Comment by awbvious

2 days ago

I don't really like this comment I made. I was tired and I tried to make an analogy with phlogiston for what seems like a pushed portrayal of AI as being, well, some kind of "super intelligence." But the kind of person that might try to "make fetch happen" with "super intelligence" is very different from, say, J. J. Becher theorizing about the mechanism with the hope of understanding it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Becher . Phlogiston wasn't a marketing term bordering on propaganda, but rather a theory before good measurement was available. It's more like someone today trying to guess what may have existed before the big bang, there is no known measurement for that, but for something that was staring people in the face nearly daily: fire.

I mean, it kind of works, in that AI is doing neat things and terrible things and it's staring people in the face all the time--except in this case because the tech monopolies force it on us. So people will want to make explanations. But there was no Big Fire that wanted us to buy more fire-making products and thus would be incentivized to come up with, say, "fire works by using your magical spirit and you get closer to heaven with each fire you set with our fire products, buy our fire products, or rather, let us keep pushing all competition for warming one's self via political corruption allowing our monopolies to exist."

Nonetheless, I do think there's something to be gained with the idea of a billion toddlers looking at mammograms, and the lack of measurement that underlay phlogiston.

First of all, I don't know if I ethically should be using the term "toddler." I heard Coxon use it. Frankly, I don't trust him. I won't trust him until he starts saying /prominently/ that people at tech companies should be liable for breaking laws that already exist and accountability is the bigger problem. Corporations already could do dangerous stuff with biology, weapons, bioweapons or the like, it's not complicated. You do dangerous stuff, you should be held accountable. Why are we farting around wondering if some bio-engineered virus that was released by some corporation could replicate on its own, when we should be say "yo, some organization released a virus on people, why are the people at the top of this organization not getting arrested or something?" I'll admit it might be an "or something" and not "arrested," but it sure looks like nothing is happening--because that's what usually happens when the sufficiently rich do something really bad. No accountability. If Coxon is going to use talking points (and I suspect he is) it should be the very first talking point Coxon or anyone else uses--otherwise I don't trust them.

But let's use "toddlers." A billion toddlers started to get right on mammograms being cancerous or not, but being toddlers they can't really articulate why.

One toddler notices he gets his marshmallow for being right when he notices the pictures are not "shiny." What does that mean? He can't explain it, but it turns out he noticed that some images were made at a lower resolution or otherwise fuzzy because it was older/cheaper tech. And who uses that? People who are poor in poor areas. And turns out, poorer people from poorer areas don't bother to come to the doctor until it's an advanced problem, because they can't afford to come in otherwise (because, say, it's America and American healthcare is broken). And sure enough, those people are more likely to have cancer.

One notices there's more white stuff in some places and dark stuff in another place, not always the same place, but kind of similarly. They say "it's um got that white stuff dark stuff thing." It turns out that's just a reflection of something that happens when the patient is richer or poorer, and again richer people have more chance of false positive because they have the luxury of getting checked more often.

One notices they are more "squishy". That's because radiologist in socioeconomically better areas have a different technique... And so forth.

And, then to make it worse, most toddlers are so inarticulate they can't even say "shiny" or "squishy," so you can't get any information out of them.

That inability to articulate is kind of like the inability to measure, the inability to see the importance of mass in the air, per this: "Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until the 1770s when Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has mass (specifically, oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels."