Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/10/brighton-general-election-candidate-uk-first-ai-mp-artificial-intelligence

I have something to contribute to the "pro" side of the ledger - machine translation. I've spent hours reading the French version of Wikipedia. I'm reading updates on current events in China from accounts that only tweet in Mandarin. It is a miracle.

i mean the google app camera to translate? finally, I can read all those essays included in japanese CD pressings.

machine translation. It is a miracle.

tell that to translators who lost their jobs

machine translation is quite bad in quality but infinitely better than no translation, so for people who had no access to translation it is pretty miraculous, the unfortunate thing is a lot of people who were paying translators decided that quite bad is good enough for them too, which means a lot of people lost their work and a lot of high quality translation is now low quality, the classic disruption story

Similarly, ML captions riddled with obvious errors were deemed to be accurate enough to make my team's edited captions a luxury item.

you just know this shit is going to get people killed, some big industrial machine is going to ship with a shoddy computer translated manual

the first death by robot occurred in 1979

I'm French/English bilingual and have experimented quite a bit with Chat GPT translations and found it pretty impressive. Don't know how it fares with other languages

Using Google Translate’s camera to translate Japanese CD liner notes isn’t putting anyone out of a job at least. Those things were never translated.

Yup. Increased automation can be a great thing. The problem -- as polyphonic states -- comes in as to what we do about the jobs lost due to automation.

Google Translate is still hilariously bad at translating speech, as I have found out on numerous occasions when using it in the compang of my in-laws. The nuances of a conversation seem to utterly defeat it. So there will be a job for translators of real-time speech long after the ones for translating documents have gone.

https://trossachs.co.uk/mountains/ben-aan/

ho ho holy shit

Once more of this kind of drivel escapes onto the internet it will surely be used to 'train' the next generation of LLMs, subsuming us all beneath an accreting tide of bollocks.

are there any recent articles about jobs lost due to automation? I think it's still a drop in the bucket compared to outsourcing and moving production around to the least expensive global locations

outsourcing is more wealth extraction rather than job loss since those jobs are still being presumably done by humans though?

It feels like there's more and more jobs now than ever, just fewer and fewer meaningful and/or reasonably-paying ones.

well, it's job loss in the country that's outsourcing

I kept joking with my coworker about that goofy Amazon grocery store concept they shut down. You know, the one that claimed to have no cashiers, but they did have a team of 1000 people in India working in shifts analyzing the video to both train a video analyzer and actually tally up the purchases.

They may have not had a cashier, but they did employ 1000 people in India!

youd think that one wouldve been doable every item just has a tag on it and the computer reads them it doesnt seem that hard but no

Yes a lot of companies/consultancies that claim to automate processes by using tech actually make most of their profit by facilitating outsourcing.

But in specific cases like translation/making subs I think the automation has led to job losses.

Automation is not a straight line, it takes a long time to develop.

This piece cites the prediction made a few years back that radiologists would cease to exist by now, but so far it hasn't happened.

Not to say it won't.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/paul-taylor/llamas-pizzas-mandolins

lol that is an amazing url, thank you

i hung out with this dude once whose job was to dissect ferrets and remove some organ to send on to labs using them for research. it occurred to me that these type of jobs that build up training chips for ML models will probably always exist, but they will be low paying jobs. i could see AI wiping out the middle class this way, especially the white collar upper-middle class.

That was a really good piece

tell that to translators who lost their jobs

― reggae mike love (polyphonic)

i'll keep saying it as long as i need to - the problem isn't the machines, it's _capitalism_.

now that linux has been fully co-opted by the beast, which is the true socialist OS to run our solar-powered LLMs on? (there's a cool solar-powered online zine that does run on linux though: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/)

yeah pretty wild that we keep developing this technology to make people's jobs easier and it's universally seen as a bad thing

ryan broderick has a good piece today about, er, pieces like that

Last week, a group of former OpenAI employees came forward with a very scary warning that AI companies have been acting secretly and irresponsibly and need to be regulated. Was this group of insiders ringing the alarm bell on rampant copyright infringement? No. What about the fact that racial biases are being encoded into these models? Nope. Misinformation and destruction of journalism? Don’t be stupid.

Rather than anything that currently matters or even exists, this group is actually very worried about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction,” as they wrote on their website. It makes for good headlines and is enough to earn them the token New York Times arms-crossed whistleblower photo, but let’s be real. This is just marketing.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/cargo-cults-autocorrect

ai is really in an alltime hype cycle right now, usually you dont get people thinking the hot new thing is going to exterminate humanity

we've already got climate change doing it but that isn't a money maker :(

climate change is increasing human misery but has no chance to wipe us out

no chance?

life won't resemble anything we would recognize today, but the special suits for the surface visits will probably be pretty cool

if were talking total extinction in my uneducated opinion its not zero but its close would prob require some weird spiraling climate effects where the planet ends up like venus or in a snowball earth situation just totally uninhabitable, major shit hitting the wall societal collapse scenarios are a lot more on the table imho tho idk how likely they are its pretty hard to figure

tho it is the fan that shit hits i guess

if things keep going the way they are the shits going to have to hit the air conditioner am i right folks

to be clear i dont really believe in shit hitting the fan societal collapse scenarios thats just shorthand for very bad things happening like war or famine, as long as theres two people society will be ongoing, maybe one person is enough

are you preparing for your role as last man

i have few different kinds of boots

doesn't last person have to be combo man / woman

is there nothing the trans agenda will not attempt to coopt

is there nothing the trans agenda will not attempt to coopt

― lag∞n

on behalf of the trans agenda, no

truly diabolical

how do we decide which jobs are worth “saving” from automation

Ones that solve actual problems.

You present them to a panel of four celebrity judges

counter-proposal: just let the Trans Agenda decide

not speaking for the Trans Agenda: i say we let the market decide

and by that i mean we make healthcare universal and give everyone a UBI so that nobody _needs_ to work

funded by taking all the money from the .01% richest people, and by taxing the shit out of income aside from that

celebrity judges idea is fine too as long as all the judges are trans

my son, who is just learning to read, picked up a free Spiderman book on a stoop this week, and it wasn't until we got home that he realized it was in French (lol Brooklyn). he was heartbroken. first actual positive cultural experience with ML: using the camera and the translate app and being able to read the book together at bedtime.

Sounds like an Apple commercial waiting to happen