It was suggested to me that I apologize to this message board for being mean to CCU. I apologize. A few of my posts were deleted because they were deemed offensive. I am truly sorry. I have a difficult time regarding the treatment and cruddy attitudes towards those who are not of our predominant skin tone or faith. Being white, we walk around confident and comfortable without the realization of what life is like when walking in someone else’s shoes.
I’m guilty of jumping to a conclusion. I am sorry for that. I’m also sorry for poking at someone.
I hope your last sentence doesn’t mean permanently. You owned your part. That’s standing up and being an adult. Hope you’re really sticking around in the long haul.
Dust ups occasionally happen, it’s part of the human experience. The quicker we get beyond them, the better. Life is way too damn short for extended grudges that don’t involve a certain “academy” in Provo.
Maybe it is just me, but we seem to be having a lot military helicopters flying over lately. It wouldn’t be an issue except they are all flying so low (and with the trim on their rotors set wrong) they are shaking my house at all hours.
I get I am a little sketchy, but this is way over the top.
I can’t adequately describe how badly I despise AI. Not just because these companies are effectively just stealing the entirety of human knowledge and creativity and selling it back to us for absurd profits, but because of just how incredibly lazy it makes people.
There was an RFP (request for proposal) that our company was considering bidding on. It was a project focused around leader development in the healthcare space. I read through it pretty thoroughly over the weekend and saw that it required our consultants to have several certifications (i.e. Masters in public health, executive coach certifications, etc.) that none of them have. It also required very specific public health experience and content that we don’t have and would have to try and create from scratch. Lastly, I noted that simply submitting a bid would be an extremely time consuming process with a short deadline for what amounted to a pretty small contract that we were highly unlikely to win.
We had a go/no-go meeting about it this morning and it became very obvious very quickly that I was the only one who had actually read the RFP. One of the leaders literally said “I didn’t read the RFP, but I fed it to our AI and it told me that we should bid on it!” Four of them were dead set on moving forward with the lengthy proposal-writing process when I brought up the concerns about the certifications required.
It’s insane that out of 6 people in the room deciding whether to spend significant company time and resources on a project, 5 of them had not even bothered to actually read what we would be bidding on. They were fully prepared to simply let AI make the decision for them. It wasn’t until the one person who actually read it (me) voiced the concerns that they realized it would be a massive wasted effort because we didn’t have the qualifications and credentials required.
And I guarantee that all 5 of them will tell all their leadership peers how they are “using AI to streamline decision making and workflow processes”. How about maybe just using your actual brain instead??
I have limited knowledge of AI, only ever using it to research basic questions. Does your app let you just submit a text RFP file and it spits out a decision? Does it give a rationale for the recommendation? Does it generate a proposal?
I use AI a lot, and since I’m in IT, I follow the issues & trends very closely.
There are unquestionably a myriad of issues with AI. I’ll keep this brief and confined to chatbots, not machine learning, not common AI products like maps or car safety enhancements, self-driving cars, won’t explore agentic AI, job displacement, environmental concerns, etc.
Users & students throwing complete trust at it without really understanding what they’re asking or receiving back. Teachers have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the issues of students and Google… AI amplifies the “not learning problem”, dramatically. Clearly, a revolution in adapting to this technology needs to happen, in education, and more broadly.
Chatbots are most powerful in the hands of experts. Full stop. This is why job openings for computer programmers have stalled. The greybeards can multiply their productivity pretty dramatically… but greybeards are going to retire. (Unresolved issue). If you know your topic, you can amplify your own productivity, sometimes dramatically. You can’t get lazy and assume it will always be right, so at the bare minimum sampling & reviewing the output is a must.
For others, AI can be a learning accelerator… if people are intent on learning. Don’t trust any single answer, but it’s so easy to get multiple answers, and with practice you can learn to ask more precise questions, when accuracy gets far better. If you’re on your A game, AI can help you become an expert in any given topic. If you’re simply trying to get it to do your work… you’ll be exposed.
The technologies are evolving VERY rapidly. I’ve read what Mythos can do in finding software bugs and vulnerabilities that humans have not seen for decades. We’re going to have 1-2 years of major updates coming from any software companies that survive. (That will be a good thing. Rather have “whitehats” find and fix the bugs than the criminals get their hands on it and bring companies / sectors of the economy to its knees.)
AI absolutely needs to be regulated… but there’s no way to stop it, entirely.
Doom Possibilities
“Will people become like horses?” (Ie, unneeded - we used to have a lot more horses before the internal combustion engine, cars, tractors, etc.). Robots and AI don’t buy things, they don’t go see sunsets, they don’t congregate at vacation spots. They’re still tools.
Will this be like the HAL 9000 and attack us? The possibility exists, but if Trump & Xi are talking with each other about AI as an emerging threat like nuclear weapons, I think the most extreme scenarios diminish the more the consensus rises it needs to be regulated and controlled.
If a tidal wave is coming… get out your surfboard. I don’t mean this from the standpoint of trying to out-run everyone else to great wealth, I mean it’s coming and if you’re bright and concerned about the future… be aware, don’t bury your head in the sand. We need smart, reasonable people to help others get to a non-hellscape future.
There’s a lot more to come, it will be bumpy but survivable (IMO)
China is approaching AI adoption completely differently than the consensus fear and loathing reaction here (which is an understandable reaction).
In China the government’s job is to take care of the people. We have nothing like that here. We’ve been conditioned to think government is horrible, and that’s what we focus on, that’s what we get.
On AI’s emergence, we have near complete chaos - “let the market decide”…which is reflected in widespread fear.
In China, Kindergartners are becoming familiar with their versions of Chatbots, older people see it as a way to lift their entire society, a way to deal with their age demographic tsunami. Since Dengxiao Peng up to Xi, at the (perceived) government’s direction they’ve lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, so there is much greater trust… and calm.
(I’m not a big fan of China, but the world isn’t black & white.)
We have an internal AI system that is basically pre-loaded with all our company info, capability statements, product descriptions, etc.
From what I can tell, all of these senior leaders just threw this RFP into that system and asked if it would be a good fit for us to go after. And it is…as long as you don’t read any of the fine-point specifics that effectively disqualify us. AI, at least as it is right now, wouldn’t be able to catch those fine points because they’re very specific to unique situations or requirements and it simply doesn’t know that stuff (because we’ve never fed that to it).
Basically, the leaders just didn’t want to bother actually reading a 55 page RFP document. Instead they just handed it to the AI, asked “do you think we should do this?”, and were planning to run with whatever it said without any additional consideration of what was actually required.
We’re using MS Copilot 365 which has been using the GPT engine from OpenAI from the outset, until recently when they added Claude as an engine option.
In the IT world, Anthropic’s Claude is pulling away from the others, which made the dustup between them & Department of War so wild. I’m sure many in the DOW never stopped using it. It’s simply better, fewer errors, much deeper insights.
(And hat’s off to Anthropic for not making their newest model publicly available, only giving it to IT vendors and large organizations who can use it to find & fix their cybersecurity deficiencies before the bad guys get ahold of it. As a reference, Claude Mythos found 271 bugs in the Firefox browser that were unknown to Firefox/Mozilla.)
It’s a bit unusual in the IT world for an established brand to be flipped, but Claude is doing that to Chat GPT. I can see it in Copilot because specifying Claude as the engine gives much better results… and it’s very slow, as everyone else is trying to use it, as well.
