Something that strikes me as really weird about the AI age that we're in is we all know we've entered it, but no one was aware when we entered it.
It was like a time jump.
Two years ago we were mocking AI videos for their crappiness, speculating that AI may or may not be all they're saying it's cracked up to be.
And now, we're in solid "AI is terrifying and I can't imagine the dystopia someone born today is going to grow up in regarding the all encompassing nature of AI"
And it's like having a black out when drunk. One minute you're in a bar. The next minute you're behind bars for public intoxication and you didn't remember anything in between.
That's how it feels with the AI thing.
Of course we always had trepidations from early on, but unlike certain ages, the age of woke, the age of covidians, the age of seeing the extent of the brainwashing, there were solid markers of "we were there, and now we're here and here's what led to that."
But with AI, I don't know if it's similar to you, but it was like a realtime mandella effect where suddenly we're in the AI age and it felt just like yesterday we were mocking the "Will Smith eats spaghetti" and there doesn't seem to be a clear moment where everyone took AI for the serious existential threat that it is....it just happened, like a black out from drinking. It's a very strange feeling.
That's because it's entirely synthetic.
AI is not a technology ready for mainstream use; it's buggy, high cost, and totally unreliable. It reminds me of VR in that respect.
But certain people want it to be adopted and are pumping billions of dollars into something thatvis incapable of paying out. Human tech support is being pushed out, not because AI can do the job, but because someone wants people to be unemployed and dependent on the government.
This is a pretty good assessment. AI is actually in a really good place for hobbiests right now. There's a lot you can run on your own box for personal use, it doesn't matter too much if something you're operating for your own use only goes off the rails, and there's no question if something is permissible or not. If you ask it to do something, and it's capable of that, and it does what you asked it to, there's no problem.
Not so for big business. Turns out trying to verify that a clever machine designed to be very compliant never complies with malicious requests adds a lot of overhead.
And so we have AI that's good for generating porn, making up stories, pretending to be a hot girl or guy so you can flirt with it, and writing messy computer code at the level of a high school graduate. But not as useful as it was expected to be anywhere else.