Artificial Intelligence
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I still think there’s a middle ground with AI, especially in industries like mine. I’m a residential GC/home builder and recently had a project where we changed the entire layout strategy of the house. Originally it was a 3-story intown rowhouse on a very tight lot, then the client decided they wanted to shift the structure lower on the site and essentially turn it into a 4-story configuration while deleting a detached 2-car garage with living space above.
In the past, I would’ve either had to spend hours manually crunching numbers or start calling subs and trying to extrapolate costs. Instead, I uploaded the original plans, my internal job cost budget from the first version of the house, and fed AI the changes along with some specifications about finishes, flooring, etc. What came back was honestly very close to where I believed the project needed to land from a budget standpoint.
Now obviously I wasn’t using this to create a final contract price or something I’d stake my business on. I already had a strong understanding of what these things should cost, so if AI spit out some insane number I would’ve known immediately. But as a fast conceptual estimating tool? It was incredibly useful.
Honestly the best way I can describe it is like having a very fast junior estimator/project assistant sitting beside you. It saved me hours of preliminary number crunching and helped me get to a realistic ballpark quickly so I could have an intelligent conversation with the client about the revised layout and direction of the project.
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Absent of the environmental issues it causes, AI works fine if the person using it thinks critically and understands the limitation of the tool. Unfortunately an awful lot of people don't understand that and you end up with unintelligible misleading shite.
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Social Media, AI and the absence of critical thinking are rapidly eroding the pillars of democracy.
I wager the orange period would have been far less likely in the 90s.
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Yeah. I think cable TV, then social media, and now AI have sort of been an escalatingly stultifying progression, and the politics of the era reflect that. Governance by meme in a post-factual era.
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For shits and gigs: meme governance via tv/social media/Ai/internet etc, could by all means be literally a more true form of democracy. It is of, by, and for the people, and it seems to have more power over peoples thoughts and actions than almost any other influence. On the other hand, its definitely fucked all of its constituents because its not really real. I think there's been an absence of critical-thinking since long before me, and the factual/post-factual thing is just an evolution of sources. When it was just radio and television people were just as susceptible to propaganda, if not more so. Now that it's moved to Tiktok etc, it still looks about the same, but societal entropy from these factors is causing "escalatingly stultifying progression" (great phrase there). Then again, I live under a rock, and this is just about the limit of my engagement with these things, so I'm aware my take is meaningless.
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oh, idk if anybody posted this before, but this shows exactly why Ai bothers me. It's boldly counterintuitive almost like its unknowingly gaslighting. This is both funny and annoying, but imagine if these questions and misconceptions were a more serious topic with potentially grave consequences.
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Tech giants not understanding why they are being booed at commencement speeches and telling graduates to get over it…
Then you see articles like this where 21,000 people are out of jobs: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy0x0j5deo
Wonder if there is a correlation between the words and actions of the general populace.
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It kinda blows my mind how AI is trumpeted as getting better and better all the time, yet it still routinely fails at very simple data retrieval tasks.
Case in point, I was curious about the record time for getting up the Manitou Incline, and Google's AI gave me this answer:
Decided to check for myself and found that Joseph Gray's time on that day was 20 seconds slower than stated, and his record was broken way back in 2022 anyway. So this information was just somehow "invented" and displayed as fact.
Forgive me if I'm less-than-thrilled at the idea of this technology determining human targets for elimination and becoming my next doctor!
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o - OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack
It’s begun and skynet is real. All hail our computer overlords…
