I had shoulder pain about ten years ago. Had an MRI. Found evidence of a tear. Was told I would need surgery and referred to a sports medicine doctor. He looked at my MRI and said the real problem was my shoulder was frozen, and he could do surgery but the PT after is what would actually be what helped me. Two radiologists and two doctors saw my MRI before this moment. Sure enough, with a little PT I got better.
I’ve had several more medical blunders since then, including a doctor telling me my problem is to lose weight 48 hours before going into emergency surgery.
What I have learned is to be weary of any time I feel like I’m in a “funnel.” Once you’re in the funnel, no one is thinking critically about your issue any more. One person said they found X. Next person reads that and assumes Y and recommends Z. And so on until the alpha is multiplied to hell. Lots of treatments that don’t hurt but don’t help and run up insurance.
I have since used AI the last couple years and it has either concurred with my doctors or given me enough ammo to challenge them. If I were the author, I would trust neither but use Claude to ask how to go back to that clinic and challenge the diagnosis.
The rhetoric around AI has been insane for years now. AI will kill us all. AI will take all our jobs. SaaS is dead. AI is too dangerous to even release.
It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.
But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
I've never heard of the Doorman Fallacy before. I like it.
That said, not everything changes because some businessman wants to cut costs. Splitting bills has always been a pain, and while a lot of apps suck, at least it's consistent. I can't tell you how many times I got dirty looks from wait staff when asked to split a bill. In pretty much every story the author talks about I would rather fail forward than go backward.
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.
I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.
My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.
This takes me back. In the 90s there wasn't exactly a lot of web app programming going on, and it was hard to find a web host willing to let you run scripts through CGI. This was my first introduction to perl and the idea of dynamically building web pages. I adapted WWWBoard into a web chat that was "real time" using html refresh tags. Really inspired the rest of my career. Was for lots of people.
Not sure how I feel about the author trying to use Matt's Script Archive's bugginess and popularity to make a point about vulnerabilities and vibe coding. The web was simply just a very different place back then. Even viruses were more about hackers showing off their skills than the industral malware complex we have today. Bots weren't scanning the whole web for wp-admin.php. No one was really entering credit cards on web pages. If your site got hacked, it got graffiti'd and it was embarrassing, but no one used it to hawk bitcoin.
Likening vibe apps to WWWBoard is simply ignoring the climate and times each are a part of.
I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."
The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.
It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.
And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."
I used the roundabout the game is modeled after the other day. This is at the freeway exit used to get to the Costco AND downtown in Kirkland. I've seen pileups here for no reason. It's insane.
To be fair, I'm not sure there's a good solution. The real problem is the volume of traffic and that it dumps onto two lane roads at the edges of this roundabout. To really fix things you need to give people other exits to use.
I was responsible for overseeing a Sierra AI implementation to replace our tier 1 support bot, which was not AI but a basic heuristic bot.
Containment from the bot alone shot up past 50%. Customer satisfaction with support went through the roof. And this was basic knowledge support with account awareness. We had not wired up any tools yet.
AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
I tend to agree. My first reaction to this post was to check the date, because I would have assumed this had been published around 2014.
Google's moral compass was gone long before this man even joined. That doesn't make them particularly evil, but they have joined the ranks of ordinary, publicly traded corporations.
I'll give my own interpretation, which is different from the parent though maybe we arrive at the same place.
Blindsight dismantles a lot of noble myths about what it means to be human and human exceptionalism. The things you read and see in all kinds of stories. It makes you appreciate how easy and unconscious it is to settle for comfortable lies over truth about how smart or great you are. I think this is what freaks a lot of people out about whether AI is conscious, actually.
I think the hope comes in if you embrace the implications for yourself, because to be otherwise is to be unconscious.
No one has ever made me feel horror and despair like Peter Watts. His books stare directly into the abyss. I think it's what makes the hope you feel at the end seem earned.
If you haven't read his work but you spend time thinking about HCI, you should.
I suspect it'll go on the subscription plan once other providers have similar benchmarks.
As annoyed as I am about this move, I get it. Users flood the newest, best model whether they really need it or not, and are efficient at using their entire quota. They've had so much trouble reigning in subscription usage it makes sense.
I get the impression Apple designers don't actually use AI, and so have no idea what to build, since users don't know what they want from AI yet either.