this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Futurology
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I think that if the AI had been running the country, it wouldn't have suggested crashing the American economy and potentially that of the rest of the world in the first place, but if you ask it stupid questions then you'll get stupid answers.
You seem to think AI understands anything. It literally does not understand anything.
It understands relationships between concepts, which is something that can be learned from reading text even without firsthand experience of the world. "Tariffs" is associated with "recession" and "recession" is associated with "bad".
Sort of. It understands "0.0023" is associated with "0.0037" and "0.0037" is associated with "0.15532"
Yes, but I don't see that as particularly significant in this context. Information, including the knowledge of economic theory stored in a human brain, can be represented digitally. The fact that a present-day AI presumably can't actually experience what it's like to be unhappy as prices rise and incomes fall doesn't affect its ability to reason about economics.
We should probably just agree to disagree. I think the strides made in AI are at the very least impressive and have made some things (text-to-speech, for example) better - if not enormously then at least noticeably.
But there isn’t a true analog to be had between calculated probabilities and conscious thought. The former is a mimic of varied competence, but has no logic inherent to it. It requires human maintenance, it’s only path to “growth” if we want to call it that, is a black-box of infinite probabilities it calculates at incredible speed.
It’s a super-magic-8-ball that we choose to pretend has agency of some sort. But it does not.
Nailed it. ChatGPT gave a pretty balanced definition, but at least it popped out "bad".
And if you put in Smoot-Hawley:
These people responding think you think AI is thinking. See, because they're smarter than you! This place fucking annoys hell out of me sometimes, just like old reddit. At least we're not run over with bots and fascists.
It's not the lighter's fault if someone uses it to burn down a forest. Especially if the lighter is yelling the whole time that it's a bad idea to burn down the forest!
But it would be partly the lighters fault if it used up more power and water than most countries do.
No? A lighter is a tool, it has no agency and as such can not carry blame. You can argue that the fault lies partly in the lap of the lighter's creator, but not the lighter itself.
But isn't fossil fuel just a tool that generates power when ignited? Fossil fuels aren't inherently bad, just like the lighter isn't. But the fossil fuels are being used in an unbalanced way, driven by profit.
Fossil fuels aren't to blame, it's capitalism. But fossil girls are partly at fault here for sure
You're assuming that crashing the economy wasn't what it was asked how to do.