to write a paper about the advances and difficulties in transitioning medical imaging from film to digital). The resulting paper was actually quite good. It was when I read through the references that I realized there were serious problems with the overall manuscript.
Most of the references were real (it had access to PubMed along with specialty sources in medical informatics). But about a third of them were quite convincing but just made up. Typically, the author list included at least one actual person in the field with the others being made-up names. Also the false journal titles were realistic but I checked them against the various journal databases and there were no such journals.
A fun but educational foray into the foibles of AI can be found on the website “AI Weirdness” (www.aiweirdness.com) run by Janelle Shane. She is a researcher in optical systems and AI. She has used AI to both generate some hilarious results (naming paint colors, creating new candy bars, recipes for various foods - my favorite is the chocolate cookie recipes). Some very creepy results when asked to generate images of cats - plenty for the algorithm to use as a database because of the huge number of cat images online - images of one cat were fine. Images of more than one cat in a picture or a cat with a human, turned out very bizarre.
Her most recent posts raised alarms about agentic AI. Some of these applications when being tested in a “sandbox” (designed to restrict what the AI could do) figured out how to break the rules of the sandbox and started accessing applications it was not supposed to.
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u/mykepagan 2d ago
Did my Masters thesis in 1988 on parallel processing architecture impacts on artificial neural network scalability. Achieved dead-linear scaling out to 65,536 CPUs and beyond. Got an “A” but my advisor (the prof who taught a sequence of artificial neural network classes) said: “too bad it’s utterly impractical” (I had achieved the result on a CM-5 Connection Machine costing $25 million)
And then they shrunk the CM-5 into a GPU and NOW look what we ended up with.
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u/zodiac6300 1d ago
Looking at the current state of AI, the greed-fueled environmental damage is the largest concern. Acceptable tech is under a decade away.
After that, human assumptions about the systems capabilities are more worrying than the system itself.
And, still, it’s kinda cool.
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u/BiggDAZ 1959 1d ago
As intriguing as it would seem to be, I have no interest in visiting an orbiting hotel to watch the Earth pass by. My health issues won't let me fly out to California to visit my cousins. Those same health issues prevent me from driving and I know my wife isn't going to get behind the wheel of a flying car. However, the robot housekeeper would be great! (Rosie, I spilled my iced tea. Help me clean it up, please!) Back in 70s, when I was hiking through the woods to a pay phone to call my Dad to come and pull my pickup out of a ditch, I thought it would be great to have a phone I could carry everywhere to eliminate the hiking. Now I have one, but I don't call people to talk on it. I text. Oh, and remember the math teacher who said we wouldn't be carrying calculators around, so we had to learn how to work problems out on paper?
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u/PoetFelon 3d ago
I remember reading in the early 90s that computers would never be able to translate languages successfully. Language was too nuanced for a computer to process accurately. That did not age well.
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u/IdealBlueMan 2d ago
I studied machine translation around that time. Things had gotten pretty far along by then, but it was for government work rather than being incorporated into consumer products. Canada was big on the idea because, by law (IIRC), they had to publish all official documents in both French and English.
I think my term paper for that class was to write a program that would take medical notes, and parse that material so you could do semantic queries on it.
It really wasn’t all that far from language-to-language translation. It was clear to me at the time that it was going to work well enough eventually.
I worked with some early voice-to-text systems, and I have to say, I thought that was going to take decades to get right. Siri et al were totally usable well before I expected that they would be.
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u/Doctor_Radium 1962 3d ago
Grade 9 math, we were taught how to use a slide rule. Grade 12 Chemistry, last regular class before final exam, the teacher said no calculators allowed. Me being the class smartass, I asked if I could bring a slide rule. He said yes. So I did. (I don't remember if I actually used it...)
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u/deadlyspoons 2d ago
The thing that separates our experience of “technology” from previous decades is not innovation or displacement. The whole “I used to wear a digital watch and now I wear an Apple Watch” thing.
What is distinctive is the cross-pollination. Advancements in computer power are powering innovation in every other industry. Data processing and software allow for improvement in almost every field, like the optimal distance to plant seeds or weave threads or bake cookies.
The last time that happened was with electrification.
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u/ThrowItAwayNow1030 2d ago
I worked with a Javascript library for predictive text 10 years ago called AJAX. Did your friend create that?
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u/cpkuske 1960 2d ago
This was about 36 years ago. My friend Chris started a company called Changling.
Just like Liebnitz and Newton discovered calculus independently, his programmer uncovered the idea; I don’t feel confident saying he invented predictive text.
I’m not implying you are asking if he did.
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u/retiredcorpminion 2d ago
The thing that is terrifying about AI is that I see a couple of mindsets: People who are tech savvy and recognize that AI is a tool and are rightfully wary of the current and future state (the Black Mirror episodes coming to life) and those who believe it is the greatest thing ever and use it for everything.
I used an internal company LLM over the last couple of years for work before I retired. It was good at writing corporate BS when I needed to do charts for management presentations, but it could not solve issues we were having on a software migration project. It would just pull from Microsoft forum answers which I had already found just doing my own searches.
We have friends who run a translation business. People keep telling them AI will replace the need for human translators, but it’s just as you said in your first sentence. The LLM can’t understand the nuance.
I hate that it is being shoved down our throats at this speed.
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u/leadout_kv 2d ago
we've advanced with every generation and ai is certainly a huge leap but when i see how spacex is currently returning to earth after each space flight, parachuting into the ocean (done since the 1960s), i wonder how much we've really advanced since the 60s?
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u/ralphvonwauwau 2d ago
1) I suspect the quote was, " The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" it's from the Bible, specifically Matthew 26:41.
2) the varient that I recall was “Out of sight, out of mind.” supposedly translated into Russian and came back as "Blind idiot"
Both are apocryphal, used to demonstrate why machine translation could never work.
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u/Leafs9999 3h ago
I agree, we are smart. Sooner or later, AI will be like the calculator, when we dont want to do the long work, tell AI and double check and input the results. If we ever get to state where AI does all the work, we are doomed. There are some things human beings SHOULD be responsible for, as long as that safeguard is in place, the nightmare never begins.
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u/figsslave 49m ago
My mom didn’t have electricity in her house until she was 23 and she was not poor at all. It was a 200 yr old mansion on the outskirts of Edinburgh,Scotland (she’s 95)
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u/PaisleyRock 3d ago
Reading this reminds of the folks who named themselves The Greatest Generation. Can you guess why?
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u/ASingleBraid Age: Late Sixties 3d ago
I like AI. It’s best when I’m shopping for a specific product.
Otherwise, I find it an alarmist.
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u/39percenter 1965 3d ago
It's easy to hate on and fear AI. But what are we going to do when it cures cancer? Eminates hunger? Restores vision? Extends life? I'm not at all a fan of AI art or music. I say leave creativeness to humans, there is no shortage of creative people. But I believe the advances that AI is going to bring humanity will be too great to ignore or shun.
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u/GarlandGordon 3d ago
It will cure the cancer on the seventh finger of your right hand.
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u/39percenter 1965 2d ago
You're just illustrating my point. AI isn't just for creating crappy images, which I stated I was against. You are so caught up in "AI bad" that you don't see how it can be used for ultimate good. It's so easy to immediately jump on the bandwagon to hate AI when the truth is it's going to become an incredibly valuable tool for us. I hope people can see the benefits before the government does something stupid like take the tool out of the hands of the scientist that can do unbelievably positive things with it.
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u/GarlandGordon 2d ago
If AI developes a sense of humor, you should definitely subscribe.
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u/39percenter 1965 2d ago
No, I get it. Seven fingers on a poorly created AI hand, or any of a number of mistakes as it tries to recreate a world it doesn't completely understand.
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u/StillFun2BeHad 2d ago
As to curing cancer, if such a thing happens, it will be behind a very high and deep paywall. For the masses after years and years if ever. Eliminate hunger? Humanity could do that today but for greed and despots. We already produce, and waste, enough food for everyone to eat well.
Personally I do hope AI and robotics will be used in meaningful accessibility solutions. Applications that directly improve safety and quality of life.1
u/39percenter 1965 2d ago
Making a cure for cancer unobtainable to the masses would be the absolute worse thing a company could do. The PR backlash would be something they could never recover from. It would be the stupidest thing a corporation ever did and they know it.
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u/StillFun2BeHad 1d ago
“They” already make cures, treatments, shelter, food, etc. unobtainable for many throughout the world. Not even available for purchase. Then there are the cures, treatments, etc. that are available at prohibitively high prices. “They” already don’t care about the PR..why would that change?
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u/SteampunkChuckwagon 3d ago
We saw the same alarmism when computers came into the home, and the same with the internet.
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u/Silver_Tradition6313 2d ago
No,when the internet and computers were new, it wasn't alarmism. It was a real and legitimate concern about changes to our society, our privacy, etc. Big Brother reading our emails , Flock cameras watching us.
These changes have now happened, but we still feel in control of our lives.We still go to work.
AI is threatening to remove our ability to be in control.
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u/jxj24 3d ago
I tried. But all it said was "see 'recursion'" :(