zifnab25 [he/him, any]

Me: “Mom, can we have New Star Trek?”

Dune Mom: “You have Old Star Trek at home”

Old Star Trek At Home

TrashFuture has hit on a few new attempts at Killer App firms, but it’s all Mindfulness this and AI that.

I think the last app I downloaded was an AI art app, which I used maybe twice.

Somebody explain to me why Eminence in Shadow is good, because I’ve watched three episodes and it just seems like horny Batman.

yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.

The original problem was posited… 60 years ago?

It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.