An excellent comment from NLR expresses a valid insight concerning current "AI":
It feels weird reading machine produced writing (and I try to avoid it) because I know it's just words strung together with no understanding.
I'd rather read a well-written article by a human. Old search engines were good at finding those, even the old pages of links were helpful for that.
At enormous cost of electricity and manpower, people are being given something worse than a 1998 search engine. And yet we're supposed to believe that we're now more advanced and smarter than ever.
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Few people realize - or perhaps they can't remember, or don't believe - how incredibly powerful and useful search engines were twenty years ago.
I was editing the journal Medical Hypotheses at that time, a job that entailed a great deal of web searching, and could find almost anybody or anything, on any subject - with that information's source and provenance; updated with newly posted material (if necessary) more than once a minute. The Google search engine, in particular, was then a superb tool.
It strikes me that the truly colossal degradation of search engines over the past 15 years - to the current point of near uselessness - may have been part of a strategy preparing for the top-down imposition of current "AI".
9 comments:
there is a point after which it becomes meaningless, and impossible, to distinguish between lack of intelligence, incompetence and evil. and it all seems to coalesce in so called AI.
@Laeth - I think it is worth trying to distinguish between these.
When there is, as in this case, a long term strategic commitment (in face of changes in owners and managers, pressures to do other things, or to stop doing the thing) - I think we can be confident that there is evil motivation behind it all, and that stupidity, insanity etc are secondary facilitators.
@Bruce,
agreed. but i was looking at the other side, meaning, the people who are enamoured by it - as by, say, the 'god-emperor'. many other examples from all sides could be given of course, but it does seem that AI cuts through these divisions and gets people from all sides on board the stupid, evil train.
By rights it should be a doddle for an artificial intelligence machine to ape a 1998 era search engine.
See, I'm tempted!
@to - "By rights" it ought to be possible to take men to the moon and back in 2025; yet it hasn't actually happened for fifty years.
As a civilization, we have a infinite capacity for deluding ourselves that we could do whatever great things people did in the past, only we just don't happen to want to - and somehow they never actually happen.
@Laeth - I suppose I am suspicious of explanations for bad social stuff that point the finger at "stupid" - because people of *above* average intelligence are the main problem, the driving force, in almost all the worst trends; and stupid people usually seem less deeply corrupted.
For instance, the problem of rising incompetence is substantially (not wholly) due to the clever-silly pseudo-explanations of how to perform functions like medical care, or education; and similarly incoherent-abstractions about matters such as sex and race and the nature of skill, that are incomprehensible to the stupid.
@Bruce, i understand what you mean and agree but i'm not using the term in a technical way. for me someone who falls for the traps of the devil is stupid, regardless of their measured IQ or degrees from prestigious universities or whatever else is considered technically intelligent.
I want to say that these kids just never got to experience the power of true search engines, and that they don't know better, but then I realize that even my peers don't seem to remember. It's one of the remarkable phenomena of this time, the inability to remember beyond the current psyop cycle. Dark City like, except that movie missed what all dystopian stories seemed to miss, that people do this to themselves.
@Sean - It sometimes feels like "I must be wrong" when "everybody" else forgets - which is, I suppose, part of the PSYOPS. Luckily, I'm one of those people who is used to being in a minority of "one" who is in-the-right! (or just a few).
Another example is when nearly-all scientists used to be honest about their work and their field, all the time, and even in small things. It really was real! Things really were different in some respects.
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