From Project Syndicate:
AI Productivity Growth Won’t Match the Computer RevolutionThose promoting AI would be lucky to see the technology’s impact on output per hour match even the short-lived burst of the 1990s and 2000s. Productivity growth will underwhelm, not because the technology is weak, but because it creates a bottleneck that earlier digital tools largely avoided.
From Gary Marcus:
Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disastersLLMs are a great tool for professionals who know what they are doing. For the normal idiot, vibe coding is a coin toss, in a dark room.What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you
I should probably have come up with a tag for this, it appears so often: LLM bullshit/slop overwhelms "{$domain}". From 404 media:
People Using AI to Represent Themselves in Court Are Clogging the SystemMore people having access to the courts is potentially good, but it’s not clear how the system can handle this increase in cases.
Introduced by Yves Smith at naked capitalism, a post by "Servaas Storm, a Dutch economist and author who works on macroeconomics, technological progress, income distribution & economic growth, finance, development and structural change, and climate change."
Russell’s Teapot: Dispatches From the Final Stage of the AI BubbleIt is a good, thoughtful review of the current shape of things. The title references Bertrand Russell’s (1952) Tea Pot Analogy, which I had never heard of.Servaas systematically (and often wryly) takes apart the key claims of AI touts. One of my faves: “No, AI will create a lot of bullshit jobs.”
Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.He lists 8 claims made by the genAI hype machine, & then explains why they are "teapots". The reference to David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" [the review/summary of which book I am still bogged down on] is in Claim #6.
Pointed at by Kottke, a very thoughtful article. The Bullshit Apocalypse is indeed apocalyptic - actually the author uses the word "catastrophic".
The Social Edge of IntelligenceThe author mentions "Degenerative AI", which we have seen before. AIs trained eating their own slop downward spiral into complete unintelligibility almost immediately. They need to be trained onAI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.
The more people use genAI, the less original training data there will be for our ever-hungry LLMs. The hundreds of daily hits I get on my blogs are certainly 99% AI training bots. So I am performing a service for the AI companies - for free, just like everyone else.
The author:
Bright Simons is a researcher, activist, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of global value chains, technology strategy, and institutional governance & design. He is the founder of the mPedigree Network, and affiliated with IMANI and ODI Global, both think tanks.His theory of how to make genAI work is:
The Social Edge Framework outlined here is a direct counterpoint to Amodei, Aschenbrenner, and Altman. It is a program of action to counter the human redundancy fantasy. It challenges the self-fulfilling doom-spirals created by the premature reallocation of material resources to a vision of AI. I speak of the philosophy that underestimates the sheer amount of human priming needed to support the Great Recode of legacy infrastructure before our current civilization can even benefit substantially from AI advances.
Finally, today, another post from Gary Marcus:
“A model that produces code which compiles and passes the tests it was given is not the same as a model that produces correct, secure, maintainable, well-architected software”A lot of code is being written by AI, but what does it mean?
...
Realism re AI coding is knowing that next-word prediction gets us a surprisingly long way in writing code, but less far in making sure that code is robust. Coders (especially vibe coders with little experience) beware.
And all you OpenClaw devotees, that goes 10x, if not 100x, for you.
That Gary Marcus article reminded me of some WOW (Words of Wisdom) I have printed & taped up on the bookshelves in my home office, for decades now. I have always thought these really conveyed the gist of coding & software development/architecture.
Computer Programming:
- Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
- The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.
Software Engineering:
- Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
- Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #119.
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