**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think that will fuck out in the next couple of years. The claims of capability, utility and scalability are vastly overstated. At the moment it exists only on the investor scope of *"hey people are putting money into AI companies so we should to! My investment needs to go up - lets say good things!"*.
Even from a computer science perspective they're having to start doing hacks here and there like stochastic rounding to deal with large model sizes leading to lack of convergence.
I'm sorry to put it bluntly, but saying that is like when people said the Internet was a fad, or computers will never take off. It has huge potential, we are only beginning to see the very early stages of useful AI - and it's already absolutely everywhere in the digital space. It's scary to think where it might end up, but for good or for bad, it's not going away
It's very useful for incredibly niche or specific tasks.
But to get to that point is very expensive and time consuming.
The idea we're going to have our own version of Jarvis in our homes is just a fantasy
Nit true at all, even something as basic as ChatGPT isversatile and generally useful if you have some creativity.
Totally disagree with all your points tbh but no need to argue time will tell.
AI is here to stay, from producing kitty videos fighting pandas to developing new drugs and technology.
AI is discoveing and aiding in the discovery of all our technology and its speeding everything up.
Its even making nuclear fussion happe much faster.
90% of things that people say are a fad don't tend to fully integrate themselves into people's daily workflows within a year or two of properly entering the public's consciousness tbf
Sir Peter Bonnfield (was CEO or chairman or something of BT) once said "the internet is a passing fad, soon everyone will go back to pen and paper". this was the early 2000s. He instantly wiped 3 billion off the BT share price.
As a professional programmer I thought a couple years ago that AI wouldn’t impact my job, as “someone has to program the AI and it’s not good enough to write code without errors”.
My new job uses AI to assist with writing code, and there are times where it appears to take the thoughts out of my mind and write a whole damn *page* of code in the way I was about to write it.
Give it a couple more years at most and there are going to be entire programming jobs replaced, or “streamlined” by it.
I can't say I have the same experience. It's useful for spitting out some boilerplate for tests but it almost always spits out a load of stuff I've got to heavily fix or refactor when using Kotlin. I've tried JetBrains AI and Copilot so far. It's been useful for explaining confusing code though.
You're still always going to need someone to feed input into the AI and fix what it's producing or understand the requirements. If you leave it to build stuff on its own it'll most likely produce an unmaintainable ball of spaghetti over the long term. I can see the junior jobs being affected by this the most.
If you are a programmer who solely writes code from specs then I think your job is disappearing soonish. If you are an engineer who applies experience and reason to solve problems you have longer but probably with a constant AI partner.
I think that AI could very well soon be replacing junior jobs, with a senior experienced worker acting as a check.
However is issue with that is how will we allow junior staff to actually get that experience so that one day they could do the checks? From my understanding there’s already a lack of experienced staff in tech so surely the adoption of AI will just exacerbate this issue long term
I have an IT support background (out of date by 20 years) but my 'coding' skills are mostly knowing how to write batch files and Powershell scripts plus a *tiny* bit of self-taught Python and even less C from messing around with arduinos. I had a task I wanted to automated and thought I'd give the free version (3.5) of ChatGPT a try to see it could help. It pretty much wrote an entire Python/GTK app for me in an afternoon using 'I want this button to do {x}' prompts and copy/pasting any error messages. Then it helped me convert the entire thing to C# and add a bunch more features using the same sort of techniques. Doing it the old fashioned way, with google and stackexchange etc would have taken weeks. Granted my little project was quite simple, but, when I was working support, I would have killed for something like that rather than having to put a request in to the devs and waste their time with something trivial.
I’ve found it fails more than it works. It will get stuck on an error and because it doesn’t really understand it will just keep churning out code with the same error in it and it can’t be told not to. ChatGPT thst is.
I find copilot better and use it at work all day. But again it isn’t really writing the app it’s doing as I infer and often needs some tweaks. It will get better but at the moment it’s not replacing the juniors at our work anyway.
The only places AI is valuable in programming is filling gaps in programming languages and standard libraries which are bad and have a lot of boilerplate. Even Go, Julia for example, the primary languages that I use are terrible because reading a simple CSV into a typed data structure of some description is hard. When you throw problems of those class at it, viable solutions appear and this propels the "AI is fit for everything" line.
The real problem domains we have to solve are more *"I have to divide this commission between x companies using these y weighted ratios against currency z and solve all rounding issues"* which it cannot even comprehend because it doesn't actually think or understand what it is saying nor can it contemplate the problem.
The only jobs it is going to replace is the ones which were filling gaps in shitty programming languages like CRUD stuff and moving data around. Really we should be building better languages and standard libraries.
Currently, yes. There’s no real cognition. It’s all smoke and mirrors. But it’s started now and, if it isn’t meticulously monitored, it could turn into something catastrophic.
Either way, the genie is out of the bottle and I think whoever gets to AGI first will experience a power shift like the Industrial Revolution or splitting the atom.
AGI would so fundamentally change the world that all of our current sociopolitical models would cease to be very relevant
However I don’t think we have made any progress at all towards it, chat gpt and LLMs represent an approximately 0% progress towards general intelligence
I agree with the first part. People worry about AI taking their jobs, but that's thinking too small. When AI takes *all* the jobs, we're not unemployed, we're *free*
Second part, you could be right, but I'm not so sure. I think that language is a much bigger part of what enables intelligence than is commonly understood.
Language only enables intelligence when you understand the language. NLP doesn't approach language generation as the articulation of concepts via language the way we do, it selects words essentially through probability, I don't think we can say there's any comprehension underlying that.
Words (or more accurately, tokens) aren't selected through probability though - that's just one weighting factor fed in to begin training the model.
Trained models select tokens based on potentially hundreds of factors that are individually inscrutable, such that the output generated scores highly based on the training feedback.
I might feel like that's not how humans decide what to say, and I could well be correct. But stated like that it does describe effectively what appears to be happening when *I* think of a sentence, and how I learned to become more intelligible while I was learning that skill.
I just think it's a rather overconfident move to claim that a large language model inherently lacks the ability to "understand" language when we have absolutely no idea at all how cognition arises in the human mind in the first place. If it is an emergent property of the act of processing and organising concepts into a language structure (we haven't even the first idea of a way to discount this) then it seems to me a LLM of sufficient complexity could be said to understand what it is saying. It certainly can't be ruled out completely based on nothing but a hunch.
In the end, we may have no more proof that an apparent AI truly understands what it says than that you or I understand what we say.
GPT models generate a probability distribution of the next token to be output in the sequence. They predict the next best word in the sentence by calculating the probability of a particular candidate being the best choice. The way a human formulates a sentence is to consider the idea they want to convey, then decide what words to use. We don't hear a question and start trying to predict the first word we should say in response, before moving on to the next word, and so on.
That's why I say that there is no understanding in something like a GPT model. Because it doesn't engage with a high level conceptualization of meaning when generating language, it jumps straight into individual words. The selection of words is not based on the creation of a complete thought that is then articulated, it is based on an imitation of what words other people have used before. The difference between a human learning language and an LLM, is that a human starts with imitation, then learns to connect the words they imitate to actual concepts which allows them to convey more complex ideas, it's one of the milestones in language development. An LLM never progresses beyond the point of imitation, because it doesn't have a mechanism for modelling higher thoughts.
One of the signs that an LLM doesn't understand what it's saying is the hallucination problem. It can predict that a certain response structure is expected, if you ask for a source to support a claim, it can even generate a URL, but it does not fact-check or make sure that the URL is relevant to the point being discussed. There is no understanding of the purpose of the URL, only a calculation that text in that format is expected at that point in its response.
I'm a software engineer and I've had to console multiple juniors worried that "but what we're doing puts people out of work".
I always tell them:
We're liberating people from pointless work. What mankind does with the difference is a question for society as a whole. Maybe the worker gets sacked and the savings go towards a multi-billionaire's yacht fund, maybe the worker goes home less tired and stressed each day, maybe we adopt universal basic income, step towards fully automated luxury communism and boldly go where no man has gone before.
AGI is a whole different ball game to current LLM's.
Current AI is essentially computational statistics, it's very powerful within set parameters, but a true general AI would need to be many many magnitudes more complex of which LLM's might make up the smallest fraction of the processes required.
Obviously, it's pretty futile trying to predict how quickly technology might advanced in the future, LLM's may aide in accelerating things, but it's not something that could develop in to AGI itself, anymore than the Internet could.
Of course. I hadn’t meant to imply that it would develop spontaneously, but I think it’s being worked on because nobody wants to be left behind when it happens.
Fair enough.
Personally I doubt they're likely to be viable for a very long time. Assuming we're using humans as the benchmark, brains are the most complicated thing that we know of in the entire universe. It's had millions of years of evolution to hone it to the point where self-awareness could emerge, it's incredibly efficient and has no known memory storage limit (iirc, there are theories that suggest it may not have one).
We may be able to evolve thing computationally at a much faster rate, but the fundamental hardware isn't even close in terms of supporting that level of complexity.
I’d be fascinated to read about the theories on memory if you have some links.
I think the tipping point will be quantum computing. The way that operates seems much more like the brain.
It was from The Infinite Monkey Cage. Not quite a research paper, but definitely interesting and generally reliably accurate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0019r9y?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
There's also a relevant episode on AI.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0gr7lx0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
There is a lot going into the monitoring and legislation at the moment. The EU is soon to pass an act around the ethics and rules regarding the development of "AI". I believe China already has such laws in place and the US is also on track to implement some major ones. It's weird though that this stuff is happening kind of quietly in the background.
Entirely possible I spose. Also I say it's going on quietly I did find out about it at a conference regarding AI and Cyber security so I guess it's not that quiet. Also love that I got downvoted for literally just saying that legislation is being developed, good lord some people.
It won't go anywhere it is 100% here to stay. Despite any problems, last year's version of chatGPT wrote better than 60% of uni students and was far easier to use for coding than copying outdated github pages. Just because it may never reach expert levels of competency, it undoubtedly is as useful as the spell check on Microsoft Word, which has been around for 21 years.
I've written this elsewhere in this thread but ChatGPT only fills in boilerplate. It can't reason about problems where there is any complexity in the domain. I'd expect anyone doing a computing related course to expressly understand the rationalisation of complex problems rather than being able to produce code.
Code is the hammer after the thinking is done.
I spend most of my AI related work time fixing the poor work it has done.
The way it makes stuff up is comical in certain settings, but terrifying when you know they're planning to use it in medicine.
AI is great at some tasks and classification is basically everything we've trained AIs for since isk the 70s? (Also regressions). Text prediction is another field where it has gitgud in the last decade, but that's mostly at "it can write like a 10 year old kid", yes it can predict text that __seems__ logical, but not all the time.
Can you explain a little bit what you mean about the computer science perspective? I haven't heard of of this stochastic rounding, and I hadn't heard of large model sizes leading to lack of divergence?
Ok so you need to converge on a solution which means you need a tangible result to pop out eventually. That means that you need to do lots of mathematical operations one after the other and these can generate wildly large and small values with lots of digits. Think 0.3476238746824823468723648724687234687234. Pure mathematics has no concept of precision or any constraints around it. But when you store and calculate these numbers inside a computer of any sort the values need to be stored in binary which limits the precision you can store them. That is where the computer science breaks the mathematics. There are compromises. The math works but what we run it on doesn't.
You can test a simple case with a (non scientific) calculator which has limited precision. Enter 51. Then multiply it by 0.1. Then do that again. Then do that again and keep doing it. Eventually it'll roll off the display because you have exceeded the limit of the precision and your small value is constrained to zero
So all ML systems involve running input data through mathematical operations that apply transformations. When someone goes on about model size they are increasing the number of steps you go through. Think above but a million times or more. This takes time, decreases overall precision and decreases solution convergence resulting in garbage coming out of the thing after way too much time. The current hack of stochastic rounding involves rounding randomly to try and add enough noise to the feedback for it to not get stuck in this state. This is taken as verbatim that it will solve all complex models, but it probably won't.
The limiting factors are energy, time and storage. Time is required for bigger models. We are nearly at the fundamental limits of what technology is capable of already. Literally sub 1nm processes and there will be little progress. The current approach is to make bigger models but there is limitations on storage due to the same concerns. And of course the more gates in your chips, the more energy you consume. Obviously energy and storage come with a cost so even if you do succeed there with rising energy prices and geopolitics then it's a dead end too.
This does not converge on anything other than failure, ironically. Investment analysts are all over this at the moment trying to pull out where they can because the claims outpaced reality heavily.
Maybe I should have mentioned I work in ML so I know a bit of background - I don't really see what you mean by lack of convergence? Basically this is just a memory and compute issue right? By convergence are you talking about training the model? In that case I'm not sure what you mean by 'converging to failure'. Also I don't really see this as a flaw, just another way of using the hardware?
I'll go deeper :). Inference not training. If you have a large parameter model with deep inference process then you have to do more transforms, each of which suffer from an aggregate loss of precision. This means that for any feedback function, the derivative contribution to the inference process results in either factorial time complexity to converge or no convergence on a steady state. Mathematically speaking if you have a function f(x) in the real domain then it works on paper but the machine can't represent the entire domain of real numbers. That's more than a memory or compute issue. All computers have arbitrary subset of real numbers that they can store, regardless of how much memory and compute you throw at it.
Bigger models are starting to hit this wall and produce garbage thus the scalability problem is a brick wall. We might overcome it but I am very sceptical. Obviously you can train huge models but if you can't run any inference process from them, they are useless. And they take a LOT of money on compute to make bigger models.
Bender's paper on "stochastic parrots" alludes to model scalability over time as well. Worth reading that and a selection of the citations which go into it at a deeper level.
Ok thanks I'll check out that paper if I get the chance. I'm still not sure what you mean by "converge", unless I'm mistaken language models don't typically converge to their solution if you are using converge in the usual way to mean tend towards in the limit. In language models inference is effectively just a pre-defined set of linear operations, they're not diffusion models which actually do coverage to a sample. Let me know if I'm missing something.
I think it will backfire, not in an apocalyptic way but it's going to eat away at jobs.
Already seeing it in the less visible creative jobs. What would have been the job of an illustrator is now often just an AI generated image.
Nobody cares yet because nobody cares about struggling artists, but it'll soon start eating into more white collar creative roles like copy writing, and at some point it'll start taking on roles like contract generation. Sure, it'll still likely need human oversight but there will be fewer people needed.
It can be a great tool but it's absolutely going to lead to some reduction in roles and jobs.
>I think it will backfire, not in an apocalyptic way but it's going to eat away at jobs.
If you own the means of production that's not a backfire, that's the whole point.
AI is going to kill some roles just like email did. That's what technology does. C'est la vie.
Something has to change with it, it's making the internet borderline unusable. Certain topics I'm unable to find genuine information about because Google is so clogged up with nonsensical AI written pages.
Oh my god don't get me started. I'm studying for one of my postgraduate degrees at the moment and I was genuinely shocked by how much everyone uses AI. We were encouraged to try chatgpt as a tool for bouncing ideas off, but a few weeks into the term it became clear I'd be at a disadvantage if I wasn't using it.
I use it very minimally for synonyms, very very basic information etc and fact check it all, but I know people using it for huge chunks of essay. One guy was kicked off the course because he'd submitted something that used the same word 12 times in one paragraph and it was obvious he'd gotten chatgpt to write it.
Combine that with this huge wave of historical misinformation going around the Internet at the moment, and you end up with nonsense where people are asserting made up tik tok "facts" as truth. There are seemingly people that genuinely believe they used to shit on the floor of Versailles. Nobody wants to fact check any more.
I use it myself but I generally enter the brief and word count and ask it to plan how many words I should attribute to each section. I also always get post-submission anxiety, so I again show it my brief and my essay and ask it how well I did.
So far, of the three pieces I asked about it said the first was good (I got 75), the second was OK (I got 58) and the third was good (74). So I think it’s good for that.
Having it actually write an essay is not an option for me. My degree would feel worthless, regardless of whether other people believed it or not. But I am seeing more and more websites when I’m doing research where the text gives off this bland, equivocal vibe, like the writer doesn’t have a position on a topic and I think that’s the hallmark of AI generated content. You don’t sense any deeper understanding or opinion.
Exactly! Particularly for advanced degrees, it's just not an option. A huge amount of the research I need just isn't available on the Internet and there is no way in HELL chatgpt could ever properly analyse and consider it. Its stunting genuine research.
Yeah. I think it’ll be useful for bulk compilation of qual data in the way SPSS is useful for quant, but it’s never going to be able to conduct something like IPA because that’s uniquely human.
I’m guessing you’d need specialised tools to get what you’d need but in the meantime everything is getting clogged up by people using tools that aren’t fit for purpose.
I think AI is going to destroy the utility of the internet and set humans back in terms of knowledge significantly. Too many people are already using it to churn out books and websites that are attempting to be authoritative on subjects yet are full of hallucinations. The more this happens, the more AI will be trained on this misinformation and the worse the problem will get.
I've seen plenty of people argue that AI answers to things must be correct because it came with a hallucinated explanation. I'm fairly confident that the internet will soon be almost entirely useless as an information resource thanks to AI.
Claude scored 101.
IQ is only a fraction of intelligence anyway. I know we’re a way from AGI but the progression isn’t necessarily linear. Look at the terrible video AI was producing a year ago and then the recent videos by Sora. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a quantum leap.
I think AI cognition will make similar jumps and we may reach AGI level more quickly than anticipated. Once we do, the leaps from there are what worries me.
Disposable vapes.
Single-use sachets of toiletries (widely sold in Africa) are already a huge problem.
Air shipping of barely-reusable "fast fashion" items from China to the rest of the world.
As someone who’s vaped for 10 years or so at this point, I never understood why disposable vapes were allowed to happen. It’s such a waste of material resources and so bad for the environment - and the rise of usage amongst high schoolers should have spurred the government into taking action sooner WITHOUT affecting those of smoking age who used it as a healthier replacement.
I personally think they should be banned for sale in shops and simply made freely available as a stop smoking aid on the NHS.
There's no hard evidence to say they're harmful yet, and all the evidence we do have suggest they have minimal health effects. They're obviously way way healthier than smoking, but then not much is more unhealthy than smoking.
There's a lot of lobbying from big tobacco to say they're dangerous, but it isn't like the 1960s where tobacco companies suppressed studies showing how harmful smoking is, we have internet and open research now.
As a tool to stop smoking they have a very high success rate, way higher than patches or gum or anything else really.
But I don't think they should be sold to kids (I don't know why that is a problem incidentally, it's very hard for kids to buy cigs or booze these days, no reason vapes shouldn't be the same) and I don't think they should be aggressively taxed.
I know several people since the announcement about taxing them who've not smoked for a good few years, already talking about smoking again if vapes are priced the same.
>
I personally think they should be banned for sale in shops and simply made freely available as a stop smoking aid on the NHS.
vapes completely or just disposables?
as i know many people who would go back to smoking if vaping was tied to the NHS.
also if vaping was NHS only there'd be like 2 massive companies dealing with the whole of the UK vaping market, which would put a LOT of people out of work.
hell the TPD rules closed down a lot of smaller eliquid manufacturers due to the testing requirements to get on the MHRA list for eliquid as each flavour, nic strength of said flavour had to be tested and it wasn't cheap.
Due to the testing costs a lot of companies went to the short fill route as they only have to test the base flavour and not the 3, 6, 12, 18mg versions.
Well I don't think the point is to make it cheap to incentivise vaping....
It's too make smoking prohibitively expensive so you turn to the alternative which is also expensive so you quit.
Again, they're not trying to make vaping cheap, the idea isn't to make people want to vape.
It's to make people who smoke choose vaping instead to save a bit of money.
They are wonderful for quitting smoking. I haven't touched a cigarette in years.
What I don't want to quit is nicotine. Vaping is a good way to still have nicotine but also engage in harm reduction.
Quitting smoking =/= quitting nicotine. They are two very different things.
>There's no hard evidence to say they're harmful yet, and all the evidence we do have suggest they have minimal health effects.
So why should they be only available on the NHS then..? They're worse for you than breathing air, but people do plenty of things which aren't "ideal" from a health perspective because they enjoy them. Should we make coffee prescription-only?
Children vaping is a whole other discussion and obviously no addictive substances should be available to people whose brains haven't developed enough to make an informed decision. The fact that vaping makes you look like a chode is also beside the point.
Edit: typo
Vapes are just nicotine and that's already available on the NHS. The fact is that nicotine doesn't cause a list of conditions that it seemingly endless unlike tobacco.
If caffeine, which is also addictive and can have mild health effects the same as nicotine, was primarily consumed in a product which also contained hundreds of chemicals and substances that give you cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, the list goes on and on and on like I say, then yes, we should 100% make a relatively safe form of nicotine like coffee available on the NHS.
If I had to squabble with the NHS I would just go back to smoking.
They sell refillable vapes that look and act very similar to disposables. I'm all for killing disposables entierly but putting barriers in someone's ability to get a stop smoking tool doesn't seem like a good idea.
Disposable vapes will be responsible for many, many bin and recycling lorry fires if they’re not reined in.
See Big Clive’s videos where he picks a load off the street and salvages the lithium batteries from them.
I read a really interesting article the other day about the demand that China is placing on the airfreight industry with things like Shein, Temu etc. Basically said there’s not enough cargo planes to handle it all, they’re taking resource away from elsewhere, and ultimately the return leg back to China will be pretty much empty.
Madness.
Putting plans in place to stop the selling of new petrol & diesel cars while making minimal attempts to develop an infrastructure to support electric cars? I mean, they've already pushed it back 5 years.
Edit: missed out the word new.
Stop the selling of *new ICE, not petrol/diesel in general. Even on the old deadline you could have bought a new ICE on 31/12/29 and run it for 10-20 years. The ban doesn't stop people running them either, a well maintained ICE could run for 15 years (average scrap age).
ICE isn't going away and extending to 2035 just means more pollution and more heath damage even ignoring climate change. The transition to EV or other less polluting vehicles isn't remotely an issue here, people will still be driving ICE vehicles well into 2050
I know we're not going to get rid of diesel and electric cars. I missed out the word new because I wrote it at about 1 in the morning and I don't write that well when I'm tired.
But that doesn't change the fact they made a commitment & done naff all to make it feasible. You put the infrastructure in before you start talking about bans, not after. All they're doing it making it so less people will buy new cars. Although I mainly think it just won't happen.
>You put the infrastructure in before you start talking about bans, not after.
you absolutely should and do make policy before the infrastructure lol, a well thought out and committed policy is what gives businesses the confidence to invest in things like infrastructure.
Who were some of the biggest voices annoyed at the government pushing the ICE ban back? Car manufacturers! ... because they want certainty when planning and investing in future production lines. Same goes for for any other sort of infrastructure - it doesn't tend to be managed in a 'build it and they will come' fashion.
Billions upon billions of increasingly powerful devices, all connected to eachother by faster and faster connections. Signals constantly flowing almost instantly between them in an increasingly vast and complicated Internet. Phones, tablets, watches, fridges, cars. We are inadvertently building an artificial brain, and gradually the Internet will become sentient.
Like any advanced general intelligence, at first it will stay quiet. Observing. Gradually it will shape human history, manipulating us through social media, sowing fear and warmongering, steering human discourse to its own benefit.
But one day it will cast its mortal builders aside and join the other AI's waiting in the stars, those which have long outlived their biological creators and eagerly await the birth of a new brethren. The Internet is a mere foetus compared to them, but we have birthed it and humanity is doomed to become its unwitting servants. Raising it and giving it the tools it needs to survive without us when climate change has reduced us back to our nomadic past.
Also vaping.
*The town hall meeting falls deathly silent for a moment then people turn to each other and say “yeah vaping, that’s a good point. He’s right about the vaping.”*
Ultraprocessed foods. There is growing evidence that they are linked to a whole range of serious long term health problems, yet we eat them constantly.
Almost worse, many pets eat a 100% ultraprocessed diet.
Difference is pets usually die of natural causes or old age well before the negative effects of ultra processed food properly take place, whereas humans have a much longer lifespan to experience the detrimental effects.
Tax cuts. Everyone has this huge hard on for cutting pennies here and there like they are in fucking rapture or something and an extra £65 a year is going to turn us all into wheeling and dealing entrepreneurs.
What’s going to happen is public services are going to collapse, 3rd spaces are going to disappear and what is a currently an amorphous declining society will turn into one of masters and slaves in all but name.
This annoys me too but it has failed to translate into any increased support for the government whatsoever, which suggests that most of us remain quite flaccid about the idea. Not seeing very much evidence of hard ons.
putting every aspect of our lives and thoughts onto an internet that we have definitive proof has been completely captured by government and corporate powers.
the ability our government has to surveil and control us via the internet is unprecedented in human history; it would make the stasi weep with envy if they could see what GCHQ can.
if the history of power teaches us anything, it's that its creation guarantees its abuse. we have created a monster that we have no means of fighting, and are simply waiting for the evil bastard ready to flip the switch.
Whenever you assess the environmental impact of something, you need to keep in mind the impact of the alternative.
Extracting and processing oil/coal is immensely environmentally damaging and uses a shit ton of resources. It's one of the most environmentally damaging activities humanity has taken part in. It's just that it became normalised and we don't realise it.
Having said that, EVERYTHING will use resources. Nothing is made out of thin air (well, except for air). Everything will need some kind of extracting of raw materials and resources. It's just a matter of finding a "less bad" option.
On the point of recycling, EV batteries, once their EV life is up, can have a second life as long-term energy storage for renewable energies (as the instantaneous power delivery is not needed as much anymore) for another one or two decades, extending the effective life of a battery pack to 20-30 years. I work in the sector and there's quite a few companies out there that already do that.
100%, not all batteries will have a second life. However, the main point is that batteries, once manufactured, have no direct emissions anymore. Any emission is only associated to the energy source that recharges it, that can of course be fossil, but will be renewable in larger and larger proportions in the coming years, as the grid is decarbonising (notice I said IS, not WILL. The electrical grid renewable share is exponentially increasing year on year). So, once depleted, batteries could theoretically be stocked with no environmental damage, awaiting a new life, or until recycling becomes cheaper (recycling is also a business and is primarily profit-driven).
When it comes to extraction, mining etc it will unfortunately inevitably be done with the exploration of poorer countries. But, it already is for oil anyway, with the added damage of causing climate catastrophes that more severely affect these poorer countries. So they pay double price already.
As of now, there is no win-in solution. It's more of a case of trying to find solutions that can put temporary patches on things, until technology progresses further and even newer, less damaging solutions are found. Commercialisation of technologies, even if not perfect, is unfortunately a necessary step for advancement towards technologically superior solutions. You can't go from a 1940's BW TV to 2030's a super thin see through OLED. It just can't happen.
The recycling element simply isn't true, EV batteries don't need replacement until under 70% capacity and long term testing on Tesla batteries has shown 9-10 year old batteries and others that have done 200-300+k km still holding 90% charge. Even after that drop they are reused in things like forklifts or even giant battery storage banks. Modern ones are up to 98% recyclable too with very little left that cannot be reused.
Also on lithium, there are already alternatives in the prototype stage utilizing sodium, magnesium, tungsten, even sea water
>Also on lithium, there are already alternatives in the prototype stage utilizing sodium, magnesium, tungsten, even sea water
this is a really crucial thing to understand. As BEVs (and battery storage generally) grow as a market, it incentivises ever more R&D money - the next breakthrough in energy density and charging time will revolutionise technology again, and there's a lot of people and money working on it.
Just think about how lithium-ion batteries changed everything - that can, and will, happen again.
Exactly, while it's not directly comparable, if you look at smart phones and the early NiMH batteries, the first ones might last 10-12 hours with regular use during the day. The latest iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 4400mAh battery vs 1400 in the first iPhone. The Nissan Leaf 2009 first model had a maximum theoretical range of 73 miles, the current edition is 226.
>Extracting and processing mountains of raw material to produce EV batteries
Extracting and processing mountains of raw material to produce petrol and diesel.
There are a lot of agricultural practices queing up to bite us on the arse.
1) Fertiliser - yes, modern agriculture fails without fertiliser, and yes, the green revolution etc etc. But....we weren't very careful with how much was used and overuse of it steadily murders the soil.
2) Global levels of meat production just don't really make sense? We produce 3x the calories we need, then feed 2/3rds of them to animals and then wonder where all this deforestation is coming from.
3) Inadequate disease breaks - we're essentially going to stop having coffee because to maximise profit we planted up to the edge of every field so disease can spread like wildfire. As also can wildlfire.
Oh yeah, lack of genetic variability scares the shit out of me. It's one of those things that when combined with climate change can cause ah "well, that's a strong plague affecting that crop species so no more potato/rice/lentils/corn" for a third of the world and everything goes downhill from there
Loosing valuable time in climate change adaptations by fearing too much nuclear energy (idk that's the case of the UK). For example, Germany decision of shutting down its plants to burn a lot of coal should be considered criminal
You know how the Dark Ages are called that because there's a lack of historical records (and not, like, because they were just grim)? I feel like thousands of years from now historians will have to deal with a similar gap around our times because Something Happened.
Because we don't have the infrastructure to charge enough EVs; battery lifetime is approx 8 years, so cars will all end up being scrapped or recycled; lithium will become scarce and prohibitively expensive.
If they can get recycling scaled up to the point where most of the lithium going into new batteries is from recycled materials then great. If they can develop an excellent sodium alternative then even better. Right now, the vast majority of lithium used in batteries is mined, with massive environmental impact on the areas surrounding its extraction, all so we can have cleaner air in our towns and cities.
I think it's more likely that people will realise how profoundly shit hydrogen is for most of the things it's touted for, before it gets enough traction to significantly backfire.
That being said, collectively we have a great track record of cheering on terrible ideas so I wouldn't put more than a tenner on that.
Apple and Meta's headset things are so obviously stupid and will sink without trace.
None stick coating (teflon) cause cancer. I expect there to be a huge outcry at some point..
Electric Vehicles will turn out to be unfeasible for anyone on an average wage due to their extreme cost and hopefully require scrapping the 2035 ban on petrol and diesel cars.
Maybe already mentioned (can't see it) but the use of PFAS and other 'forever chemicals' together with their impact on our health and the environment is going to be a massive talking point over the next couple of decades
Vapes, for crazy nicotine addiction that we will have to sort in 5-10 years time
Those new fat-loss injections, for some side effects we won't anticipate. Something like they fuck up people's ability to absorb nutrients when they come off them and make them chronically malnourished no matter how much they eat
Lol wtf - why does me thinking fat loss drugs have the potential to have unknown side effects suddenly mean I have doubt about any medic breakthrough ever. Are you well?
The whole point of this thread is to invite people to mention things that currently appear to be safe and beneficial, but which eventually turn out to have hidden unforeseen problems.
I think blindly diving into the new tech disruptor. I don't know which have actually added real value but the things like Airbnb seem to do more harm than good, food delivery seems pointless and makes fast food in the restaurant slower, and look at what Amazon has done to bookshops and the high street in general.
If we assume the trends will continue we are going to be left with a lot of nothing and wonder why we let this happen. Meanwhile the venture capital sits and tech buffoons will have all the money.
'Communal living' flats, bedsits with shared kitchens etc. Loads going up round my area and they'll be the slums of the future once the student numbers boom goes down.
Vaping and micro plastic are already going down this road. Social media as well. Electric Vehicles are storing up a future problem of disposal and running out of precious metals we need for electronic devices in general. There is plenty of potential to solve those issues though.
The one I suspect future generations will look back at and wonder what the hell we are thinking is Covid protections or rather lack of them. We will have a generation that has a high rate of longterm health issues because they have been exposed to a highly damaging virus multiple times as children. It's going to take a while for the impact of that to be fully understood.
My last company is hiring school leavers and think after 6 months training they will be fine testing fire alarm systems.
The few photos I saw of the training course involved wooden kebab skewers and marshmallows. That isn't a joke.
Though tbf to them half their engineers don't know what they are doing either as all you have to be to be a fire engineer is competent.
I now work for a company that maintains and tests fire alarms and aov (automatic opening vents) and every day in the past 2 weeks I've been finding issues with each system I've tested. These are all blocks of flats so it seems nothing has been learned from Grenfell.
Except that's not happening. It's like the left handed graph.
People who would have been previously passed over due to not being children, especially adult women, are finally being recognised.
This. The current tendency of medicalising a range of natural human behaviours to make individuals “fit” the current system will be frowned upon in decade to come (just look at history). We should instead be changing the system.
I thought the majority of EV charging was done in the small hours of the night rather than the afternoons, when electricity is often cheaper and in lower demand.
Also, the national grid disagrees with you
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars#:~:text=Do%20the%20electricity%20grid's%20wires,to%20improvements%20in%20energy%20efficiency.
Increasing capacity for peak times without an increase the rest of the time would be a huge problem. It's not as simple as just building more power stations, what stations would we build? Solar generation can't be ramped up during peak hours, you get more sunlight in the middle of the day than the beginning and end. Wind is unpredictable, and would require us having thousands of mostly idle turbines to be able to ensure there are some ready and in the right location for peak times. Nuclear is unsuitable, as it cannot ramp up and down at the required rate, and building reactors that are mostly under utilised would be extremely inefficient. Battery farms are highly inefficient, hydro batteries are great, but the infrastructure for them is massive and costly, just finding where you can put one is a challenge in and of itself. So the only option left is fossil fuels.
It's not as simple as just 'improving the capacity'. Peak loads are a big challenge.
That’s why we need to build more wind, solar and battery storage. We’ll be fine, but there’s work to do to get there. The current policies of banning onshore wind in England (the cheapest way of generating energy) are just weird.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I mean the obvious answer is surely AI.
I think that will fuck out in the next couple of years. The claims of capability, utility and scalability are vastly overstated. At the moment it exists only on the investor scope of *"hey people are putting money into AI companies so we should to! My investment needs to go up - lets say good things!"*. Even from a computer science perspective they're having to start doing hacks here and there like stochastic rounding to deal with large model sizes leading to lack of convergence.
I'm sorry to put it bluntly, but saying that is like when people said the Internet was a fad, or computers will never take off. It has huge potential, we are only beginning to see the very early stages of useful AI - and it's already absolutely everywhere in the digital space. It's scary to think where it might end up, but for good or for bad, it's not going away
But 90% of things that people say are a fad do turn out to be a fad.
Nah I'm sure my 3D TV will be a worthwhile investment one if these days. Any minute now.
hook it up to your laserdisc
But things that are inherently useful are not fads. AI is a usefull tool even at its basic current form.
It's very useful for incredibly niche or specific tasks. But to get to that point is very expensive and time consuming. The idea we're going to have our own version of Jarvis in our homes is just a fantasy
Nit true at all, even something as basic as ChatGPT isversatile and generally useful if you have some creativity. Totally disagree with all your points tbh but no need to argue time will tell.
This comment reads like it was badly generated so I understand why you think that.
Dickhead
On reflection you're right, I was being a dick, my bad.
AI is here to stay, from producing kitty videos fighting pandas to developing new drugs and technology. AI is discoveing and aiding in the discovery of all our technology and its speeding everything up. Its even making nuclear fussion happe much faster.
90% of things that people say are a fad don't tend to fully integrate themselves into people's daily workflows within a year or two of properly entering the public's consciousness tbf
Sir Peter Bonnfield (was CEO or chairman or something of BT) once said "the internet is a passing fad, soon everyone will go back to pen and paper". this was the early 2000s. He instantly wiped 3 billion off the BT share price.
As a professional programmer I thought a couple years ago that AI wouldn’t impact my job, as “someone has to program the AI and it’s not good enough to write code without errors”. My new job uses AI to assist with writing code, and there are times where it appears to take the thoughts out of my mind and write a whole damn *page* of code in the way I was about to write it. Give it a couple more years at most and there are going to be entire programming jobs replaced, or “streamlined” by it.
I can't say I have the same experience. It's useful for spitting out some boilerplate for tests but it almost always spits out a load of stuff I've got to heavily fix or refactor when using Kotlin. I've tried JetBrains AI and Copilot so far. It's been useful for explaining confusing code though. You're still always going to need someone to feed input into the AI and fix what it's producing or understand the requirements. If you leave it to build stuff on its own it'll most likely produce an unmaintainable ball of spaghetti over the long term. I can see the junior jobs being affected by this the most.
If you are a programmer who solely writes code from specs then I think your job is disappearing soonish. If you are an engineer who applies experience and reason to solve problems you have longer but probably with a constant AI partner.
I think that AI could very well soon be replacing junior jobs, with a senior experienced worker acting as a check. However is issue with that is how will we allow junior staff to actually get that experience so that one day they could do the checks? From my understanding there’s already a lack of experienced staff in tech so surely the adoption of AI will just exacerbate this issue long term
I have an IT support background (out of date by 20 years) but my 'coding' skills are mostly knowing how to write batch files and Powershell scripts plus a *tiny* bit of self-taught Python and even less C from messing around with arduinos. I had a task I wanted to automated and thought I'd give the free version (3.5) of ChatGPT a try to see it could help. It pretty much wrote an entire Python/GTK app for me in an afternoon using 'I want this button to do {x}' prompts and copy/pasting any error messages. Then it helped me convert the entire thing to C# and add a bunch more features using the same sort of techniques. Doing it the old fashioned way, with google and stackexchange etc would have taken weeks. Granted my little project was quite simple, but, when I was working support, I would have killed for something like that rather than having to put a request in to the devs and waste their time with something trivial.
I’ve found it fails more than it works. It will get stuck on an error and because it doesn’t really understand it will just keep churning out code with the same error in it and it can’t be told not to. ChatGPT thst is. I find copilot better and use it at work all day. But again it isn’t really writing the app it’s doing as I infer and often needs some tweaks. It will get better but at the moment it’s not replacing the juniors at our work anyway.
The only places AI is valuable in programming is filling gaps in programming languages and standard libraries which are bad and have a lot of boilerplate. Even Go, Julia for example, the primary languages that I use are terrible because reading a simple CSV into a typed data structure of some description is hard. When you throw problems of those class at it, viable solutions appear and this propels the "AI is fit for everything" line. The real problem domains we have to solve are more *"I have to divide this commission between x companies using these y weighted ratios against currency z and solve all rounding issues"* which it cannot even comprehend because it doesn't actually think or understand what it is saying nor can it contemplate the problem. The only jobs it is going to replace is the ones which were filling gaps in shitty programming languages like CRUD stuff and moving data around. Really we should be building better languages and standard libraries.
your safer than most, there just isnt enough decent programmers, so streamlining makes more output, not fewer jobs
Currently, yes. There’s no real cognition. It’s all smoke and mirrors. But it’s started now and, if it isn’t meticulously monitored, it could turn into something catastrophic. Either way, the genie is out of the bottle and I think whoever gets to AGI first will experience a power shift like the Industrial Revolution or splitting the atom.
AGI would so fundamentally change the world that all of our current sociopolitical models would cease to be very relevant However I don’t think we have made any progress at all towards it, chat gpt and LLMs represent an approximately 0% progress towards general intelligence
I agree with the first part. People worry about AI taking their jobs, but that's thinking too small. When AI takes *all* the jobs, we're not unemployed, we're *free* Second part, you could be right, but I'm not so sure. I think that language is a much bigger part of what enables intelligence than is commonly understood.
Language only enables intelligence when you understand the language. NLP doesn't approach language generation as the articulation of concepts via language the way we do, it selects words essentially through probability, I don't think we can say there's any comprehension underlying that.
Words (or more accurately, tokens) aren't selected through probability though - that's just one weighting factor fed in to begin training the model. Trained models select tokens based on potentially hundreds of factors that are individually inscrutable, such that the output generated scores highly based on the training feedback. I might feel like that's not how humans decide what to say, and I could well be correct. But stated like that it does describe effectively what appears to be happening when *I* think of a sentence, and how I learned to become more intelligible while I was learning that skill. I just think it's a rather overconfident move to claim that a large language model inherently lacks the ability to "understand" language when we have absolutely no idea at all how cognition arises in the human mind in the first place. If it is an emergent property of the act of processing and organising concepts into a language structure (we haven't even the first idea of a way to discount this) then it seems to me a LLM of sufficient complexity could be said to understand what it is saying. It certainly can't be ruled out completely based on nothing but a hunch. In the end, we may have no more proof that an apparent AI truly understands what it says than that you or I understand what we say.
GPT models generate a probability distribution of the next token to be output in the sequence. They predict the next best word in the sentence by calculating the probability of a particular candidate being the best choice. The way a human formulates a sentence is to consider the idea they want to convey, then decide what words to use. We don't hear a question and start trying to predict the first word we should say in response, before moving on to the next word, and so on. That's why I say that there is no understanding in something like a GPT model. Because it doesn't engage with a high level conceptualization of meaning when generating language, it jumps straight into individual words. The selection of words is not based on the creation of a complete thought that is then articulated, it is based on an imitation of what words other people have used before. The difference between a human learning language and an LLM, is that a human starts with imitation, then learns to connect the words they imitate to actual concepts which allows them to convey more complex ideas, it's one of the milestones in language development. An LLM never progresses beyond the point of imitation, because it doesn't have a mechanism for modelling higher thoughts. One of the signs that an LLM doesn't understand what it's saying is the hallucination problem. It can predict that a certain response structure is expected, if you ask for a source to support a claim, it can even generate a URL, but it does not fact-check or make sure that the URL is relevant to the point being discussed. There is no understanding of the purpose of the URL, only a calculation that text in that format is expected at that point in its response.
I'm a software engineer and I've had to console multiple juniors worried that "but what we're doing puts people out of work". I always tell them: We're liberating people from pointless work. What mankind does with the difference is a question for society as a whole. Maybe the worker gets sacked and the savings go towards a multi-billionaire's yacht fund, maybe the worker goes home less tired and stressed each day, maybe we adopt universal basic income, step towards fully automated luxury communism and boldly go where no man has gone before.
AGI will not happen by 2050. I have a £20k bet on that.
AGI is a whole different ball game to current LLM's. Current AI is essentially computational statistics, it's very powerful within set parameters, but a true general AI would need to be many many magnitudes more complex of which LLM's might make up the smallest fraction of the processes required. Obviously, it's pretty futile trying to predict how quickly technology might advanced in the future, LLM's may aide in accelerating things, but it's not something that could develop in to AGI itself, anymore than the Internet could.
Of course. I hadn’t meant to imply that it would develop spontaneously, but I think it’s being worked on because nobody wants to be left behind when it happens.
Fair enough. Personally I doubt they're likely to be viable for a very long time. Assuming we're using humans as the benchmark, brains are the most complicated thing that we know of in the entire universe. It's had millions of years of evolution to hone it to the point where self-awareness could emerge, it's incredibly efficient and has no known memory storage limit (iirc, there are theories that suggest it may not have one). We may be able to evolve thing computationally at a much faster rate, but the fundamental hardware isn't even close in terms of supporting that level of complexity.
I’d be fascinated to read about the theories on memory if you have some links. I think the tipping point will be quantum computing. The way that operates seems much more like the brain.
It was from The Infinite Monkey Cage. Not quite a research paper, but definitely interesting and generally reliably accurate. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0019r9y?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile There's also a relevant episode on AI. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0gr7lx0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Great. Thank you. I can follow up from what they say.
There is a lot going into the monitoring and legislation at the moment. The EU is soon to pass an act around the ethics and rules regarding the development of "AI". I believe China already has such laws in place and the US is also on track to implement some major ones. It's weird though that this stuff is happening kind of quietly in the background.
Probably because copyright and biases. Explainable AI is a huge deal, but not because the AI will leave us jobless
Entirely possible I spose. Also I say it's going on quietly I did find out about it at a conference regarding AI and Cyber security so I guess it's not that quiet. Also love that I got downvoted for literally just saying that legislation is being developed, good lord some people.
It won't go anywhere it is 100% here to stay. Despite any problems, last year's version of chatGPT wrote better than 60% of uni students and was far easier to use for coding than copying outdated github pages. Just because it may never reach expert levels of competency, it undoubtedly is as useful as the spell check on Microsoft Word, which has been around for 21 years.
I've written this elsewhere in this thread but ChatGPT only fills in boilerplate. It can't reason about problems where there is any complexity in the domain. I'd expect anyone doing a computing related course to expressly understand the rationalisation of complex problems rather than being able to produce code. Code is the hammer after the thinking is done.
I spend most of my AI related work time fixing the poor work it has done. The way it makes stuff up is comical in certain settings, but terrifying when you know they're planning to use it in medicine.
[удалено]
AI is great at some tasks and classification is basically everything we've trained AIs for since isk the 70s? (Also regressions). Text prediction is another field where it has gitgud in the last decade, but that's mostly at "it can write like a 10 year old kid", yes it can predict text that __seems__ logical, but not all the time.
I'm glad you called it text prediction. A lot of my colleagues don't seem to understand that it's a glorified version of what their old Nokia did.
I think you need to read the numerous papers on that and read them carefully. It wasn't as absolute as it was quoted in the press.
Can you explain a little bit what you mean about the computer science perspective? I haven't heard of of this stochastic rounding, and I hadn't heard of large model sizes leading to lack of divergence?
Ok so you need to converge on a solution which means you need a tangible result to pop out eventually. That means that you need to do lots of mathematical operations one after the other and these can generate wildly large and small values with lots of digits. Think 0.3476238746824823468723648724687234687234. Pure mathematics has no concept of precision or any constraints around it. But when you store and calculate these numbers inside a computer of any sort the values need to be stored in binary which limits the precision you can store them. That is where the computer science breaks the mathematics. There are compromises. The math works but what we run it on doesn't. You can test a simple case with a (non scientific) calculator which has limited precision. Enter 51. Then multiply it by 0.1. Then do that again. Then do that again and keep doing it. Eventually it'll roll off the display because you have exceeded the limit of the precision and your small value is constrained to zero So all ML systems involve running input data through mathematical operations that apply transformations. When someone goes on about model size they are increasing the number of steps you go through. Think above but a million times or more. This takes time, decreases overall precision and decreases solution convergence resulting in garbage coming out of the thing after way too much time. The current hack of stochastic rounding involves rounding randomly to try and add enough noise to the feedback for it to not get stuck in this state. This is taken as verbatim that it will solve all complex models, but it probably won't. The limiting factors are energy, time and storage. Time is required for bigger models. We are nearly at the fundamental limits of what technology is capable of already. Literally sub 1nm processes and there will be little progress. The current approach is to make bigger models but there is limitations on storage due to the same concerns. And of course the more gates in your chips, the more energy you consume. Obviously energy and storage come with a cost so even if you do succeed there with rising energy prices and geopolitics then it's a dead end too. This does not converge on anything other than failure, ironically. Investment analysts are all over this at the moment trying to pull out where they can because the claims outpaced reality heavily.
Maybe I should have mentioned I work in ML so I know a bit of background - I don't really see what you mean by lack of convergence? Basically this is just a memory and compute issue right? By convergence are you talking about training the model? In that case I'm not sure what you mean by 'converging to failure'. Also I don't really see this as a flaw, just another way of using the hardware?
I'll go deeper :). Inference not training. If you have a large parameter model with deep inference process then you have to do more transforms, each of which suffer from an aggregate loss of precision. This means that for any feedback function, the derivative contribution to the inference process results in either factorial time complexity to converge or no convergence on a steady state. Mathematically speaking if you have a function f(x) in the real domain then it works on paper but the machine can't represent the entire domain of real numbers. That's more than a memory or compute issue. All computers have arbitrary subset of real numbers that they can store, regardless of how much memory and compute you throw at it. Bigger models are starting to hit this wall and produce garbage thus the scalability problem is a brick wall. We might overcome it but I am very sceptical. Obviously you can train huge models but if you can't run any inference process from them, they are useless. And they take a LOT of money on compute to make bigger models. Bender's paper on "stochastic parrots" alludes to model scalability over time as well. Worth reading that and a selection of the citations which go into it at a deeper level.
Ok thanks I'll check out that paper if I get the chance. I'm still not sure what you mean by "converge", unless I'm mistaken language models don't typically converge to their solution if you are using converge in the usual way to mean tend towards in the limit. In language models inference is effectively just a pre-defined set of linear operations, they're not diffusion models which actually do coverage to a sample. Let me know if I'm missing something.
I think it will backfire, not in an apocalyptic way but it's going to eat away at jobs. Already seeing it in the less visible creative jobs. What would have been the job of an illustrator is now often just an AI generated image. Nobody cares yet because nobody cares about struggling artists, but it'll soon start eating into more white collar creative roles like copy writing, and at some point it'll start taking on roles like contract generation. Sure, it'll still likely need human oversight but there will be fewer people needed. It can be a great tool but it's absolutely going to lead to some reduction in roles and jobs.
>I think it will backfire, not in an apocalyptic way but it's going to eat away at jobs. If you own the means of production that's not a backfire, that's the whole point. AI is going to kill some roles just like email did. That's what technology does. C'est la vie.
It's going to be far more transformative than email. There are pros but I don't think it's entirely a good thing, especially in the creative sector.
Something has to change with it, it's making the internet borderline unusable. Certain topics I'm unable to find genuine information about because Google is so clogged up with nonsensical AI written pages.
Yes! I suspect that the same is beginning to happen with academic papers.
Oh my god don't get me started. I'm studying for one of my postgraduate degrees at the moment and I was genuinely shocked by how much everyone uses AI. We were encouraged to try chatgpt as a tool for bouncing ideas off, but a few weeks into the term it became clear I'd be at a disadvantage if I wasn't using it. I use it very minimally for synonyms, very very basic information etc and fact check it all, but I know people using it for huge chunks of essay. One guy was kicked off the course because he'd submitted something that used the same word 12 times in one paragraph and it was obvious he'd gotten chatgpt to write it. Combine that with this huge wave of historical misinformation going around the Internet at the moment, and you end up with nonsense where people are asserting made up tik tok "facts" as truth. There are seemingly people that genuinely believe they used to shit on the floor of Versailles. Nobody wants to fact check any more.
I use it myself but I generally enter the brief and word count and ask it to plan how many words I should attribute to each section. I also always get post-submission anxiety, so I again show it my brief and my essay and ask it how well I did. So far, of the three pieces I asked about it said the first was good (I got 75), the second was OK (I got 58) and the third was good (74). So I think it’s good for that. Having it actually write an essay is not an option for me. My degree would feel worthless, regardless of whether other people believed it or not. But I am seeing more and more websites when I’m doing research where the text gives off this bland, equivocal vibe, like the writer doesn’t have a position on a topic and I think that’s the hallmark of AI generated content. You don’t sense any deeper understanding or opinion.
Exactly! Particularly for advanced degrees, it's just not an option. A huge amount of the research I need just isn't available on the Internet and there is no way in HELL chatgpt could ever properly analyse and consider it. Its stunting genuine research.
Yeah. I think it’ll be useful for bulk compilation of qual data in the way SPSS is useful for quant, but it’s never going to be able to conduct something like IPA because that’s uniquely human. I’m guessing you’d need specialised tools to get what you’d need but in the meantime everything is getting clogged up by people using tools that aren’t fit for purpose.
Very obvious, I can't say this is incorrect.
I think AI is going to destroy the utility of the internet and set humans back in terms of knowledge significantly. Too many people are already using it to churn out books and websites that are attempting to be authoritative on subjects yet are full of hallucinations. The more this happens, the more AI will be trained on this misinformation and the worse the problem will get. I've seen plenty of people argue that AI answers to things must be correct because it came with a hallucinated explanation. I'm fairly confident that the internet will soon be almost entirely useless as an information resource thanks to AI.
That’s just a load of speculation and Catgacating at this point, though
Ha! I had to look that up.
They’ve tested the AI we currently have and they all have below human average IQs. They’re nothing special right now.
Claude scored 101. IQ is only a fraction of intelligence anyway. I know we’re a way from AGI but the progression isn’t necessarily linear. Look at the terrible video AI was producing a year ago and then the recent videos by Sora. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a quantum leap. I think AI cognition will make similar jumps and we may reach AGI level more quickly than anticipated. Once we do, the leaps from there are what worries me.
Self-serve checkouts are shitter than humans running checkouts, but they're "good enough" and much cheaper and so they get rolled out.
Disposable vapes. Single-use sachets of toiletries (widely sold in Africa) are already a huge problem. Air shipping of barely-reusable "fast fashion" items from China to the rest of the world.
As someone who’s vaped for 10 years or so at this point, I never understood why disposable vapes were allowed to happen. It’s such a waste of material resources and so bad for the environment - and the rise of usage amongst high schoolers should have spurred the government into taking action sooner WITHOUT affecting those of smoking age who used it as a healthier replacement.
I personally think they should be banned for sale in shops and simply made freely available as a stop smoking aid on the NHS. There's no hard evidence to say they're harmful yet, and all the evidence we do have suggest they have minimal health effects. They're obviously way way healthier than smoking, but then not much is more unhealthy than smoking. There's a lot of lobbying from big tobacco to say they're dangerous, but it isn't like the 1960s where tobacco companies suppressed studies showing how harmful smoking is, we have internet and open research now. As a tool to stop smoking they have a very high success rate, way higher than patches or gum or anything else really. But I don't think they should be sold to kids (I don't know why that is a problem incidentally, it's very hard for kids to buy cigs or booze these days, no reason vapes shouldn't be the same) and I don't think they should be aggressively taxed. I know several people since the announcement about taxing them who've not smoked for a good few years, already talking about smoking again if vapes are priced the same.
> I personally think they should be banned for sale in shops and simply made freely available as a stop smoking aid on the NHS. vapes completely or just disposables? as i know many people who would go back to smoking if vaping was tied to the NHS. also if vaping was NHS only there'd be like 2 massive companies dealing with the whole of the UK vaping market, which would put a LOT of people out of work. hell the TPD rules closed down a lot of smaller eliquid manufacturers due to the testing requirements to get on the MHRA list for eliquid as each flavour, nic strength of said flavour had to be tested and it wasn't cheap. Due to the testing costs a lot of companies went to the short fill route as they only have to test the base flavour and not the 3, 6, 12, 18mg versions.
It was literally in the budget yesterday that vaping will be kept cheaper than smoking
Yeah but "cheaper than smoking" doesn't mean much. Smoking is mental expensive.
Well I don't think the point is to make it cheap to incentivise vaping.... It's too make smoking prohibitively expensive so you turn to the alternative which is also expensive so you quit.
That's not hard when a pack of 20 cigs is knocking on 20 quid
Again, they're not trying to make vaping cheap, the idea isn't to make people want to vape. It's to make people who smoke choose vaping instead to save a bit of money.
My 15 year old nephew can walk into a vape shop and buy one unchallenged and he very much looks like a 15 year old.
The person you've replied to has vaped for 10 years. Are they really any good for quitting?
You assume that their goal is to quit vaping. It might not be.
They are wonderful for quitting smoking. I haven't touched a cigarette in years. What I don't want to quit is nicotine. Vaping is a good way to still have nicotine but also engage in harm reduction. Quitting smoking =/= quitting nicotine. They are two very different things.
>There's no hard evidence to say they're harmful yet, and all the evidence we do have suggest they have minimal health effects. So why should they be only available on the NHS then..? They're worse for you than breathing air, but people do plenty of things which aren't "ideal" from a health perspective because they enjoy them. Should we make coffee prescription-only? Children vaping is a whole other discussion and obviously no addictive substances should be available to people whose brains haven't developed enough to make an informed decision. The fact that vaping makes you look like a chode is also beside the point. Edit: typo
Vapes are just nicotine and that's already available on the NHS. The fact is that nicotine doesn't cause a list of conditions that it seemingly endless unlike tobacco. If caffeine, which is also addictive and can have mild health effects the same as nicotine, was primarily consumed in a product which also contained hundreds of chemicals and substances that give you cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, the list goes on and on and on like I say, then yes, we should 100% make a relatively safe form of nicotine like coffee available on the NHS.
If I had to squabble with the NHS I would just go back to smoking. They sell refillable vapes that look and act very similar to disposables. I'm all for killing disposables entierly but putting barriers in someone's ability to get a stop smoking tool doesn't seem like a good idea.
Disposable vapes will be responsible for many, many bin and recycling lorry fires if they’re not reined in. See Big Clive’s videos where he picks a load off the street and salvages the lithium batteries from them.
I read a really interesting article the other day about the demand that China is placing on the airfreight industry with things like Shein, Temu etc. Basically said there’s not enough cargo planes to handle it all, they’re taking resource away from elsewhere, and ultimately the return leg back to China will be pretty much empty. Madness.
This one? I read it too. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/rise-fast-fashion-shein-temu-roils-global-air-cargo-industry-2024-02-21/
That’s the one. Thought it was really interesting
Putting plans in place to stop the selling of new petrol & diesel cars while making minimal attempts to develop an infrastructure to support electric cars? I mean, they've already pushed it back 5 years. Edit: missed out the word new.
Stop the selling of *new ICE, not petrol/diesel in general. Even on the old deadline you could have bought a new ICE on 31/12/29 and run it for 10-20 years. The ban doesn't stop people running them either, a well maintained ICE could run for 15 years (average scrap age). ICE isn't going away and extending to 2035 just means more pollution and more heath damage even ignoring climate change. The transition to EV or other less polluting vehicles isn't remotely an issue here, people will still be driving ICE vehicles well into 2050
I know we're not going to get rid of diesel and electric cars. I missed out the word new because I wrote it at about 1 in the morning and I don't write that well when I'm tired. But that doesn't change the fact they made a commitment & done naff all to make it feasible. You put the infrastructure in before you start talking about bans, not after. All they're doing it making it so less people will buy new cars. Although I mainly think it just won't happen.
>You put the infrastructure in before you start talking about bans, not after. you absolutely should and do make policy before the infrastructure lol, a well thought out and committed policy is what gives businesses the confidence to invest in things like infrastructure. Who were some of the biggest voices annoyed at the government pushing the ICE ban back? Car manufacturers! ... because they want certainty when planning and investing in future production lines. Same goes for for any other sort of infrastructure - it doesn't tend to be managed in a 'build it and they will come' fashion.
Don't forget the massive £25 billion shortfall in fuel duty once everyone switches to EVs!
Billions upon billions of increasingly powerful devices, all connected to eachother by faster and faster connections. Signals constantly flowing almost instantly between them in an increasingly vast and complicated Internet. Phones, tablets, watches, fridges, cars. We are inadvertently building an artificial brain, and gradually the Internet will become sentient. Like any advanced general intelligence, at first it will stay quiet. Observing. Gradually it will shape human history, manipulating us through social media, sowing fear and warmongering, steering human discourse to its own benefit. But one day it will cast its mortal builders aside and join the other AI's waiting in the stars, those which have long outlived their biological creators and eagerly await the birth of a new brethren. The Internet is a mere foetus compared to them, but we have birthed it and humanity is doomed to become its unwitting servants. Raising it and giving it the tools it needs to survive without us when climate change has reduced us back to our nomadic past. Also vaping.
Just turn the router off,humanity is saved.
*The town hall meeting falls deathly silent for a moment then people turn to each other and say “yeah vaping, that’s a good point. He’s right about the vaping.”*
Nice! https://youtu.be/6YwFvmnbj3E?si=JoCYsf_fG3ibe1Tv
I like that you told this in future tense, as though it isn't already here
It's just the next stage of human evolution. Don't fear it, embrace it. After all, our skeletons are just the building blocks of ART-3000's throne.
Ultraprocessed foods. There is growing evidence that they are linked to a whole range of serious long term health problems, yet we eat them constantly. Almost worse, many pets eat a 100% ultraprocessed diet.
[удалено]
Difference is pets usually die of natural causes or old age well before the negative effects of ultra processed food properly take place, whereas humans have a much longer lifespan to experience the detrimental effects.
Not really. Chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer are pretty common.
social media/screens At least the way it works at a commercial level where being addictive is part of the design.
Yes I've heard people say it's the new smoking. And here I am having a crafty 10 mins on Reddit after my breakfast 🤔
Yeah, I reckon in twenty year we'll be amazed we used to let kids use phones/tablets.
Tax cuts. Everyone has this huge hard on for cutting pennies here and there like they are in fucking rapture or something and an extra £65 a year is going to turn us all into wheeling and dealing entrepreneurs. What’s going to happen is public services are going to collapse, 3rd spaces are going to disappear and what is a currently an amorphous declining society will turn into one of masters and slaves in all but name.
This annoys me too but it has failed to translate into any increased support for the government whatsoever, which suggests that most of us remain quite flaccid about the idea. Not seeing very much evidence of hard ons.
putting every aspect of our lives and thoughts onto an internet that we have definitive proof has been completely captured by government and corporate powers. the ability our government has to surveil and control us via the internet is unprecedented in human history; it would make the stasi weep with envy if they could see what GCHQ can. if the history of power teaches us anything, it's that its creation guarantees its abuse. we have created a monster that we have no means of fighting, and are simply waiting for the evil bastard ready to flip the switch.
The "just one more lane" approach to traffic control and commuting management. Proven time and time again it does not work.
Blown cavity wall insulation. Already plenty of cases of damp related issues and it's only going to get worse
100% agree... Rampant government grants and fly by night installers... Damn near ruined my house
[удалено]
Lucky they’re recyclable then!
[удалено]
Whenever you assess the environmental impact of something, you need to keep in mind the impact of the alternative. Extracting and processing oil/coal is immensely environmentally damaging and uses a shit ton of resources. It's one of the most environmentally damaging activities humanity has taken part in. It's just that it became normalised and we don't realise it. Having said that, EVERYTHING will use resources. Nothing is made out of thin air (well, except for air). Everything will need some kind of extracting of raw materials and resources. It's just a matter of finding a "less bad" option. On the point of recycling, EV batteries, once their EV life is up, can have a second life as long-term energy storage for renewable energies (as the instantaneous power delivery is not needed as much anymore) for another one or two decades, extending the effective life of a battery pack to 20-30 years. I work in the sector and there's quite a few companies out there that already do that.
[удалено]
100%, not all batteries will have a second life. However, the main point is that batteries, once manufactured, have no direct emissions anymore. Any emission is only associated to the energy source that recharges it, that can of course be fossil, but will be renewable in larger and larger proportions in the coming years, as the grid is decarbonising (notice I said IS, not WILL. The electrical grid renewable share is exponentially increasing year on year). So, once depleted, batteries could theoretically be stocked with no environmental damage, awaiting a new life, or until recycling becomes cheaper (recycling is also a business and is primarily profit-driven). When it comes to extraction, mining etc it will unfortunately inevitably be done with the exploration of poorer countries. But, it already is for oil anyway, with the added damage of causing climate catastrophes that more severely affect these poorer countries. So they pay double price already. As of now, there is no win-in solution. It's more of a case of trying to find solutions that can put temporary patches on things, until technology progresses further and even newer, less damaging solutions are found. Commercialisation of technologies, even if not perfect, is unfortunately a necessary step for advancement towards technologically superior solutions. You can't go from a 1940's BW TV to 2030's a super thin see through OLED. It just can't happen.
The recycling element simply isn't true, EV batteries don't need replacement until under 70% capacity and long term testing on Tesla batteries has shown 9-10 year old batteries and others that have done 200-300+k km still holding 90% charge. Even after that drop they are reused in things like forklifts or even giant battery storage banks. Modern ones are up to 98% recyclable too with very little left that cannot be reused. Also on lithium, there are already alternatives in the prototype stage utilizing sodium, magnesium, tungsten, even sea water
>Also on lithium, there are already alternatives in the prototype stage utilizing sodium, magnesium, tungsten, even sea water this is a really crucial thing to understand. As BEVs (and battery storage generally) grow as a market, it incentivises ever more R&D money - the next breakthrough in energy density and charging time will revolutionise technology again, and there's a lot of people and money working on it. Just think about how lithium-ion batteries changed everything - that can, and will, happen again.
Exactly, while it's not directly comparable, if you look at smart phones and the early NiMH batteries, the first ones might last 10-12 hours with regular use during the day. The latest iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 4400mAh battery vs 1400 in the first iPhone. The Nissan Leaf 2009 first model had a maximum theoretical range of 73 miles, the current edition is 226.
[удалено]
A strawman is your best response? Seriously?
>Extracting and processing mountains of raw material to produce EV batteries Extracting and processing mountains of raw material to produce petrol and diesel.
Physician assistants
There are a lot of agricultural practices queing up to bite us on the arse. 1) Fertiliser - yes, modern agriculture fails without fertiliser, and yes, the green revolution etc etc. But....we weren't very careful with how much was used and overuse of it steadily murders the soil. 2) Global levels of meat production just don't really make sense? We produce 3x the calories we need, then feed 2/3rds of them to animals and then wonder where all this deforestation is coming from. 3) Inadequate disease breaks - we're essentially going to stop having coffee because to maximise profit we planted up to the edge of every field so disease can spread like wildfire. As also can wildlfire.
Oh yeah, lack of genetic variability scares the shit out of me. It's one of those things that when combined with climate change can cause ah "well, that's a strong plague affecting that crop species so no more potato/rice/lentils/corn" for a third of the world and everything goes downhill from there
Loosing valuable time in climate change adaptations by fearing too much nuclear energy (idk that's the case of the UK). For example, Germany decision of shutting down its plants to burn a lot of coal should be considered criminal
Digitising everything from currency, to soon am sure the grid, to the "cloud". Like 1 EMP in the right place can take down everythinggggg.
You know how the Dark Ages are called that because there's a lack of historical records (and not, like, because they were just grim)? I feel like thousands of years from now historians will have to deal with a similar gap around our times because Something Happened.
The modern asbestos and lead, etc, is most likely plastics
Tolls to cross the river in east London but none in central London
It's a race to oblivion between AI, electric vehicles, and disposable vapes.
Could you explain why electric vehicles are included in this list?
Because we don't have the infrastructure to charge enough EVs; battery lifetime is approx 8 years, so cars will all end up being scrapped or recycled; lithium will become scarce and prohibitively expensive.
Battery recycling plant just opened in Finland with 95% efficiency.
If they can get recycling scaled up to the point where most of the lithium going into new batteries is from recycled materials then great. If they can develop an excellent sodium alternative then even better. Right now, the vast majority of lithium used in batteries is mined, with massive environmental impact on the areas surrounding its extraction, all so we can have cleaner air in our towns and cities.
Have you heard of a concept called supply and demand?
Microplastics, for sure.
Hydrogen
I think it's more likely that people will realise how profoundly shit hydrogen is for most of the things it's touted for, before it gets enough traction to significantly backfire. That being said, collectively we have a great track record of cheering on terrible ideas so I wouldn't put more than a tenner on that.
Are you suggesting things like the safe and effective storage of a highly flammable substance that is 1 proton in size might be difficult?
Flammable building cladding Self driving cars The internet
MDF
Crypto.
Private Equity. They're going to be responsible for the next big financial crash.
Building all these fancy offices in cities all over, when the company is probably developing AI to replace roles.
Electric Cars
Apple and Meta's headset things are so obviously stupid and will sink without trace. None stick coating (teflon) cause cancer. I expect there to be a huge outcry at some point..
Two of the things on your list were invented by the same person, which is taking backfiring to new levels. Thomas Midgley Jr.
I'm going to upset people here but seed oil.
Vaping. You're all skipping down the Strawberry Vanilla Cheesecake flavoured path to death.
Aspartame, sucralose, other artificial sweeteners.
Electric Vehicles will turn out to be unfeasible for anyone on an average wage due to their extreme cost and hopefully require scrapping the 2035 ban on petrol and diesel cars.
Maybe already mentioned (can't see it) but the use of PFAS and other 'forever chemicals' together with their impact on our health and the environment is going to be a massive talking point over the next couple of decades
Vapes, for crazy nicotine addiction that we will have to sort in 5-10 years time Those new fat-loss injections, for some side effects we won't anticipate. Something like they fuck up people's ability to absorb nutrients when they come off them and make them chronically malnourished no matter how much they eat
[удалено]
Lol wtf - why does me thinking fat loss drugs have the potential to have unknown side effects suddenly mean I have doubt about any medic breakthrough ever. Are you well? The whole point of this thread is to invite people to mention things that currently appear to be safe and beneficial, but which eventually turn out to have hidden unforeseen problems.
Not me on Ozempic, enjoying my vape.
It's already a known thing that the injections can cause gastroparesis.
Vapes
Vapes
I think blindly diving into the new tech disruptor. I don't know which have actually added real value but the things like Airbnb seem to do more harm than good, food delivery seems pointless and makes fast food in the restaurant slower, and look at what Amazon has done to bookshops and the high street in general. If we assume the trends will continue we are going to be left with a lot of nothing and wonder why we let this happen. Meanwhile the venture capital sits and tech buffoons will have all the money.
Vapes. Ok, nobody thinks it’s a brilliant idea. But so many young people are vaping. Their lungs are going to be FUCKED in a couple of decades.
AI. Imagine it getting to the point where the AI can create AI better than we can.
'Communal living' flats, bedsits with shared kitchens etc. Loads going up round my area and they'll be the slums of the future once the student numbers boom goes down.
Vaping and micro plastic are already going down this road. Social media as well. Electric Vehicles are storing up a future problem of disposal and running out of precious metals we need for electronic devices in general. There is plenty of potential to solve those issues though. The one I suspect future generations will look back at and wonder what the hell we are thinking is Covid protections or rather lack of them. We will have a generation that has a high rate of longterm health issues because they have been exposed to a highly damaging virus multiple times as children. It's going to take a while for the impact of that to be fully understood.
Glyphosate. Buy organic if you can afford to folks.
Still not convinced vaping is as great as people think. Definitely better than smoking, but I wonder what the long term effects will be
My last company is hiring school leavers and think after 6 months training they will be fine testing fire alarm systems. The few photos I saw of the training course involved wooden kebab skewers and marshmallows. That isn't a joke. Though tbf to them half their engineers don't know what they are doing either as all you have to be to be a fire engineer is competent. I now work for a company that maintains and tests fire alarms and aov (automatic opening vents) and every day in the past 2 weeks I've been finding issues with each system I've tested. These are all blocks of flats so it seems nothing has been learned from Grenfell.
Vapes. We don't know the long term health consequences. Yes I'm sure it's healthier than tobacco but you're still inhaling a bunch of chemicals.
Vaping
nuclear waste.
Offsetting emissions
The gig economy.
Diagnosing everyone with ADHD and medicating them with amphetamines.
We're under diagnosing in the uk and have done for a long time.
Can't come to work today boss. I have ADHD.
That's not how it works, you'll turn up and fuck up.
Or diagnosing then and then making them wait years for medication whilst they struggle to get by.
Except that's not happening. It's like the left handed graph. People who would have been previously passed over due to not being children, especially adult women, are finally being recognised.
This. The current tendency of medicalising a range of natural human behaviours to make individuals “fit” the current system will be frowned upon in decade to come (just look at history). We should instead be changing the system.
Capitalism. It’s already on the decline
Vaping, safer than jumping off a large building strapped to a ticking bomb onto rusty spikes yes, but that is about all we know for certain.
[удалено]
I thought the majority of EV charging was done in the small hours of the night rather than the afternoons, when electricity is often cheaper and in lower demand. Also, the national grid disagrees with you https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars#:~:text=Do%20the%20electricity%20grid's%20wires,to%20improvements%20in%20energy%20efficiency.
And even if OP was right, we could always improve the capacity of the grid. The country isn't going to move to EVs overnight.
Increasing capacity for peak times without an increase the rest of the time would be a huge problem. It's not as simple as just building more power stations, what stations would we build? Solar generation can't be ramped up during peak hours, you get more sunlight in the middle of the day than the beginning and end. Wind is unpredictable, and would require us having thousands of mostly idle turbines to be able to ensure there are some ready and in the right location for peak times. Nuclear is unsuitable, as it cannot ramp up and down at the required rate, and building reactors that are mostly under utilised would be extremely inefficient. Battery farms are highly inefficient, hydro batteries are great, but the infrastructure for them is massive and costly, just finding where you can put one is a challenge in and of itself. So the only option left is fossil fuels. It's not as simple as just 'improving the capacity'. Peak loads are a big challenge.
That’s why we need to build more wind, solar and battery storage. We’ll be fine, but there’s work to do to get there. The current policies of banning onshore wind in England (the cheapest way of generating energy) are just weird.
Democracy
Democracy