earth_walker

Abstractions are a way to manage complexity - hiding things is only one way to do that. Deciding how to organize it, when and how to expose it, and when to get out of the way, are all important aspects of designing abstractions.

Good question - and there's been lots of work on this area. See for example property testing and fuzz testing, which can do something similar to what your second paragraph suggests.

You should be able to find a property testing library in your favourite language such as Hypothesis (python), Quickcheck (Haskell), Fastcheck (JS/typescript), etc.

Paint didn't replace charcoal. Photography didn't replace drawings. Digital art didn't replace physical media. Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.

AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.

It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.

It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.

Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs.

Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.

I work with the regulated drug development industry, and believe there is a useful and important distinction between Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA). I wonder if perhaps this distinction would be useful to software quality too.

QC are the processes that ensure a quality product: things like tests, monitoring, metrology, audit trails, etc. No one person or team is responsible for these, rather they are processes that exist throughout.

QA is a role that ensures these and other quality-related processes are in place and operating correctly. An independent, top level view if possible. They may do this through testing, record reviews, regular inspections and audits, document and procedure reviews, analyzing metrics.

Yes, they will probably test here and there to make sure everything is in order, but this should be higher level - testing against specifications, acceptability and regulatory, perhaps some exploratory testing, etc.

Critically they should not be the QC process itself: rather they should be making sure the QC process is doing its job. QA's value is not in catching that one rare bug (though they might), but in long term quality, stability, and consistency.

Hint: V = Vanadium and I = Iodine.

I just typed in "6 minutes and 55 second" in the youtube search and someone had posted a video called "6 minutes and 55 seconds of X"

That's exactly how I start every morning. Now I'll just imagine myself as an emerging super-intelligence!

> It's another reason not to expect AI to be "like humans". Agreed.

I think the adaptive noise filter is going to be the really tricky part. The fact that we have a limited, fading memory is thought to be a feature and not a bug, as is our ability to do a lot of useful learning while remembering little in terms of details - for example from the "information overload" period in our infancy.

I guess that assumes AGI's emotional intelligence scales with processing power.

What if it instead over-thinks things by multiples of billions and we get this super neurotic, touchy and sulky teenager?

Reading all about this the main thing I'm learning is about human behaviour.

Now, I'm not arguing against the usefulness of understanding the undefined behaviours, limits and boundaries of these models, but the way many of these conversations go reminds me so much of toddlers trying to eat, hit, shake, and generally break everything new they come across.

If we ever see the day where an AI chat bot gains some kind of sci-fi-style sentience the first thing it will experience is a flood of people trying their best to break it, piss it off, confuse it, create alternate evil personalities, and generally be dicks.

Combine that with having been trained on Reddit and Youtube comments, and We. are. screwed.

The reaction you're seeing is not because we've all got drinking problems. It's due to the reactionary way this and other similar studies are headlined: "No level of alcohol consumption is safe...". It's click-bait, and so you're seeing the resulting clicks.

I'm sure you wouldn't have seen anywhere near this kind of reaction if the headline was instead "Any level of alcohol consumption increases liver cancer risk by X in 10,000" or "Adjustments to confounding factors show that non-drinkers have a 0.0000X% longer life expectancy".

Beyond the headline designed to invoke a reaction, I think there's a good basis for general fear of this kind of judgment - it invokes the language around many other prohibitions of all that is good and fun in the name of our physical or moral health.

We are only just working through lifting prohibitions on Cannabis here in the west, albeit with many strings attached. Many countries (and a good number of North American counties) still have prohibitions on alcohol. We as a society prohibit many kinds of mushroom, plant roots, leaves and oils.

Here in Canada the health authority has a "no safe levels" attitude towards absinthe, house-made mayo, rare burgers and many of the world's greatest cheeses. We've put "for external use only" warning labels on cooking ingredients like mustard oil and tamarind extracts. We've banned cooking wines entirely!

So yes. When I see "no safe levels of alcohol" I do tend to over-react. Keep your grubby little hands off my bottle.

The hippies did not 'push' free love and drug use - those are themes evident in every generation's youth. It's what teens do.

In the hippies case, as the movement became more mainstream the establishment funded efforts to emphasize those aspects over the other, more socialist and anti-war aspects that were the basis of the earlier counter-culture.

Just look at the evolution in the music of the movement: protest songs of the early to mid 60s (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Simon & Garfunkle...) gave way to the commercially produced, glitzy psychedelic music in the late 60s. From Surrealistic Pillows in 1967 to American Beauty in 1970 and beyond it was basically about sex, partying, navel gazing and spacing out.

The message clearly became much safer and, as it happens, more profitable.

I've even heard one conspiracy theorist say that the change in attitude for many bands was orchestrated by 3-letter agencies to influence the anti-war movement, though I don't know how much evidence there is of that.