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00:04 schestowitz-TR; Office for National Statistics (ONS) Entered Into Propaganda Business? https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2023/01/23/ons-propaganda-business/
00:04 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-schestowitz.com Blog Archive Office for National Statistics (ONS) Entered Into Propaganda Business?
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05:47 schestowitz; AI will replace academics unless our teaching challenges students again
05:47 schestowitz; That means to say plagiarism. Hardly a new issue; the media panic is reinvigorated by PR from Microsoft
05:47 schestowitz; Delivery of educational material chunked at the optimal grade for retention by passive student-consumers is ripe for automation, says Andy Farnell
05:47 schestowitz; Right, but automation and "HEY HI" (hype) aren't the same thing.
05:47 schestowitz; [Albert Einstein head in a humanoid prototype to illustrate AI will replace
05:47 schestowitz; academics unless our teaching challenges students again]
05:47 schestowitz; Source: Getty (edited)
05:47 schestowitz; Einstein became a bit of a cult figure and mascot. Many of his theories did not turn out to be true. But that's me nitpicking.
05:47 schestowitz; These past months have seen a wave of articles about a new kind of AI
05:47 schestowitz; called large language models (LLMs), of which ChatGPT is the most
05:47 schestowitz; prominent. The liberal progressives have embraced it, declaring that
05:47 schestowitz; its ability to auto- generate plausible-sounding text in seconds
05:48 schestowitz; strengthens_the_case for 'authenticity' in assessment.
05:48 schestowitz; This "wave of articles" is partly Microsoft spam. That helped distract from last October's layoffs and this month's layoffs. This is easily demonstrable. Microsoft keeps pretending to have "embraced" some future brands, such as "clown computing".
05:48 schestowitz; By contrast, the conservatives are doubling down on detection, proctoring and
05:48 schestowitz; reference-checking. But both camps are missing the bigger question: if
05:48 schestowitz; you cannot tell a machine from a genuine student, what makes you think
05:48 schestowitz; a student cares whether they're taught by you or a machine? Critics
05:48 schestowitz; are quick to seize on ChatGPT's limitations. By averaging a colossal
05:48 schestowitz; training set of 1TB of text, containing 175 billion word-association
05:48 schestowitz; parameters, it responds to question in the style of an overconfident
05:48 schestowitz; sixth-form essay, with a strident, repetitive tone.
05:48 schestowitz; It's large-scale brute-force plagiarism with some automation built in. Hardly new. SCIGen, for instance, is nearly 20 years old. But it didn't have Microsoft's PR budget to flood the media and brainwash hundreds of millions of people. The emperor is naked.
05:48 schestowitz; But truth is not a
05:48 schestowitz; reliable outcome of this process, as many examples have
05:48 schestowitz; highlighted. LLMs lack even the most basic epistemic position and any
05:48 schestowitz; understanding of causation or structure. Yet that doesn't matter,
05:48 schestowitz; advocates argue. This is just a start. LLMs, notable because they are
05:48 schestowitz; superficially human, have yet to integrate with other kinds of AI in
05:48 schestowitz; this rapidly maturing field. Once they do, they will be capable of
05:48 schestowitz; effective reasoning ' or its useful simulation. The likely impact of
05:48 schestowitz; LLMs on labour markets is certainly underestimated. Application
05:48 schestowitz; researchers are already eyeing them for tasks such as retail, customer
05:48 schestowitz; assistance, query and decision support. And their impressive ability
05:48 schestowitz; to interactively deliver short, informative responses, more succinct
05:48 schestowitz; and focused than Google or Wikipedia, makes them strong candidates for
05:48 schestowitz; teaching, too. Using current technology, adding speech systems for
05:48 schestowitz; accurate listening and expressive voice synthesis is almost trivial.
05:48 schestowitz; Teaching can be done by just reading books. But teachers exist because books are not enough.
05:48 schestowitz; About 5 an hour currently buys computing power to service five to 10
05:48 schestowitz; students simultaneously. Surely administrators will be falling over
05:48 schestowitz; themselves to replace teachers with bots trained in specific knowledge
05:48 schestowitz; areas ' perhaps incorporating Douglas Adams-style 'personality'
05:48 schestowitz; add-ons, allowing students to be taught by simulated Einsteins or
05:48 schestowitz; Feynmans.
05:48 schestowitz; Economics and teaching should be put apart.
05:48 schestowitz; But as the cost falls, and as people become increasingly unable to
05:48 schestowitz; distinguish plausible-sounding nonsense from genuine wisdom, human
05:48 schestowitz; suppliers will compete with machines in a race to the bottom. And the
05:48 schestowitz; disastrous consequences will not be limited to academics' bank
05:48 schestowitz; balances. As a systems theorist, I predict that this market for
05:48 schestowitz; lemons, as economists call it, will run into the same problem that
05:49 schestowitz; devastated banana production in the late 20th century: production of
05:49 schestowitz; sterile monocultures.
05:49 schestowitz; This isn't even a new problem.
05:49 schestowitz; Positive feedback loops of mediocrity will kill off intellectual
05:49 schestowitz; progress by failing to reproduce innovative experts with core
05:49 schestowitz; disciplinary skills. At best, we will be stuck in an endless recycling
05:49 schestowitz; of 'approved facts'. At worst, our ability to reason and assess
05:49 schestowitz; knowledge claims will collapse, leave us sitting ducks for recruitment
05:49 schestowitz; and brainwashing by malign forces. In fact, you could argue that we
05:49 schestowitz; are nearly there already.
05:49 schestowitz; Not even ML was needed for this. I'm not so old, but hype set aside, we had all this before.
05:49 schestowitz; Credential inflation means that a degree is now considered a
05:49 schestowitz; necessity, and many students are not so much thirsty for knowledge as
05:49 schestowitz; anxious about being left behind in the red queen's race to grow their
05:49 schestowitz; CVs. Profit-hungry universities' response to this market has, at the
05:49 schestowitz; extreme, reduced professors to poorly paid operators of degree
05:49 schestowitz; machines that chunk educational material at the optimal grade for
05:49 schestowitz; retention by passive student-consumers. Such a model is ripe for
05:49 schestowitz; automation and sublimation by LLMs, whose training data can be washed
05:49 schestowitz; of anything too marginal.
05:49 schestowitz; There's already a long but still-creeping threat of recruiters scanning for buzzwords like "IoT" because they have no grasp of technological substance.
05:49 schestowitz; To save both our jobs and society, academics must go back to the future. At our
05:49 schestowitz; best, we did not use to spoon-feed students, as we do today. Nor is that what
05:49 schestowitz; they wanted. They came for guidance, encouragement and socialisation into
05:49 schestowitz; collegiate life, already as full adults. We always had an implicit duty of
05:49 schestowitz; care, but we also had authority to direct and judge.
05:49 schestowitz; That sounds more like The Times than a hacker ;-)
05:49 schestowitz; I know, I know... language adapts to the platform/editors ;-)
05:49 schestowitz; In my tutorials in the 1990s, anyone who sat in meek, expectant
05:49 schestowitz; silence was ignored ' by me as much as by their peers. Something
05:49 schestowitz; important I took from a psychoanalyst is that 'this doesn't begin
05:49 schestowitz; until you have the courage to speak first'. A good professor is a
05:49 schestowitz; sparring partner who aims to toughen up young minds through merciless
05:49 schestowitz; examination of purported knowledge, a process continuous with
05:49 schestowitz; research. And I believe many students still crave to be challenged '
05:49 schestowitz; even if they have lost the words to express it. There is
05:49 schestowitz; unquestionably a demand for passive inculcation, too. But in a world
05:49 schestowitz; bereft of benevolent intellects, trusted, respected human knowledge
05:49 schestowitz; curators will command a premium like never before ' possibly in new
05:49 schestowitz; freelance roles akin to those of consultants or therapists.
05:50 schestowitz; It's worth noting troll and misinformation farms online. They too pose overlapping threats.
05:50 schestowitz;
05:50 schestowitz; We will need courage to retake the ground freed by the
05:50 schestowitz; machines. Begging bowls in hand for grants and accolades, we've
05:50 schestowitz; allowed_ourselves to be bullied by MBAs with twice our salaries and
05:50 schestowitz; half our IQs. But once we accept that AI will completely replace our
05:50 schestowitz; current jobs as mouthpieces for statistically 'consensual truth', we
05:50 schestowitz; can begin valuing ourselves again. By re-embracing our former status
05:50 schestowitz; as authorities and role models, we will become real professors again.
05:50 schestowitz; I saw "MBAs with twice our salaries and half our IQs" in another site the other day, maybe quoting or copying you.
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06:57 schestowitz-TR; "So yesterday my blog was on the front page of Hacker News. Twice. The comments were brutal, however some people politely pointed out some issues that I've brushed off in the past because it's difficult to interpret comments like "ur website is gay furry trash because I can't tell what is a conversation snippet lol"" https://xeiaso.net/blog/site-update-better-css
06:57 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-xeiaso.net | Site Update: CSS Fixes - Xe Iaso
08:33 schestowitz-TR; we are watching the above video ah the moment
08:33 schestowitz-TR; it is long, but starts with a 2-minute roundup/overview
08:33 schestowitz-TR; very concerning
08:33 schestowitz-TR; even our "Transparency" orgs are lying now
08:33 schestowitz-TR; so where can I turn to data?
08:33 schestowitz-TR; 5-6 Days Later Still No Reply From ONS; Statistic Regulator Receives Formal Complaint https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2023/01/23/5-6-days-later-still-no-reply-from-ons-statistic-regulator-receives-formal-complaint/
08:33 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-schestowitz.com Blog Archive 5-6 Days Later Still No Reply From ONS; Statistic Regulator Receives Formal Complaint
08:34 techrigthssec; That's problematic.
08:34 techrigthssec; They seem to hide the data in various ways, including through delays.
08:50 schestowitz-TR; swap=mem/ramx2
08:50 schestowitz-TR; swapless servers can become a mess to manage
08:50 schestowitz-TR; gnu/linux, recent builds
08:50 schestowitz-TR; thi is not a weakness
08:50 schestowitz-TR; disk space is not expensive and not volatile (it can be)
08:50 schestowitz-TR; case: you run shit program, it asks for moar and moar ram
08:50 schestowitz-TR; system slows down
08:50 schestowitz-TR; you realise something is wrong
08:50 schestowitz-TR; you can kill the process that's offending
08:50 schestowitz-TR; while ie eats up ram oom might have guessed wrong
08:50 schestowitz-TR; but it can take a lot of time to totally exhaust ram
08:50 schestowitz-TR; and you can killlall from a remote terminal or machine
08:50 schestowitz-TR; if xserver has been kicked to swap by then
08:50 schestowitz-TR; then give things time to recover//rebalance
10:01 schestowitz-TR; After More Than an Hour on the Phone, "Standard Life" Says Pension Was 'Transferred', Refuses to Give Any More Information (Money Gone 'Missing') https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2023/01/23/phone-your-pension-provider-before-too-late/
10:01 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-schestowitz.com Blog Archive After More Than an Hour on the Phone, Standard Life Says Pension Was Transferred, Refuses to Give Any More Information (Money Gone Missing)
10:01 schestowitz-TR; truly scandalous. And I've wasted so much time on this.
10:04 techrigthssec; ack
10:16 schestowitz-TR; ONS is Apparently Still Undercounting UK Deaths, Reality Likely a Lot Worse Than Stated https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2023/01/23/undercounting-uk-deaths/
10:16 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-schestowitz.com Blog Archive ONS is Apparently Still Undercounting UK Deaths, Reality Likely a Lot Worse Than Stated
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10:59 techrigthssec; ack
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20:11 schestowitz-TR; UK: 30% More Deaths Than Expected https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2023/01/23/more-deaths-than-expected/
20:11 -TechrightsBN/#boycottnovell-schestowitz.com Blog Archive UK: 30% More Deaths Than Expected
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