That still isn’t a purpose, but I guess a better example would be something that’s useless to everybody. Like wisdom teeth.

Right, so if it instead was a tool for say translation, that’s more narrow tool use. But it still stunts your ability because you’ll lean into it vs. trying to learn the words yourself.

It depends upon how you use it. I use Google Translate to aid me in learning Esperanto, but I’m using it as adjunct to my dictionaries, textbooks, and other sources. It isn’t my teacher, and it isn’t my single source of truth. More often than not, it’s the last resort when everything else has failed, and I’m wary of the results it gives me. Also, crucially, I’m learning the language so I don’t have to rely upon it for translations. LLMs are tools, not teachers.

Or say an augmentation to do instant math, hard problems, but then you start using it for stuff you could have done before in your head.

LLMs are terrible at math. I don’t think they’ve been able to fix that? It might even be one of those things that they can’t fix, simply due to how LLMs operate. In any case, we’ve had calculators for a long time, yet children are still taught math in school because society recognizes that understanding as crucial.

I think the problem comes from offloading your thinking onto a machine. Machines should do stuff that’s mentally taxing because it’s tedious, not because it makes you think too hard. The earring in that parable is Cory Doctorow’s reverse centaur taken to the furthest extreme.

This is like something you’d find in Warehouse 23 or an SCP facility. I think that an AI earring would actually get you killed long before you lost your mental faculties.

Evolution isn’t a directed process, so there’s no “purpose”. I, a male, have nipples. What evolutionary purpose does that have?

Yes, but when the shit hits the fan and they blame the AI, we shouldn’t let them get away with it. It’s their fault, not the computer’s.

I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.

1. AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.

2. It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.

3. They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.

And, of course, there’s

4. It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don’t quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.

The farm is only part of it. Whether they were raised on a factory farm or your neighbor’s farm, they all go to the same slaughterhouse. Unless you know farmers who do their own slaughtering, which I highly doubt.

do americans even realise how garbage their meat is?

No, they don’t. Part of it is the media doesn’t report on it, but part of it is it’s illegal to take photos or get video from inside of slaughterhouses. Also, a lot of people don’t want to know, because it would be inconvenient. They like the taste of meat, and they don’t want to quit eating it.

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Thanks for catching this! I fixed it. What’s remarkable is that apparently a lot of people don’t want to believe that this isn’t Vonnegut, which is why it slipped past me when I did a web search on it earlier.

I’ve tried contacting multiple places that have published this quote to have them retract it with no results. I’ve also contacted Snopes twice with no reply.

I was once contacted by someone who wanted to know my source for the quote because they were tracking Vonnegut’s archeology experience in his biography and wouldn’t believe me when I said it was about my own life.

That moment when your brain goes “This…but unironically”.

Do you want kidney stones? Because this is how you get kidney stones.

It’s only racism if it comes from the USA region of North America. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling discrimination.

Yeah, I was talking about the Gemini blurb at the top of Google search results.

Understand that the “AI” framing is pure marketing. It’s meant to get you to accept using LLMs to replace humans for every cognitive task. You have to decouple LLMs as a technology from the AI tech-bro hype train.

Oof. I think you need to find a better example than nuclear power.

LLMs existed before the AI craze. Sure, they’re useful in certain specific use cases. They aren’t a good substitute for a search engine or an artist or a therapist or any of the other myriad misuses now prevalent.

LLMs can make stuff resembling art. I’m not interested in it, though, because a human didn’t make it. What makes art art, what makes it interesting, is artists.

The room is filling with sewage. I’m not sure that this is a good thing.