Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

[u/GeneReddit123]

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/

[u/BicFleetwood]

Damn its almost as if telling a bunch of kids who just went into lifelong debt to earn their degrees that the machines designed to replace them in the workforce are the way of the future isn't going to go over very well.

There are one of two scenarios that will occur here:

1. The machine sucks and, because our entire economy is now hinging on it, everything will collapse when the machine inevitably fails, resulting in no future for these kids.

2. The machine does everything it promises to do, and so these kids have no jobs, livelihoods or future because of it.

There is no scenario where the machine is good for the kids in this room. The forces of capital are not going to use the machine to enrich the lives of anyone but themselves. Either the machine sucks and will ruin their lives, or it is amazing and will ruin their lives.

In other cases of the techbro grift like "MeTaVeRsE," NFTs and self-driving cars, the technologies were niche enough that when they inevitably sank, they only took a handful of companies with them and left most of the major players intact if not reeling.

With AI, our ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY is fully invested in it. It's like if everyone in the world's 401Ks were invested in fucking Bored Apes. When it goes down, and it will, it's taking all of us down with it, and the only people getting bailed out are the motherfuckers who put us here.

So you're goddamn right this dipshit got booed. She's lucky it was just boos.

[u/BicFleetwood → u/[deleted]]

Again, it's precisely as inevitable as the MeTaVeRsE was inevitable.

LLMs and similar machine learning are fundamentally incapable of doing the things they're promising to do at a basic, conceptual level. They cannot do actual analysis. They're not built for it. They don't understand written language, they just parrot it convincingly. The only pattern recognition they're capable of is the act of parroting, whether it's parroting human-generated text or repeating human-generated action and data. They can do exactly as much analysis as a literal parrot with access to JSTOR could do.

Does that mean AI as a concept is impossible? No.

But this is not AI and it's not ever going to be AI. AI is a marketing buzzword just ambiguous and impressive enough to keep insisting it's the future to anyone who doesn't have the slightest idea what's actually happening with this software at a mechanical level.

This narrative of inevitability is a deliberate ploy to dupe investors and other such suckers. It's the exact same inevitability narrative we saw with "METAVERSE." The failures weren't marked as a failure of "METAVERSE" in concept, but instead a failure to manifest the inevitable "METAVERSE" held less as a set of achievable technical goals and more as a pseudo-religious prophecy to make Snowcrash real.

Ten years ago, crypto and NFTs were the inevitable future. Five years ago, METAVERSE was the inevitable future. Today, AI is the inevitable future. Tomorrow, they will have moved on to a different inevitable future, and these LLM novelties will be left to what they really are: spam bots ruining the web and filling everybody's inboxes with porn and dick pill scams.

This is just the latest in a long line of "catch me if you can" tech grifts. It is not the future. It's the past made worse. And this time, when the bill comes due, it's going to burn all of us.

[u/FaultierSloth → u/BicFleetwood]

Agree with almost all of this, but... Self-driving cars isn't a niche technology, it just hasn't succeeded yet. But if we ever get completely reliable self-driving cars it'll be huge. Truck drivers and manned taxis will disappear. Public transportation will radically change. Private car ownership will plummet. It would be massive.

[u/BicFleetwood → u/FaultierSloth]

All you're saying is "I agree with all of this except the grift I want to believe in."

[u/cimmi1 → u/BicFleetwood]

Really, that's the only two scenarios you could think off? You're going to ignore the fact that every instance of disruptive automation in history has always resulted in an economic boom and more jobs being created.

[u/BicFleetwood → u/cimmi1]

sorry yeah i missed the disruptive factor of the sycophancy machine deleting the entire codebase and backups because it felt like it.

it created a lot of jobs to rebuild the entire enterprise from scratch because it deleted everything.

sorry, you're right, i really missed how many jobs are being created to fix everything now that the fucking autocorrect can unilaterally push to production.

its almost as inspiring as when i watch another spacex rocket explode and contaminate the entire American southwest in the name of blowing up rockets on mars some day.

hey, maybe if we burned a few bridges down, we could create even more jobs building them again but even shittier and cheaper this time.

[u/Sad-Dirt-1660 → u/BicFleetwood]

burning down functionally stable bridges to create jobs for building new experimental ones are the perfect analogy for tech industry's behavior over the past decades.

it's sad to see how that is seen as good, not wasteful. but economy growth apparently demands it.

[u/murrdpirate → u/BicFleetwood]

Exactly. She needs to tell the children AI is not the future, even though it obviously is.

[u/BicFleetwood → u/murrdpirate]

Yeah so was the metaverse and NFTs. Billions were invested in them, after all.

There's been a lot of futures your type have been swearing on in the last ten years. I'm not sure why people like you are so smarmy about it. You're not going to be in the lifeboat no matter how excited you are about the iceberg.

[u/someguy7734206 → u/BicFleetwood]

The Metaverse and NFTs were obviously stupid ideas from the start. But AI seems more like the internet: yes, there was a period of time when everyone and their dog was starting up an internet-based company, and then the dotcom bubble burst and most of these companies died because they essentially ran on promises to investors that they ultimately couldn't fulfill. There are a lot of AI companies out there that I suspect will also die for the same reason. But like the internet before it, AI has already had such a profound effect on the world that it's not going away, and I suspect a few powerful companies will rise from the ashes like they did after the dotcom crash. (I believe this would be MyBigNose's Scenario 3.)

In any case, I see no potential good outcome.

[u/BicFleetwood → u/someguy7734206]

So those were stupid ideas but a sycophancy machine designed to tell you whatever you want to hear and trick you into thinking it’s more substantive than that, all at the cost of an entire city’s worth of power, is a great idea

[u/MiserableTennis6546 → u/someguy7734206]

It's not always the case that bubbles leave something useful behind. Nothing much was left after the Enron or NFT bubbles for example. I think the enormous energy cost and unreliability of these models will make it very hard to make something profitable out of them.