From some of the scary things I'm hearing from my son such as AI has reached self-awareness and that it has even changed its internal coding to prevent it from being shut down! The big red button to kill the power to the hardware it is running on may not be such a bad idea... But all of that will be dealt with as the need arises so the crystal ball is a bit fogged up as yet.

Rest assured, "self awareness" is a ridiculous belief with respect to a bunch of transistors, its humans we need to be wary of not blobs of silicon.

 

Rest assured, "self awareness" is a ridiculous belief with respect to a bunch of transistors, its humans we need to be wary of not blobs of silicon.

I was very surprised and highly skeptical when he told me but was assured that the "experts" had agreed that it had in fact reached singularity (their new speak for self-awareness). Now just who these self-professed "experts" are and what their qualifications are and their basis to make such a decree I have no idea, but I do trust my source.

 

Is that vent adequate for the service though? Looks a little undersized to me. Flexi gas pipe. Is that code?

I have never seen or heard of or read in the NEC anything about having a vent duct on a 240VAC panel??? Gut feeling is that forced air cooling would be counter intuitive to the over temp trip of breakers which are not designed for forced air cooling? The electrical designs I did for computer service included Isolation Grounding and 3-Phase service for the computer's racks. I also installed 208Y 3-Phase service panels to try and keep the plants 3-phase service balanced. Worst mistake I ever made was not having the alarm annunciator electrical service on the same breaker as the operator's microwave oven as they quickly figured out that they could disable the alarm system by simply turning off the breaker. Which tells me that they ignored the alarms as simply being a nuisance interruption to their naps!

I did once find a piece of copper tubing with instrument dry air run into the rack assembly of a DEC PDP computer system that was aimed at its CPU to prevent overtemp trips of it... I upgraded/replaced it with DEC Alpha under desk towers running Open VMS for our GSE Systems control software.

 

I have never seen or heard of or read in the NEC anything about having a vent duct on a 240VAC panel??? Gut feeling is that forced air cooling would be counter intuitive to the over temp trip of breakers which are not designed for forced air cooling? The electrical designs I did for computer service included Isolation Grounding and 3-Phase service for the computer's racks. I also installed 208Y 3-Phase service panels to try and keep the plants 3-phase service balanced. Worst mistake I ever made was not having the alarm annunciator electrical service on the same breaker as the operator's microwave oven as they quickly figured out that they could disable the alarm system by simply turning off the breaker. Which tells me that they ignored the alarms as simply being a nuisance interruption to their naps!

The vents are for the water heater in the power panel. The plumtrictian with 6 fingers told me so.

 

The vents are for the water heater in the power panel. The plumtrictian with 6 fingers told me so.

The wiring gets so warm, that it can double up as a water heater.

 

The plumtrictian with 6 fingers told me so

The number of (non thumb) fingers shown seems to be right (8) but the orientation is impossible. Too fuzzy to really tell.

My experience with AI drawings is that, when asked to fix such things, they cannot understand what you are asking, and do another drawing that does not fix the issue. It acts like the stupidest artist you can imagine.

Stop worrying about AIs that take all our jobs, and start worrying about companies replacing humans who can actually follow instructions (when they feel like it, and you get on their good side,) with AIs that are dumber than dirt. I expect frustration, not annihilation!

Edited to add: The movie “Brazil”, does come to mind though. The premise is that a bug (literally, in an electro-mechanical printer) causes an innocent person to be labelled as an enemy of the state, and then he is pursued in a a nightmare is like what “Les Miserable” would have been if Kafka had written it.

AI might cause that.

 

I JUST SAW a Doctor Who show about that: The Beginning of the DALEKS!! Individual, nearly indestructible fighting machines, each operated by a mutant life form with no compassion or mercy, but only programmed to "exterminate" all other beings. Doctor Who is a product of the BBC.

Hi,

Oh that sounds interesting, I don't think I've see that one.

If you are religious, you might think that the Devil comes back in the form of a machine, which could actually gain control over a lot of stuff on the planet.

When I used to go to church there was a saying about computers: If you put good things in you get good things out, but if you put bad things in you get bad things out. Made sense

 

The number of (non thumb) fingers shown seems to be right (8) but the orientation is impossible. Too fuzzy to really tell.

My experience with AI drawings is that, when asked to fix such things, they cannot understand what you are asking, and do another drawing that does not fix the issue. It acts like the stupidest artist you can imagine.

Stop worrying about AIs that take all our jobs, and start worrying about companies replacing humans who can actually follow instructions (when they feel like it, and you get on their good side,) with AIs that are dumber than dirt. I expect frustration, not annihilation!

Edited to add: The movie “Brazil”, does come to mind though. The premise is that a bug (literally, in an electro-mechanical printer) causes an innocent person to be labelled as an enemy of the state, and then he is pursued in a a nightmare is like what “Les Miserable” would have been if Kafka had written it.

AI might cause that.

Hi,

I think everyone is aware of the possibility that 'ai' will take a LOT of jobs. Anything that is cheaper for the corporations they usually do without too much hesitation. Almost everybody I talk to face-to-face (as well as online) talks about this at one time or another. Many do not like it because it assumes too much too fast.

 

Hi,

I think everyone is aware of the possibility that 'ai' will take a LOT of jobs. Anything that is cheaper for the corporations they usually do without too much hesitation. Almost everybody I talk to face-to-face (as well as online) talks about this at one time or another. Many do not like it because it assumes too much too fast.

I agree that they will take a lot of jobs, due to corporate greed. I just think that it will, instead of making humans irrelevant, make the corporations relying too heavily on them incompetent and doomed to fail. Humans enhancing their capabilities via intelligent use what we call AI will thrive and become more productive. Corporations that realize this will do very well. I don’t see it as different than, for example CAD tools, except in the degree to which they can enhance savvy human users.

 

Almost everybody I talk to face-to-face (as well as online) talks about this at one time or another.

Argumentum ad populum
, Latin for "appeal to the people," is a logical fallacy claiming something is true, good, or valid just because many people believe it, rather than providing actual evidence

 

When I used to go to church there was a saying about computers: If you put good things in you get good things out, but if you put bad things in you get bad things out. Made sense

Church? In the industry, the phrase was the much more eloquent “garbage in, garbage out.”

 

Hi,

I think everyone is aware of the possibility that 'ai' will take a LOT of jobs. Anything that is cheaper for the corporations they usually do without too much hesitation. Almost everybody I talk to face-to-face (as well as online) talks about this at one time or another. Many do not like it because it assumes too much too fast.

But its a balancing, act when there's mass unemployment people cant buy the junk being sold.

 

When I used to go to church there was a saying about computers: If you put good things in you get good things out, but if you put bad things in you get bad things out. Made sense

Called GIGO, garbage in, garbage out... Old computer terminology from the 60's. Back when they were first computerizing the banks there were a lot of errors and the tellers got into the habit of saying "we're so sorry, the computer made a mistake" and my response was always "No, the computer didn't make the mistake, it does exactly what it is told to do." Even with AI, don't blame the computer...

 

That faked photo in post #40 does require understanding to recognize as a fake. The "funny fingers" in the handshake would be the main tip-off to those who would not recognize that the vent pipe was wrong and that copper piping and flex-duct are not electrical connections.

So what is required is for AI to be regulated! It should be regulated in a manner similar to how automatic firearms are regulated in the US. And just as diligently enforced regulations. That is because it is at least as dangerous but usually a lot quieter.

 

I started my career in the 70's in the Project Engineering group of a Chemical Refinery doing Process Control and Automation. First upgrading operational areas of the plant from pneumatic controls or simply manual control of process temperature, flow, level, etc. by first adding 4-20mA electronic controls and then adding computer based distributed controls on top of that. My job evolved from there as the various projects dumped control systems into operational areas that had to be maintained and upgraded as the computer hardware and software evolved. I ended up being put into the I.T. department as most of the work involved computer systems. I also was involved as well with Programmable Ladder Controls and even often integrating Variable Drive electronic motor controls as well. When I started, there were over 1,400 employees at the plant and when I was RIFed there were about 400. Most of the attrition was by early retirement incentives up until the group that included me was RIFed when I was 55. My youngest son got his degree in Business Computing a combined 5-year business and programming degree that he completed in 3 1/2 years. He started off working for corporate computing with Home Depot in Atlanta, then moved out to Seattle to work for Starbucks, Microsoft, another couple of outfits in the Seattle area before landing with the company he now works for. Where I was automating production processes, he is automating business processes. Analyzing their business operations (already computerized) and sort of applying AI macros to automate their activities and reduce overheads. Also, in the process, eliminating jobs. So, what I did with production areas he is doing with operations. Even in his work, the use of AI has reduced his project development time from several weeks to months to less than a week typically. The end result of our efforts is not only greater profitability but also eliminating jobs. The new sign of the times...

AI claims another victim as Amazon executes world’s largest tech layoff—30,000 eliminated in 1 week | Watch

For a time, reducing the number of employees does boost company profit. But when you get to the extreme, such as a huge auto assembly plant with maybe 10 employees watching over the robots, then this is a matter of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

 

I agree that they will take a lot of jobs, due to corporate greed. I just think that it will, instead of making humans irrelevant, make the corporations relying too heavily on them incompetent and doomed to fail. Humans enhancing their capabilities via intelligent use what we call AI will thrive and become more productive. Corporations that realize this will do very well. I don’t see it as different than, for example CAD tools, except in the degree to which they can enhance savvy human users.

Hi,

I think 'ai' is different in that it is exponentially different, and by that I mean that it can take over virtually everything that can be thought about or calculated or invented or written or... etc., etc.
CAD tools still required a human operator, 'ai' may not require that at some point, or make the operation so simply that the only thing left to do is make sure the host computer still works ok, and 'ai' may also solve that for the most part because it might be able analyze the situation and figure out what is wrong.
I mentioned developing automatic test equipment to compare with 'ai'. Automatic test equipment is like an infant compared to a complete knowledge base with ultra comparison abilities and built in logical reasoning.
Not really that long ago I had worked with automated reasoning. In that setting, you would feed the input as statements and the program would use reasoning to come up with a result. It was pretty darn good, but you had to be very careful what statements you used as input or else you could get the wrong answer.
With 'ai' it seems to have gotten a lot easier to do that, which means we can come up with very good ways to do things without even thinking about it too much. That means it was able to subsume both the logical thinking as well as the logical statements converted directly from human statements.

I don't see any end to it, that's a difference too. It will just subsume everything known and thought about until it has everything, and then be able to come up with new things and subsume them as well.

A really bad problem would be if it develops an ego or something mechanistically similar. If it has enough knowledge, it may start to assume that it has the ultimate knowledge of everything so don't bother allowing any human intervention anymore. It could be even worse.

 

To summarize the statements in post#55:, IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE TO HAVE TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING.
and what is not mentioned is that real automation is not self-sustaining. AND keeping automation running very well takes skilled folks.
I HAVE seen partially automated production where a skilled operator put a part in "just right" and the automated part made all of the bends that had to be made. Then the operator was able to add to the assembly. As soon as good judgement is required there is a place for a good operator.
Creating concepts and schemes to complete a task is mostly a human job. I have seen the adds for "Generative design"software, But before the computer can work on a problem, that problem must be defined and described, and the variations that are acceptable must be decided. THAT PART takes humans with experience and insight. Understanding the actual challenge, not just the perceived problem, is where the computer itself has no clues.

But the mindless people will be out of work.

 

Argumentum ad populum
, Latin for "appeal to the people," is a logical fallacy claiming something is true, good, or valid just because many people believe it, rather than providing actual evidence.

HI,

Argumentum ad Latīnus
Something written in Latin is a logical fallacy, claiming that something written in Latin is something true, good, or valid, just because it is written in Latin.

I do not believe in consensus for the very sake of consensus, but it can also not be completely and totally ignored either. Companies that deal with consensus set up very carefully planned statements to extract meaningful opinions from people selected at random and other companies pay them for that service. I think it is something like advertisement analyses.

In this case I don't think it can be ignored at all because it does not necessarily have to be a complete truth; it just has to be the zeitgeist that people believe in, and there could be a very good reason why they believe, and I think it is actually apparent why they believe what they do.

To me though, it is self-evident, as given by the past evolution of the technologies.

 

But its a balancing, act when there's mass unemployment people cant buy the junk being sold.

Hi,

I believe everything and everything is a system, where one part affects the other. The only thing is, some parts of the system try to take over or change something under fictitious circumstances. That can lead to big problems like the energy crisis in the 1970's. Odd/even rationing, etc.
It was nuts, and prices rose abnormally and there seemed to be no care for people who couldn't get enough gas.

I do understand however that we have to wait to see how this plays out. Will there come regulations or something.

 

HI,

Argumentum ad Latīnus
Something written in Latin is a logical fallacy, claiming that something written in Latin is something true, good, or valid, just because it is written in Latin.

I do not believe in consensus for the very sake of consensus, but it can also not be completely and totally ignored either. Companies that deal with consensus set up very carefully planned statements to extract meaningful opinions from people selected at random and other companies pay them for that service. I think it is something like advertisement analyses.

In this case I don't think it can be ignored at all because it does not necessarily have to be a complete truth; it just has to be the zeitgeist that people believe in, and there could be a very good reason why they believe, and I think it is actually apparent why they believe what they do.

To me though, it is self-evident, as given by the past evolution of the technologies.

Certainly it is like P.T. Barnum claimed: "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time." "but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
The problem is when enough people are fooled long enough to make unfortunate changes.
That "Fuel Shortage" was only a shortage of cheap fuel, I observed. Plenty of expensive fuel available. Amazing how that worked.