Fond memories of this and Encarta on CDROM as a kid. Sad to see it go.
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I wonder why?
America first
Money saving
Too woke
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Thinking about the CIA factbook, Encarta on CD ROM, Encyclopedia Britannica etc.. reminded me of an interview with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, which I listened to on the Joe Rogan podcast. He was waxing lyrical about AI, and something he said about it sent chills down my spine.
"We already learn from textbooks written by people we never met.”
Huang then expanded on that idea to argue that AI will increasingly generate and organize knowledge faster than humans:
“In a couple of years… 90% of the world’s knowledge will likely be generated by AI.”
It probably seems quite innocuous at first, but what he’s saying is that over time the “source of truth” could shift from books, archives and firsthand records to whatever the model outputs. And therefore history could get re-written to fit whatever agenda the system owner decides.
But isnt that already what happens and has happened throughout human histrory and in every society.
AI just cuts out the middleman.
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No. The difference is that if I read a history book, I can check to see who is the author and when it was written to get an idea of the bias. Relying on AI to do the complex task of collating many sources will be much quicker but probably more dangerous than having a human collator. You have little insight into how good in a technical sense and how biased the AI is, whether by accident or design.
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You are forgetting two things:
Human nature and truth no longer matters. Most people want their biases confirmed in a quick google, they dont want to have to actually read up on a topic they only have a fleeting interest in and those who dig through mounds of source material to get to the bottom of an issue are so few that their opinion carries no weight.
Theoretical problem with AIs is bias drift, they pick up a biased source and are then open to more of the same
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