If you've been knee-deep in the technology industry for as long as many of us have been, it's hard not to feel that you're part of the problem and not the solution.
Which is probably too bleak a view. There's no doubt that tech can be a force for good. Sometimes directly, like Google using artificial intelligence to diagnose tuberculosis cases. Yes, TB is still a dangerous disease that affects something like 10 million people a year.
TB is treatable, but it needs to be diagnosed. Google's Health Acoustic Representations, catchily abbreviated as HeAR, can help with that. Researchers from Big G said they trained the HeAR bioacoustics foundation model, which is a large general purpose artificial intelligence "blob" of statistical inferencing, on 300 million pieces of "audio data curated from a diverse and de-identified dataset".
A cough model - yes, that's what the researchers call it - was trained as part of the above, with around 100 million cough sounds. The sounds come from copyright free (!) sources like YouTube clips and recordings from a Zambian hospital. AI is very good at spotting patterns in data, and an app on a smartphone can be used to listen to people coughing, and help diagnose TB.
In fact, patients can simply use their mobile phones, cough, and receive a TB diagnosis with 94% accuracy.
There are many other applications of AI for healthcare, like developing promising new mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccines; for New Zealand, the AI melanoma detection tools for doctors and dermatologists are particularly relevant and already in use.
AI for hearing aids is another. Humanity is growing increasingly hard of hearing, as the world is growing louder and louder - in no small part due to technology subjecting us to ear-battering noise levels. This is, somewhat unironically, now becoming another business opportunity for tech companies that can repurpose earbuds to help people not miss important verbal communication, with AI suppressing background noise while separating out speech.
That's now being developed as a useful accessibility feature, along with other things like live captions and haptics (buzzing and vibrations) for alarms and alerts that might otherwise go unheard. Have a read of Apple's page on the subject of hearing accessibility.
Nothing of the above is for free, and technology doesn't take place in isolation. As has become increasingly apparent, the power requirements of AI are truly monstrous. Data centres are "pigs when it comes to energy use, and now they're the size of an elephant" as Eric Woodell told Reuters recently. Woodell is an expert on that subject whose consultancy "offers guidance to companies on how to prevent IT outages, safeguard online transactions, and protect customer data".
That's before we get into PFAS - per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances - being used extensively to make chips, or semiconductors. The "forever chemicals" which don't break down and disappear are toxic, but we don't know quite how bad yet.
At a political level, it may seem weird that with so much room for improvement in their industry and opportunities to improve people's quality of life like, not wrecking the planet for everyone, the IT grandees have flipped right-wards, and quite openly express disturbingly unkind opinions. Elon Musk is one example, but who hurt Marc Andreesen, the coder who was instrumental in developing the Mosaic web browser that became Netscape Navigator back in the 90s?
Andreesen is now enormously wealthy. As the founder of Andreesen Horowitz the venture capitalists, the money means he's being listened to. People might even take his incoherent "techno-optimist manifesto" from last year seriously, in which among others he name checks an interesting chap from the 1900s, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Marinetti was one of the authors of the Fascist Manifesto, and you'd think openly endorsing a losing ideology like that, one which caused immeasurable suffering to humans and the world, is not something anyone would do. There you have it though, and Andreesen is not alone.
Some of the political tilt to the right no doubt comes from the geeks becoming rich while growing old and bitter, with their already low empathy towards other people being further blunted.
Another factor is that if you're in tech, and have made a decent fist of it, you can get away with almost anything. Tech can be difficult to understand, since much of it is black box stuff: most people don't know how it works, particularly not by looking at it. Which is fine, and true for other industries as well, but it does leave the people who understand tech in a powerful position.
Sometimes though, there's no need even to understand tech. You just need to be able to convincingly repeat important sounding terms and run slide shows with numbers presented without meaningful context.
Like at a certain event recently in New Zealand, which I will not name so as to avoid give nonsense like web3 and crypto oxygen. It was attended by important people who clearly take an uncritical view of the comically bad tech in question, and never bothered to check media reports on who was sent to prison recently for money laundering. Tech is fine to pull wool over people's eyes with, but getting tricksy with money? Uh-oh. Don't try that.
And no, I'm not going to mention Donald Trump flogging NFTs along with pieces of his suit. Oh oops, I did. If you think about it, it means Trump understands the purpose of the tech, albeit not the finer details of it.
43 Comments
Quite - my limited experimentation is if you upload a structured data file it’s absolutely awesome at detecting patterns, graphing, summarising. If on the other hand you ask a more general question, it handles the first one, but then when you ask a follow up question it promptly flies in to the nearest hill and destroys itself.
So:
1. Data helper i.e. machine learning - good
2. Esoteric questions - laughable
I don't really think IT has materially made a difference to most people's lives because it just hasn't had much impact on productivity.
Now I read new on my phone instead of newspaper, share jokes on Facebook instead of at the pub, my data is saved in the cloud instead of in a photo album or folder at home but none of these things have transformed the lives of ordinary people. This isn't a globally transformative technology like the printing press was to knowledge, machine tools in manufacturing or agricultural mechanisation which meaningfully improved human life for subsequent generations.
The other thing is the deployment of IT in businesses has been very slow and poor. Often they've essentially mirrored manual processes so delivered no meaningful benefit to business and I've seen a lot of technology deployed that actually reduced productivity.
I don't really think IT has materially made a difference to most people's lives because it just hasn't had much impact on productivity.
Is there a typo in here? "IT" should read "AI" maybe? Or did you mean "it" as a pronoun? Because IT (information technology) has definitely had more than a minor impact on productivity.
Then the question might be, has all that productivity really improved people's lives? Has it positively improved people's lives and productivity at home? The issue is attempting to view everything through economic values.
In many cases IT can be a massive cost sink with no improvement in anything. And given the massive increase in technology over the last 20 years, where's the productivity?
Our history does suggest though, that humankind lacks the wisdom to use it's tools for a greater positive benefit.
ChrisOfNoFame was decidedly short on examples of productivity. I even asked Copilot and the seven examples it gave were unimpressive. It is nice not having to wait in line so much these days at the bank or the insurance office. Planning a holiday is much easier too.
Electronic payments, satellite launch, satellite design, aircraft design and operation, logistics, immigration & boarder control, navigation for those without astronomy degrees, efficient fuel control systems for everything from cars to tractors and ships. Rapid communication especially during natural disasters or emergencies such as roadside breakdowns. Computing the meaning of the sounds returned by ground penetrating radar used to find most of the materials used for modern life
Airplanes facilitate overseas holidays which presumably make people healthier. In terms of wealth, efficiency improvements in farming, logistics & distribution mean that where you could previously afford 1 potato per hour worked you can now afford a dozen. That counts as wealthier.
Where is that productivity if we can't measure it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2022/10/20/why-is-technology-no…
Ha. Thanks guys [posties]. And I thought I was the only one to think that big tech has just captured the processes [systems] rather than enabled them or even improved things. Tech does have some great features, however, like contributing on your favourite websites as posties. Or should that be ''threadies?''
AI is perfect for finding patterns in data, but just giving the accuracy is next to useless. Need the accuracy/precision/recall, or false negative/positive rate.
I can also give you an algorithm that will diagnose TB from coughs with >94% accuracy: Always negative. It's not a particularly useful algorithm.
It's all moving at a pace too fast for governments, society and the individuals' psyche to keep up with. And massively co-opted by the large corporations rolling it out. Can we even call it capitalism or a free market, if Amazon are algorithmically showing us what it wants us to buy?
And occuring the world over, I've spoken to people from more traditional cultures, they too notice the difference. Where the family or group would sit around a table, sharing a meal, some stories and a laugh, most everyone is now hunched over on their phones.
I guess it's going where it's going though.
Lol you keep forgetting the sarc tag Gummy...
Where exactly has the internet and AI taken us... Misinformation/disinformation, fake everything plus theft and plagiarism, reams of data and personal information stored to improve your online experience, an entire species recording and curating life for the internet, likes and followers.
An amplifier of knowledge lost in translation, encouraging narcissism and feeding fragile human egos. And the game doesn't change.
Exponential growth akin to parasites, viruses and cancer?
I can emphasise with the grumpiness. A lot has happened in a relatively short timeframe.
So much arcane learning, guano down the river.
A little spare on achievements. We've never been more connected and informed (and disconnected and misinformed)
Accurate on what too much money does to tech bros (or anyone)
Light on sharing blame with the marketeers (the hypers and spruikers) and license milkers.
Technology reduces dross with AI an accelerant. How wetware adapts/adopts always the problem.
The AI generated picture at the top of this article must have been especially chosen. What's going on with that lower lip, weird cheek bones, not to mention that insanely furrowed brow.
I just read up on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. What an interesting character! He invented Futurist cooking, fought and was wounded in WW1 and volunteered for the Eastern Front in WW2 at the age of 64. A leading figure in the Futurist movement that sought a fusion of artistic practices with advanced forms of technology.
Information technology is still a nerdy male dominated area and it's natural that some would be attracted to Marinetti, just like they are to LOTR and even Warhammer. Turning AI "based" will be on the agenda of many a tech minion, just for the lolz. Remember what happened to "Tay". Maybe if they were shown more empathy when at school things would have been different but tech is an arena where they now have some power and influence.
I use Copilot (AI) a lot as a handy assistant to quickly answer simple work questions. You can have a conversation with it. It's very useful now it is on the taskbar and I'd hate to be without it. I would have thought Boomers would like it as it greatly simplifies looking things up yet I have found few want to be educated about it. It was nigh on impossible to get the Silent Generation to grasp the Internet, and now Boomers’ eyes glaze over when I show them Copilot.
Humans have an "avidity for pattern": our brains are using pattern every day. How do I recognize, say, a former childhood friend by his face that I haven't seen for 60 years? By the pattern of their facial features that I unconsciously registered in my brain those 60 years ago, despite that person having developed heavier jowls, creases in their skin or even a beard and/or a moustache in the intervening years. The brain can still identify those initial patterns that enable you to identify that person. You may not remember his name but most times a hint will enable you to recall it even though, because you only heard it, it hasn't been registered as firmly; we seem to remember patterns seen better than patterns heard.
The bigger problem is increasing complexity. Every step we take now, chasing the diminishing returns left with energy efficiencies, demands complexity.
Tainter wrote the bible: Collapse of Complex Societies.
Well worth the read. We are heading for the demise of the internet - impossible though that may seem to most. We are triaging flat-out, if we could only see. Heath, LG infrastructure, Public Service, all decaying, all costing more than we can 'afford'.
It depends on your perception of 'good and bad'.
If you ignore PDK (at all of our peril) and think growth is good, Tech and AI is pure good.
Tech has helped most industries get more done, in the same amount of time, with fewer people. Those people are freed up to do more, thus more GDP, aka more growth.
AI will do the same. It's only just begun.
In terms of the web, there are estimates that half of content is now being generated by AI. A lot of it is nonsense that invades privacy, doesn't acknowledge ownership or place any value on what people create. No wonder the quality is slowly moving behind pay walls.
This from MIT Tech Review - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-tow… - about what may happen to at least the social parts of the web.
And a commentary on AI from Jaron Lanier - https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the… - that asks some bloody awkward questions and asks us to stop mythologising AI.
I first used the web in 1995, for commercial research and technical data book downloads that were suddenly available on line (and made our painstakingly maintained paper library obsolete within about 2 years). That usefulness is still there, but the vast majority of what it's become is a hideous, corrosive, untrustworthy mess.
Just disconnect from social media: it's not doing you any good.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.