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Nobody Asked for AI (jacobin.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 3 months ago (5 children)

I did not read the full article since it is paywalled.

But well, nobody asked for the internet either.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Yes they did.

    People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.

    Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,

    Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and

    Voila ! The internet.

    It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.

    If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I come from a chemistry background. Chemistry is one of the first field in which machine learning was first applied. In fact many of the first algorithms and models have been developed by chemists.

    This has been a gradual adoption throughout the past 50 years.

    How is this different from your description of the internet history? If anything, internet was much faster than that: it took less than 50 years from the first computer to the invention of internet.

    And I'm not even considering the first developments in machine learning, which happened pretty much as soon as computing machines were invented.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Logical fallacy. Just because I rebutted the assertion that no one asked for the internet, does not mean I support the assertion it was being used to rebut (that no one asked for AI).

    The internet was absolutely desired and wanted and actively built by thousands of hands in academia as well as privately, it didn't need to be pushed by corporate interests.

    I'm happy to accept that the chemistry research industry wanted AI, I have zero knowledge of it, the question I have is whether this LLM monstrosity is what you had in mind ? I did see an LLM came up with a design (is that the right word ?) for a bacteriophage - is it doing positive things for you guys ? Or is it causing as much confusion as it does value like it does in IT ?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    What I'm saying is that also LLMs grew organically. Machine learning developed organically through the years and LLMs are one of the products of such development.

    Machine learning algorithms were absolutely desired and wanted, hundreds of thousands of people worked on developing them. It is a very useful technology. If I may list one very useful development: AlphaFold, for which the 2024 Nobel prize was adjudicated.

    Now, whether LLMs are useful in chemistry and biology: kind of. Coming up with the design of a bacteriophage is not the first use which would come to my mind. Of course LLMs are being tested for their applications in such domains, but results are in general worse than dedicated models. One area in which I see value is the use of agents in orchestrating tools and analyzing results. Not really in producing new things on their own.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    That's one of the poorest summaries of computing history that I've ever seen. Did you use AI to write it?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (-1 children)

    Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.

    AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.

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