swansont

No. Why would you think that? How does a criticism of a lack of substantiation connect with agreement/disagreement?

You emphasized the wrong bit; that’s an example of what I meant by the lousy track record. The nobody behind the curtain part means that AI is not sentient, and IMO it’s not a good practice to treat it as such.

You do understand that if the computer sends information through the speakers it’s synthesized and not actually speaking, right? Right? I don’t think I’ve ever said “Hey Siri” because that came later on. As I recall, when Siri was first included you had to do something (hold the home button, perhaps) to get it to work, and it didn’t work very well for what I wanted. So I turned it off and haven’t looked back. (as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t want my devices listening to me, because tech companies have an IMO lousy track record of restraint when it comes to gathering personal information) But it was only voice recognition technology tied to a search engine. There’s no man (or woman) behind the curtain.

Part of the issue is anthropomorphizing it; ChatGPT doesn’t “say” anything and can’t truly be objective because it lacks the capacity to do so. ChatGPT will return a result that’s some admixture of what humans have previously said, and all LLMs have biases that depend on their algorithm and training (as recently mentioned, see Grok) I don’t see how that’s an issue for me to address. “We” do? The reason I brought up the lack of substantiation is that I don’t. I hear how Eric Schmidt was booed for touting AI in a commencement address in Arizona, which followed some other speaker being booed for similar sentiments offered up in Florida.

Yes, but that’s beside the point. Water’s behavior (or any other aspect of nature) is not defined by our knowledge of it. No, it does not. Assigning the meaning of numbers is extrinsic. Rolling an 18 with 3d6 is the best value for a skill, but you could just as easily say 3 is best. Numerology claims the meaning is inherent in the number and in nature.

Two things: -The objection in this thread has been about AI use in general, by the great unwashed masses and showing up in seemingly every aspect of tech and the consumer experience, and your counterexamples are in some very specific areas. -I’m seeing a lot of unsubstantiated claims about how good AI is, and yet I know I can find reports of the problems I’ve described, such as https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/ And the latter is my objection. Having to be an expert to vet the responses, as opposed to every Jane, Dick and Harry using it. I read recently about someone who got in trouble for using AI to write an article and it hallucinated a quote used in the article. It was the New York Times’ Canada bureau chief, so not some green reporter, and the error was caught by a reader, not the editorial staff. https://thewalrus.ca/the-new-york-times-got-caught-using-ai-hallucinations-in-its-reporting/ I ran across a good use for it a while back; someone used it to give them decorating ideas for a new table in their living room. It works because there’s no right answer, so veracity isn’t an issue. (the ethical problems remain, of course) My objection isn’t to niches where it works. I made a comment about blockchain earlier; that didn’t go away - it found the niche where it’s useful, and the hypemasters who proclaimed it would transform the world finally shut up.

A seatbelt doesn’t save lives of people who don’t get into accidents. You only mentioned driving, which means it’s irrelevant to the issue. If you had said you’d been in an accident and didn’t die despite not wearing a seatbelt, that would be an anecdote, but still irrelevant. The combination of the two make it a crappy argument. In the US, about half of auto accident fatalities were people not wearing seatbelts, yet the vast majority wear seatbelts. If seatbelts did nothing, the odds of dying would be the same whether or not you wore one. When looking at a large sample (not anecdotes) you’d expect fewer fatalities since there are fewer people in that group. https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/seat-belt-statistics/

If there’s a physical process it’s there whether we understand it or not. Water boiled at 100C before we understood thermodynamics.

It’s what I see, as I’m not a part of those conversations among those end users. I only know a few people who use it, and one person’s buy-in is scary, since it’s the same use that has been repeatedly reported as being unreliable: medical advice. That’s a fatalist attitude; it’s true of any technology. Blockchain was the “next big thing” not that long ago, and we didn’t “need to learn to use it”. I never bought any NFTs and my home appliances are not internet-enabled, and I’ve somehow survived.

But the patterns are tied to physical processes; as MigL noted, it’s rooted in causality. Finding the pattern can possibly lead to seeing what the underlying physical process is. Numerology has no such connection - it’s assigning meaning based on superstition or belief. Horoscopes based on numerical values.

The movie was history-based fiction, not a documentary. There are accounts of the concern that are easily found - basically someone asked if it could trigger a nitrogen fusion chain reaction, and then others did the physics, and answered, “no” Where is the technical analysis? How about posting what CERN actually said, and not giving any credence to the crackpot conspiracy claims? But it is gibberish. It’s lacking in technical rigor, which you basically acknowledge when you remind us that you’re not a physicist.

I disagree about the wide margin part, but that might be a matter of expectations. It certainly seem to me that a lot of the hype is coming from the tech companies that have a stake in the success of AI, so it includes the financial backers and the companies who have incorporated it into their products.

No. I think it’s being forced into a lot of places by management, despite resistance by people compelled to use it. I think the marketing campaign is desperate, as is any campaign that relies on stoking fear (“you’ll be left behind”). As exchemist said, it’s being hyped.

“Requires appropriate usage” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since there are no protocols to ensure that, and the tech companies are going out of their way to try and push the tech on everyone

Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities; if you were familiar with it, not having 100% certainty would be utterly unsurprising.