Yesterday I encountered a "wrong-on-the-internet" rando professing his excitement for "using machine learning" in #3dprinting to throttle speeds in the right places to avoid quality loss.
While completely not worth engaging with, I feel like this is a useful example to understand why this idiocy is so infuriating...
This is a problem domain where the constraints and effects are pretty much entirely comprehensible in terms of known physical models. Any suboptimal behavior is entirely a matter of nobody having spent the time to apply known models. But sure, let's instead spend the time hooking up ML, CV to evaluate results, and waste tons (literally) of plastic training a model to learn a poor approximation of what we already know.
But this is a general pattern that's terrifying...
The proponents of this kind of shit want to throw away the whole concept of having and using scientific knowledge obtained by experiment, with documentation of how it was obtained, evidence supporting the resulting models, falsifiability, etc., and replace it with a worse version of the way humans tens of thousands of years ago came to believe things about the world: simplistic pattern recognition.
@dalias I think you are attributing way too much agency to them.
It's not high aspirations for AI's capabilities. It's fundamental disinterest in the subject matter that's the problem.
My bet is that they thought - gee, this looks like a hard problem. I bet that no one has thought about it before, so instead of me investing the effort to understand it, I'll just have AI solve it for me.
@AeonCypher @chrisg @dalias __ ____ ____ ____ __ _ hammer ____ _____ _______ _____ ____ _ ____.
Fill the blanks.
I'd like to solve the puzzle...
@AeonCypher @chrisg @dalias You solve it without AI???????????
@chrisg That's kinda the whole thing, the anti-expertise sentiment behind it.
@chrisg And, not incidentally, the same anti-expertise sentiment is characteristic of fascism.
@dalias Very true.
Now that you wrote this, I realize it is possible to draw a line between obsession with AI and it's associated deification of existing knowledge to some of Ur-Fascism properties, like the cult of tradition and cult of action.
@dalias @chrisg I'm reminded of this article's claim that LLMs see so much adoption by tech companies because any technology that devalues expertise gives employers more power over their labourers.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/