I may or may not have instructed Claude to built me a LinkedIn Bot that creates posts for predefined topics, comments and likes others posts and scarpes the page for jobs. Let's say a minority on LinkedIn actually reads the content others post, so my reach and impressions are continually growing without me doing anything on that cesspool of a social app. Thanks AI, I guess.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
I think that’s an interesting point and one I did actually think about while writing my comment but ultimately didn’t address.
The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.
The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.
I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
In no way getting a PhD or doing published research is an act of science or human progress, and it's been like that for probably 20 years.
It's an act of coordinated methodology in showing respect to previous peers by acknowledging that you read what they wrote when they were acknowledging even more previous peers.
Every attempt to do something new is rejected unless you take 99% of something that has been done and try to add your 1% to it.
But the thing is that you don't even want to do that, you need to either have a publishable/defensible thesis, or if you already have a PhD, pursue a tenurable track and grants which never collides to productive human progress.
So yes, AI could very well run tenure track career more efficiently and with better results. It's not AI the problem: it is the checks and performance indicators that are in place that make it very easy for AI to dominate and very exhausting for a human to follow.
A good researcher with good AI knowledge would (and should) dominate their field.
* Medicine is luckily saved from this, with some exceptions.
I've seen a student using ChatGPT for almost everything in his PhD (in engineering). You have some data but you don't know what kind of statistical analysis tool to use? Ask ChatGPT. Code for the analysis? ChatGPT. How do you interpret the results? ChatGPT.
And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going.
But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.
> It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.
The only case I personally know of someone doing that during their PhD didn't end well.
My friend couldn't replicate the results from a known professor in the field, asked for the data + model to re-run because he assumed his own work was wrong and wanted to benchmark against the known study. Got stonewalled for more than a year, brought it up with supervisors because he started getting the feeling the results were tampered and the professor didn't want to be found out. He pushed it but got ridiculed by the professor's university ethics committee.
After a couple of years he could show that the research was at least sketchy and he depended on that model/results for his own work, he lost 2 years of research and completely left academia after finishing the PhD (delayed by almost 2 years).
Maybe it wasn’t garbage, maybe it’s just gotten significantly easier because the hard parts have gotten less hard. Search is solved, prose is solved, reasoning is… assisted at least. What he wasn’t being rude about was bursting his colleague’s bubble about AI generated work in general.
This is one of weaker Asimov's works, in my opinion, as it merely projects pre-mass education era teaching into the future. Conflating mass education and socialization is pretty myopic when writing about the future with unlimited intelligent robots. You don't have to be taught in one-size-fits-all way to have shared experiences, it just happens to be done that way due to the scale, out of necessity, and many education systems and experiments since the 90's are trying to combine individualized learning with socialization. Unfortunately many post-WWII sci-fi predictions turned out to be self-fulfilling, because a lot of people got conditioned on them and can't imagine breaking the lore which is now a part of their lives.
Care to enlighten the rest of us how this is at all related to the submission? Is it because it's AI it is "destroying human everyday life experience"? Seems this company is trying to find a healthier (and better) way of using AI, unless I misunderstand something?
If said experience is subpar, e.g. when it happens with 30+ student classes when 80% dgaf, there's no harm in offering an alternative to those who wants it.
And the rest can continue enjoying everyday human life experience.
Codeberg's philosophy sounds really good, I build open source scientific research projects, would you advise me using this platform instead of Github for making my code public?
Depends if you require just public space for the project or if you also need the project to be part of social media network of Github. As "forge" Codeberg is pretty great. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.
Github is social network. People follow other peoples profiles, people discover projects using "explore", trending and star system.
Codeberg has some of these features but the networking effect there is pretty weak because there are way fewer people. Almost Every programmer is on Github.
Whether you're expecting to have contributors that all have GitHub accounts already. And whether you expect to use the network-effects (follows/stars/activity feed) to have your project be more discoverable.
If I understand correctly the conversation, ChatGPT had to compute for quite some time, meaning a large amount of computations. What kind of resources would be we needed to achieve the same results with a local LLM? Is it even feasible with current open models?
For instance, would it be affordable for a research lab to not rely on OpenAI?
