IMHO the root of the issue is that "AI" is being anthropomorphised, or oversold as actually "intelligent".

If there's anything I've learned about software, "intelligent" usually means "we've thrown a lot of intelligent people at the problem, and made the solution even more complicated".

Machine learning is not software, but probably should be approached as such. It's a program that takes some input and transforms it into some output. But I suppose if society really cared about physical or mental health, we wouldn't have had cigarettes or slot machines.

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escapecharacter 3 days ago | parent [-]

A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”.

When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.

	▲	fragmede 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Was all that snark, the cloud to ass" string replacement firefox extension; was it actually helpful? We're still trying to sell the masses (and ourselves) on the benefits of self-hosting, and the cost of cloud hosting vs on-prem has never really been answered. Don't get me wrong, a trawl through my comments here will find I don't always manage to hold my tongue when I'm feeling snarky, so I very much understand the desire, but at the end of the day, what has that actually helped? My friends who were Unix and Linux sysadmins who didn't manage to upskill are still out of a job when their employers moved the servers they were babysitting into the cloud, and my data is still swimming around somewhere in Facebook and Google's data centers. Sure let's call the AI names, behind its back and to its face if we're feeling particularly bold, but is that actually going to amount to anything?