The field of #AI is such junk pseudo science at this point. Which other field has its equivalent of Nobel prize winners going absolutely bonkers? Between him and Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (his brother has the complete opposite view at least) clown town is getting crowded.
@timnitGebru with the same quality measures they can stop writing research papers altogether, if 100M bad papers are as good as producing one seminal one
@timnitGebru not a Nobel winner, but "elderly and distinguished scientist" / popularizer Michio Kaku was on NPR a few months back waxing eloquent about how quantum computers are going to give us AI, solve all medical problems, communicate with parallel universes, etc., etc. The only part of the entire interview where he made sense was a few parenthetical comments about LLMs not being that great :-)
Not sure what "field" Kaku is in for the last many decades other than publicity, though.
What they seem to be saying is: "to get the full environmental benefit of AI we not only have to make the "replaced" person redundant, we have to kill and eat them too."
@timnitGebru#AI is alchemy, not science. Alchemy gave us some useful inventions, but did so mostly by accident with no understanding of how to explain why adding an eye of newt to your iron sword did nothing useful.
@timnitGebru Knowing Tomlinson's work I tend to think that this pre-print is actually a troll that successfully hit its target (especially looking at their lastest publications). Or maybe Tomlinson et al went crazy.
The irony is that two of the authors wrote an entirely unhinged paper in 2013 about computing when sustainability efforts fail and civilizations collapse. That paper bases its premise on such significant and rigorous scholarship as... wait for it... Jared Diamond. (????)
To be fair there are other papers in that genre that are much better. Some of the other authors have gone on to do great work. This one, though... yikes.
@timnitGebru Interesting, I believe this is the same B. Tomlinson who published Collapse Informatics back in 2013. There's a real whiff of eugenicist lifeboat ethics to this.
@timnitGebru It's certainly not on the same order of things, but I'm also troubled by Roger Penrose's mixture of Gödel incompleteness, quantum mechanics and biology to sort of prove the existence of the soul.
@timnitGebru so most of their claims should be taken with a huge pinch of salt?
(sorry I'm just trying to wrap my heads around all the hype in the field and it's hard to tell what is true / reliable and what isn't).
@timnitGebru
Imagine looking at those absolute garbagefire charts and thinking, "Well this is interesting and worthy of consideration." Dude needs to ask his doctor about the likelihood of brain worms being accountable for his cognitive decline.
@timnitGebru No other serious academic field today has a mainstream view that is bogus, pseudoscientific, or otherwise totally misguided, with serious scholars trying to subvert it from the margins, that much can be said about 'AI studies'
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