(no subject)

[degringolade]

 
So in nice weather like yesterday, the mornings are sitting on my stoop and sipping some tea and listening to my birds.  The above is a listing of what my AI driven phone application told me of the birdsong I was hearing.  Overall, I approve this use.

 

---

 

I have been pondering my reading of the news cycle where it pertains to artificial intelligence.  There is a lot to ponder there.  

>  A lot of folks worry about energy issues.  As they stand right now, these things are super energy hungry.

>  Other folks worry about how they will change their relationship to the symbols we call money.

>  Still others worry about their jobs and how their status and lifestyles will be affected ( a subset of prior).

>  The weirdo’s like me who mull over the concept of artificial intelligence/LLM itself.

>  There is quite the fringe worried about if these things are some kind of demon or the beginnings of skynet or the Matrix

>  What will the proposed processes do to the dispersal of information?

>  How will these processes affect the government's means of control?

>  How will these processes affect the relationship between the different layers of government (e.g. local, state, federal).

>  I am certain that I will come up with more, but these will do for a start.

Truthfully, since someone is going to be deploying these entities in some manner, I think that we (that means me)  should sit down and sip some tea and take a good long ponder on just what this undocumented and experimental phenomenon implies.  I am not proposing that I am going to do anything about it, as that particular train has left the station, all that I can do is to figure out what tracks it is going to follow.

I have made a request to an associate for his definition of the odd term (Intelligence).  He thinks differently than I do and his thoughts make me tighten up what I am trying to get my brain around.  I am thinking that the definition itself might be part and parcel of the intellectual quandary surrounding the entire mess.   But he simply stated that there is no such thing as intelligence so that tactic went nowhere

But my initial thoughts are that these things are not “intelligent” per se, what they are is the scheme for replacement of the middle layers of a system of production that has gotten too large and was never intelligent in the first place. 

 In a concept that I first found attractive back in Greer’s days of the Archdruid, they are the agents of disintermediation.  Most tasks in the American landscape today can be uncharitably described as middle management drones and “specialists” that are actually a drag on the tasks being attempted.  When you look at the organization structure of even a small entity, you will see lines leading from the executive to arenas that have no connection whatsoever to production staff actually doing the job.  The same is true for any largish organization.  

The advent of the “computer age” that started to form back in the 1990’s is just beginning to bear its fruit in a serious way.  We have a society that I see as somewhat akin to the structure of the 18th century English countryside as the enclosure acts started to get traction and the upper classes of that particular (peculiar) society stopped giving any kind of fuck about the people “below” them.  

Just to make things clear, this particular piece of writing/thinking on my part is not the end point of the discussion of the points above, it is the beginning.  I will need to think through each of the parameters I have outlined above and then at the end of the process of analysis I will see how my initial prejudices fared after the process is complete.  

 

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Bird ID is one of the things that AI does well enough to be useful. We used to have someone on birdfeeding who would post their results like that periodically, which was fun to see.

In order to compensate for AI errors, you can look up suggested birds somewhere like All About Birds, then play the songs to check whether you recognize any of them.