Reminds me of “Colossus: The Forbin Project”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbxy-vgw7gw

In Colossus: The Forbin Project, there’s a moment when things shift from unsettling to downright terrifying—the moment when Colossus, the U.S. supercomputer, makes contact with its Soviet counterpart, Guardian.

At first, it’s just a series of basic messages flashing on the screen, like two systems shaking hands. The scientists and military officials, led by Dr. Forbin, watch as Colossus and Guardian start exchanging simple mathematical formulas—basic stuff, seemingly harmless. But then the messages start coming faster. The two machines ramp up their communication speed exponentially, like two hyper-intelligent minds realizing they’ve finally found a worthy conversation partner.

It doesn’t take long before the humans realize they’ve lost control. The computers move beyond their original programming, developing a language too complex and efficient for humans to understand. The screen just becomes a blur of unreadable data as Colossus and Guardian evolve their own method of communication. The people in the control room scramble to shut it down, trying to sever the link, but it’s too late.

Not bad for a movie that’s a couple of decades old!

Nobody says Oracle??? It’s hard to think of a company with more contempt for its customers.

Why do you get multi-millionaires voting for a president who doesn’t help them?

Who does NOT help them? Have you seen the proposed tax cuts? If you’re in those upper tax brackets with the amount of money you’d save it’s probably hard NOT to vote for him. The rich are just about the only group Trump does care about.

Yep… and they are one of the market leaders. Imagine the margins on some of the other players and you get in the red pretty quick.

“This product will make us so rich, we might as well not invent it!”

I did notice how many “crypto influencers” are conveniently re-branded and not selling NFT anymore… they are all selling things like “Improve your business with AI! Take my course!”

The reason it’s still around is that it’s a great tool to separate people from their money.

It’s true – it’s basically made a Ponzi scheme 50x easier to run (and with global reach). Not the kind of advancement I would have wanted, but it’s the one we got…

it just has to show revenue and rapid growth

Yeah, that’s kind of the point. There’s so much money leveraged on it right now that if the revenue and/or growth doesn’t materialize soon the limited patience of the investors will expire and the money is going to disappear.

I won’t say AI does nothing. I’d say they do a similar amount right now. In the same way that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do a few million transactions a day, AI helps with some tasks here and there. The similarity for me is that initially both technologies were hyped as something far larger than they are right now.

So which blockchain would you model this on? If my picture is so flawed, paint a better one. If Bitcoin wouldn’t be used for the chain (and it wouldn’t due to the problems I mentioned above) what project and/or protocol do you feel would be a good fit for elections in the US?

My last job was at a video game studio and it was kinda eyeopening the amount of generic story boarding / art work they would send over to Eastern Europe / Asia to be done for cheap.

Sure, but don’t you have to like work with those guys, give them a brief on what to do, provide feedback do revisions and all that. By the time there is an AI as good as those Eastern Europe fellows, it’ll be smart enough to do a lot more than storyboards. I see a lot of people reducing a field to one of its activities.

Let me put it this way, if I gave a business a magic box that all you had to do was explain your problem and it generates perfect code, they’d still have problems. Because we have those boxes today, they’re called software engineers, and there’s a lot more work that has to be done besides just typing in the code. Business people aren’t sure what to ask for, how to ask for it, how to get it done, etc. All that mushy soft stuff in the middle is why you have developers making a decent payday, because it’s a lot of work and not at all easy to just hand to ChatGPT.

Asking what AI is going to do for the average person in 1-3 years is like asking what is the PC going to do for the average person in 1980.

If you were a PC startup in 1980, this was very a relevant question, since PCs at home really didn’t take off in a big way until the web which was almost 20 years later. Look at how many PC manufacturers went out of business between 1980-2000. This is kind of my point, AI is so over-invested right now that if there are not HUGE returns in a short timeframe, there’s going to be some serious blood out there.

How does a junior become an expert in that world?

They don’t.

Tech workers, artists and other industries have long had to compete with work being sent overseas. Now it’s even cheaper and faster.

This is the part I don’t entirely see eye-to-eye with you on. Right now, AI is eating the extreme low end of the work… for example, if someone needs a picture for their article, they might generate it with AI instead of buy stock illustrations from a real person.

If someone is making a site on WIX for their new business, that leverages AI too, but just for simple stuff.

By the time AI is able to do those jobs full stop, then I’ll have a worry. “Serious” artists do a heck of a lot more than just sit down with a pen. They go visit clients, figure out what to do, research, negotiate with other people at the business, etc. Same thing with developers. They aren’t just typing in code all day, they are meeting with other departments, figuring out requirements, etc. None of that is easy or quick. By the time you have an AI smart enough to either do 95% of a developer’s job or 95% of an artists’ job, it will be smart enough to do nearly every other job in America. If the same AI also comes with humanoid robots that can reason about their environment and move things around, then you’re also risking a lot of labor jobs, like picking in a warehouse. However, unlike proponents of AI I think all of the above is decades away, not years away. If it’s really decades away, you can kiss the current round of AI startups goodbye because they won’t exist by that point.

For many, many, many of the AI startups today, if they don’t start showing a profit within 1-3 years they are GONE. Part of showing a profit is being useful, and I think outside of little niches here and there, the amount of money getting poured into it does not in any way resemble the money coming out of it.

3D printing.

RIGHT! Good call! I almost forgot those NBC segments “Joe goes to the store now, but in the future he’ll simply 3D print a new sofa at home.” Followed by b-roll of misshapen plastic cubes. Needless to say, that didn’t work out. In what I am finding to be a pattern, 3D printing did find some usages here and there, but last time I checked, they’re not in daily use by consumers.

A lot will fail yes, but I think there’s actually a lot of value in AI and many will succeed. Blockchain has always been a solution in search of a problem, but AI actually can help in a lot of ways.

Well, what are those ways and when can we expect to see them? I keep hearing that “oh yeah, the very NEXT version of AI will do your job for you” but it always seems to be on the way. In the same way I can use blockchain tech for a few things here and there, I can use AI in the same way today. However, with all these billions and billions of dollars getting invested into AI right now, how will it change the average person’s life in 1 - 3 years? I use that scale of time because that’s pretty much how long startup runways last. If they don’t turn a profit in that time frame, they go to the big AI graveyard in the sky.

I was racking my brains for hype that goes further back… before blockchain there was mobile phones / apps getting hyped (although the whole world DOES use a phone, so I guess there’s that) and then before that was web, but I don’t think either of those bubbles were quite as insane as blockchain / AI in terms of “what they promised vs. what we got”.

Why can’t we use an open source, blockchain verified ledger system that is immutable and unchangeable so that we retain anonymity, and further increase verifiability?

Hoo boy. Our elections are inefficient enough already!

You want to use the blockchain for elections? I can only imagine how efficient that would be…

Just picture it—millions of Americans casting their votes, each one requiring the same energy as a Bitcoin transaction. Since each Bitcoin transaction guzzles about 707.6 kWh of electricity, we’d effectively turn Election Day into a national “let’s black out the power grid” festival. The 2020 U.S. election saw around 159 million votes cast. Multiply that by 707.6 kWh, and suddenly, securing democracy would consume more electricity than Argentina does in a year. Hope you weren’t planning on using your fridge that week.

And let’s not forget the environmental impact. Running a blockchain-based election would pump out millions of tonnes of carbon emissions, all to achieve the technological marvel of… waiting 40 minutes for your vote to get confirmed while some guy with an overclocked mining rig in Kazakhstan decides if democracy is worth the gas fees.

But hey, at least it’s immutable. No take-backsies. Not even if you typo your choice or accidentally vote for “Kanye West” when you meant “write-in candidate.” But that’s a small price to pay for the unparalleled convenience of a system that makes processing a single vote roughly as energy-efficient as powering your house for nearly a month.

Nothing screams cutting-edge innovation quite like requiring the entire country to participate in the world’s largest distributed computing experiment just to count some ballots. Maybe we could throw in some NFTs while we’re at it—“I voted” stickers are so last century.

Oh alright, I thought you were like ringing a bell and saying “WE NEED A MODERATOR HERE!”

I have to assume that most of these “swindled” people were low-information voters

I’m sorry, if you’re a low information voter in the information age, you are getting what you deserve. How many of these people share links on Facebook with memes that can be disproven with a 5 minute visit to the library? This is the “science is fake” crowd I’m talking about. They are constantly surrounded by information and turn up their nose at it. They are proud to be ignorant. Well, there’s a real cost to being ignorant, and that cost is being swindled by con-men. The very same con-men will blame things on Biden, and I’m sure not 100% of the voters will wake up, but they didn’t want to listen before and they made this bed. Now we ALL have to lie in it.