The past month I have come to understand that not only my usual ranting on
how "AI" is dumbing down the population and seems to surgically remove
analytical thinking from people holds true, but that we are soon running into a
situation where one cannot get actual assistance for an issue one is seeking
help for.
Let me elaborate. The background of the story is that the domain
registrar and host of an old webspace of mine did some internal migration/change
of infrastructure. A lot of the things on my page stopped working. They were
still in the file manager, some of them untouched for twenty-five years, but the
web addresses did not work. I will admit that back then it was perhaps an odd
thing to "merge" my homepage with a blog, and have the icons point to what is on
"my page" from a front mainly being on blogger, but not rocket science. I
reckoned back then that it was merely web addresses I kept under control. It
worked and had done so up until a month ago.
Together with unnamed old friends
in the nerdy hacksquad some things could be deduced: Subdomains did not work
anymore, but did as subdirectories - remedied by me retouching code from 2000 to
2008, changing hundreds and hundreds of lines, HTML programming 90s style. Other
things were due to snippets on blogger that needed to be fixed in order to run
security protocols. Etcetera.
Regarding the main issue however, we were
clueless. I asked the technical support of the mentioned web hotel (whom had
hosted my page since two decades, before then I had it at a UK-based firm and
some of it even came from an old one at geocities - remember those?) and got
advice all over the place - and I trusted it as I would if talking to a real
person. PHP needed updating, DNS redirection faulty, CNAME pointing the wrong
way - all with the assertiveness that if I change this and that, things will for
sure work again. The problem was that each time I listened to their advice it
either made things a little bit worse, or stopped the page from working
altogether.
The thread grew longer, back and forth. Sometimes I got a message
that actually seem to come from a human being and was helpful, but other times
it just seemed to be "AI" grasping at straws in an assuring manner. The main
issue is still there though. I believe the problem might lie in a configuration
file I do not have access to under file manager which manages directories
(analogous to the blocks/cluster-issue on my c64 bbs). It redirects incorrectly
and I get the notion that the computer running the bot is incapable of
introspection. The last response I got had literally nothing to do with the very
specific question I asked and exemplified - and seemed to have nothing to do
with what was touched upon earlier in the thread.
I guess "AI" support bots are
only useful if they can use the documents they are trained on for answers, and
they are unable to help with a real issue. They come with unfocused
brainstorming at best, but often choosing random keywords and explaining from
that with extreme confidence (albeit contextually erroneous). It is very often
totally irrelevant and not at all addressing the issue we are trying to solve.
Perhaps it is the lack of "we" that is the issue, as I am a human and am
communicating "with".
Now I am not a programmer, but a neurologist.
Nerding around with geezers into low-level programming for more than three
decades has left some traces in me though - but imagine if I was oblivious. Then
please extrapolate the moral of this story to everyday internal medicine or my
own field - or any other area of expertise for that matter. I am glad that I am
using energy to communicate "with" my patients.
From the same earlier
mentioned
pluralistic-post:
"Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They
think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a
programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities.
AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society".
My
Datagubbe friend has
expounded more on the matter under Jonesing For The Next Disruptor.
Keep
thinking for yourself! A few years ago I wrote that when disruption trumps
proven experience stupidity reigns. It creates impractical and often absurd
scenarios but is fabulous for imagining fantastic promises no one can fulfil -
because fantasy is not knowledge.