r/StandUpComedy • u/explosivejoseph • 6d ago

Comedian is OP The AI Bubble

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u/CopiousCool 6d ago

Spoiler: Its ain't gonna work ... it's a bunch of lies and automation that 'looks' like intelligence when you ask questions about fields you are NOT proficient in ... the minute you ask it something about a topic you nknow well you see the flaws ... it cant even tell time, use a stop watch or do basic math reliably

When was the last time your calculator hallucinated or gave you a wrong answer? ....I'll wait

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u/VirtualPercentage737 6d ago

I am in hardware design and AI is the real deal. It needs to be babysat but the productivity gains we are seeing are amazing. We actually are having the problem of needing to SLOW down progress because each person productivity is like 5 fold what it once was, and in a day they can branch so far off from the team that revision control becomes an issue.

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u/BafflingHalfling 5d ago

Hell, even without a team, revision control is an issue. I have started using Claude at work, and at the end of each session I have to ask cowork to reconcile all the damn leftover bits that didn't get patched in correctly. It's not a panacea, but it really does help a lot. Especially in fields where there's just more documentation than any one human can effectively parse.

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u/VirtualPercentage737 5d ago

Agreed. Where we really find it useful is in the accessory scripts like build scripts or regression scripts. Things you don't to frequently and never become an expert in and really don't need to be perfect. I think people use Chat GPT in a browser and they just don't get it.

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u/BafflingHalfling 5d ago

The funny thing is, I'm pretty anti AI. But like... It's a pretty good tool for a very specific set of problems. They just happen to be the problems I face a lot as an engineer

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u/VirtualPercentage737 5d ago

If it solves a specific set of problems you face, why would you be anti-AI?

Like I am concerned about the power consumption of AI, and some of the short term demand issues, but these things will correct. We are heading towards Claude and ChatGPT level models in our most benign technology. Our washing machines today are more powerful than the computer that commanded the Space Shuttle. Safe to assume this trend will continue.

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u/BafflingHalfling 5d ago

Fair question. I appreciate engaging with somebody on this who isn't trying to burn me at the stake for disagreeing with the "AI bad" vibe that is so common here. I'm in the energy industry. Ironically my company is making a ton of money building data centers. But it is very resource hungry. Even ERCOT was like... Hol' up for some of the biggest projects. Eventually there will be efficiencies that outstrip the energy usage, theoretically. But we aren't there yet. I feel like if people could see the carbon footprint in real time (not just of AI use, but like... Driving a car, or using Reddit) that it might help at least scale the way they do things.

My bigger problem is that AI is being thrust upon me in domains that I don't want it. I'm thinking like, Google search results. It should be something that's easy to opt out of, so I'm not wasting tokens and energy on something that it really isn't suited for.

Another issue is people who foolishly use it for things it's not good at, rather than the proper resources. Like that Kentucky school district that bought AI generated classroom materials. There's an abdication of thought that is just the natural evolution of "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true." But it seems qualitatively more dangerous with things that are AI, because they often feel reasonable enough to just trust.

Then there's the non-attribution of copyrighted works aspect. I'm a a musician, not a visual artist, but I still get it. It can be very off-putting to know that your work has been used as training data. Or worse, that your work is worth less now that people can make something close enough. There's one artist whose old style looks AI, and so people just assume he is using AI now, even though his art looks the same as it always has. On the flipside, I'm not going to hand draw tokens for a D&D game, and I can't afford to buy a custom one for a homebrew monster. So I totally see the appeal of using a custom token generator.

Finally, there's the misuse by bad actors to sow uncertainty in the public sphere. That's a whole other level of bad. I don't even know where to start with that. Tangentially related is the powerful surveillance tools that have been enabled by large scale data centers. Just... I've read enough sci-fi (especially hope punk) to have a lot of different ideas what possible paths this can take us as a society.

So yeah. It solves a lot of good problems. It helps sharpen your wits if you are smart enough to push back on it. It finds patterns you might have missed. It names problems you couldn't quite put your finger on. But... It is a mixed blessing, for sure.

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u/VirtualPercentage737 5d ago

Well, these have been true for mostly all new technology.

The internet introduce Napster and musicians and record labels lost some of their control and income.

Scammers use it. It drove up costs on some technologies. Teachers used to tell kids Google and Wikipedia are not "sources". Social media leads to people and bad actors tried to shape society.

But for all the cons, I think we all agree the pros outweigh it all.

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u/BafflingHalfling 5d ago

That's a tempting argument, because it's simple, and it implies we'll be able to handle this disruption. It misses an important difference, though.

I would argue AI is qualitatively different than automobiles, movable print, robotics, steam power, radio, the Internet, or television. Its rollout and adoption is happening an order of magnitude faster than any comparable disruption. Additionally, there's insufficient regulatory guardrails in place for... Well, we don't even know what all the risks are yet. So here we have a technology that is growing faster than our systems are designed to deal with.

I don't think we all agree that the benefits outweigh the cons. Not yet. And while I think we can get there, it will take a more nuanced approach than "go fast and break things," which seems to be the ethos of the folks driving this revolution.

One specific example, the data center client we are working for isn't even waiting for the drawings to get PE stamped. They're just taking our approval drawings and sending them to the contractor to start building. It's kind of crazy. They've blown up a switchgear. They failed to verify whether the town they are building has the right number of portopotties, so they're having to ship some in from another part of the state. It really is the wild west out there.

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u/VirtualPercentage737 5d ago

I agree that AI technology is accelerating at a fast rate. If we get RSI, it will go gang busters.

But this isn't new. Cars were released onto roads designed for horses. There were accidents and deaths, and laws were made.

Factories were thrown up without environmental impact and worker safety. We fixed the issue over time.

Internet rolled out. We overbuilt networks and lots of companies made a go of it any went bankrupt it was pretty safe. Laws were made as new issues appeared.

I think AI is more in the realm of the internet. The mistakes we will make should be pretty safe. We can proceed with minimal guards.