posted in Technology
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-business-incentive-to-lie-useless-chatbots-report-nikhil-suresh
The NerveCory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lyingIt has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
Replying to @floofloof@lemmy.ca
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
Replying to @eah@programming.dev
I’m glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They’re very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn’t warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.
I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI…
Replying to @zergtoshi@lemmy.world
Wasn’t Nano predicated on those lines? I remember reading transactions could be done locally, even off-line, validated beetween the parts and only later added to the global ledger.
Replying to @qyron@sopuli.xyz
Nano uses “proof of stake” instead of proof of work to decide the order of transactions, and who receives block rewards.
The main problem with PoS is that it’s essentially the same as Federal Reserve bonds: all the new money goes towards people with extra money to freeze. This is part of why inequality has spiraled out of control since the Nixon Shock. Proof of work literally burns most of the profits because of difficulty adjustment.
A more specific problem with Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) is that the entire supply was centrally issued, with a pinky promise from this private organization that they only issued coins by CAPTCHA. If they were lying, then they could have issued 51% of the supply to themselves for permanent control. The only way we’d be able to detect it is if the price kept going down for years.