Machine learning is neither good or evil | viznut
I've been wanting to write this for a long time. Even before large generative machine-learning models became a valid subject of conversation among non-technical people.
My relationship with "artificial intelligence" has been quite complicated. I've had a strong scientific and hacker-like curiosity towards machine-learning models for many years, and I feel there's a lot of positive potential to them. However, I dislike how they're being adopted by the civilization.
There's already a lot of political polarization around this topic. I often side with the skeptics and laugh at the naïve advocates, but I still feel both sides are misguided. Similar polarization has happened with many other technologies before, so it's nothing new.
It is much easier for me to hate, say, "mining"-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They're all environmentally destructive scam, period. But AI forms a mind-boggingly huge territory of possibilities, and we've barely scratched the surface of it. Simplistic judgement is therefore impossible.
I often get obsessed by systems that do something they shouldn't be able to. Such as computer programs that do "impossible" things – how can a short formula like t*5&(t<<7)|t*3&(t*4<<10) sound like music? When I found potentially useful undocumented features in an old 8-bit computer, I could spend hundreds of hours studying it in order to show it at a demoscene event.
