stupidpol

It's a chatbot.

It literally just guesses the next word. The least-stupid versions have an extra mechanism to go, 'given this pile of pre-processed text, what's the next word?' The problem in full is people "deploing" a stupid chatbot as if it's one of Asimov's robots.

The introductory complaints echo Socrates railing against writing. 'It will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.' 'You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.' We let the encyclopedia talk, and it's going to end civilization! Nah. On the list of current existential threats - not in the top ten.

It spends seven pages glazing institutions as the only good thing holding society together... then basically leads with "Admittedly, our institutions have been fragile and ineffective for some time." Later: "It is unreasonable to expect the kind of superhuman willpower necessary for all of us at scale to indefinitely avoid the worst temptations of AI." Given the spread and vigor of kneejerk opposition to even the least uses of AI - surely blaming the robot is perfectly doable. Certain business institutions live quarter to quarter, and will gladly jettison this latest foolproof guarantee of infinite growth for the next salesman's promise of same.

"There has been much written lately about how the rule of law has broken down among celebrated democracies," citing a paper about twenty years of alarming decline. This tech is five years old.

This is erudite nonsense. A moral panic wearing elbow patches. I'm not reading past yet another slippery-slope morality tale where making [blank] easier makes people worse at [blank] so we must always do [blank] the hard way. As if Desmos ruined mathematics and now there's no more mathematicians. If you do engineering with a slide rule instead of longhand, you're a thief of expertise.

Rubbish.