AI as a cult

Here's my AI start-up idea, I'm gonna design an AI that can monitor the snack machine rack and know when your Twix is stuck in the little spinny-doos and then automatically give it an extra nudge, saving the trouble of the customer rocking the machine and potentially being crushed by said machine.

My idea is to use AI to insert spelling and grammatical errors into AI generated papers. This will make it harder to tell you used AI to do your paper. Should be a big seller with the high school and college crowd. ;-)

I remember snack machines, way back in my youth. Nowadays we just order mass quantities of junk food from Amazon.

We do have a direct account with Lundt.

At one point I was $2 up on the snack machine at the end of my corridor at Watson. It had a slightly wonky dollar bill handler that would get jammed.

I discovered that part of its power-on sequence was to run the handler backwards for a bit, so it produced an indescribably crinkled dollar bill, and started working again.

Saved them a truck roll, so everybody's happy.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Do you remember the old cigarette machines? My dad smoked Pall Malls.

I'm just old enough to be nostalgic for this type of soda machine:

Which by the time I was old enough to tie my own shoelaces (mid 1980s) seemed to have disappeared from most everywhere except candlepin bowling alleys (it's a New England thing), which always seemed to be a decade or three behind the times on decor & technology.

The drinks always seemed to taste the best out of those, when they worked right at least.

The Web 2.0 21st century business model is instead of just running a vending machine business, you make YouTube videos about running a vending machine business. Averaging millions of views likely brings in significantly more money than the modest profit from sales, which as someone mentions in the comments is likely going to require a couple hours work a day just to break even.

At work we just stock whatever people request and give it away free.

AI is a fad, like nanotech. A money sink.

He said, as the robot pushed him down the elevator shaft! :-)

Hey, listen, man, don't trash all the buzzwords. How do you expect professors and defense contractors to separate granting agencies from their money?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Or VCs to separate citizens from their savings?

I should tell the story of my nanotech adventure some day. Mo and I did get a week in Oxford for free, which was worth the degradation of dealing with hustlers and VC parasites.

John Larkin hasn't noticed quite how productive the "fad" has already been. When his business gets washed away by cheap AI based competition he will be totally baffled, but he is a bit short of natural intelligence.

Why go robots always have eyes that glow? That sounds like bad optics to me.

Or for that matter, why are they most always humanoid?

It keeps the audience happy. Most of them are even less well-inforned than you are.

Screen actors' guild approves of that, though. The original 'robots' were Karel Capek's creation, for the R.U.R. play. Modern film variants include nonhumanoids

Trillions of dollars will be spent into R&D on how to connect some kind of GPT-like algorithm to an android body, only to find that the finished product mostly likes to watch sports, gossip with other androids, and is largely unemployable.

Of course one we have multiple AI oracles, they will use up all our power generation powering flame wars.

One of the more "interesting" Fermi paradox rationales I've read lately is the idea that technological civilizations founded by biological organisms rapidly merge with machines but then encounter difficult thermal management issues, so have to power down for long periods of time.

Of course AI makes no sense. It's just more bad code.

Nobody has a clue how our brains work. How can a logic system with millisecond prop delays do the math to hit a spinning tennis ball?