We use Hubspot. Here's what we use it for:
- the "live chat with support person" bubble on our web application
- single funnel for incoming/outgoing support tickets & support communications with our customers
Adopting it was an old decision.
We would love to not use hubspot; the service delivered vs. the ongoing costs seem like a bad deal now.
At some point, we'll get around to migrating to something else.
That nightmare scenario actually did play out not long ago near me. A woman from out of state was falsely ID'd by an AI camera of some kind and was detained for months and it wrecked her life.
My sentiment is that the process was wrong and that the officers and other parties involved in this should all be fired, and the woman compensated.
None of that is what normally happens; that is not happening "millions of times". That's why it was newsworthy when it _did_ happen.
The original comment was philosophically open ended.
I made the example in my response very specific because arguing about hypothetical generalities is usually not productive.
The difference is this: it's difficult to ascertain if someone is guilty or innocent without arresting them. YOu don't arrest people via a random statistical sampling; you arrest via a biased selector: You arrest people you have high odds of beleiving are likely to be guilty. And you arrest them because you cannot ascertain their guilt via non-destructive observation. Without arresting them, they are allowed to simply walk away while you are trying to ascertain their status.
An arrest rate of 10% of all humans would be ridiculous.
A false positive rate of 10% _among the population of people you arrest_ is acceptable.
So the applicable comparison isn't "your cell phone doesn't work 10% of the time", the applicable comparison is "when your cell phone wasn't working, the tech support team guessed correctly as to the root cause 90% of the time, but guessed incorrectly 10% of the time"
IOW, 90% success rate with a 10% FP rate amongst a problematic cohort.
>No I maintain it would be pathetic performance by LEO if they were willy nilly arresting people hoping to bag the perp.
Nobody is advocating for that.
The cops should only be arresting people they have a plausible reason to arrest. If it turns out that 10% of the time their guess was incorrect, that's acceptable. They are not performing random arrests and getting a lot hit rate. They are doing targeted arrests and getting an ultra high hit rate.
>AI is being forced inappropriately into peoples lives with no opt out *everywhere*
I agree with you, and I also don't like that, and I think stopping that via market choices and legislation, as appropriate, is the right thing to do.
In my mind that's totally separate from what I am talking about and commenting on.
That said, you can make legislation so that you're not forced to use it (or be spied on by it), but you cannot make a law that stops AI development. If nothing else, the law won't reach beyond our borders. And eventually a nation hostile to you will develop ASI and then they will impose it on you (and worse)
I've been a professional software engineer for 30 years.
AI has changed everything for software engineers.
I wrote a line of code by hand saturday (client blocks AI) and it was weird. I hadn't done it in months.
I don't have a crystal ball. I cannot say for sure whats coming.
But I would say this: if the scope of your ambition is small, e.g. the possible amount of value you can add as a business (or as an employee) is fundamentally constrained by something, then having a machine do that thing way more efficiently than you is a problem.
Machines will take an increasing share of your fixed pie.
Lots of software isn't that.
Lots of software is trying to make the pie bigger.
We're doing things now that we never would have tried. The incremental cost of writing code goes to zero. Software engineering changes. What assumptions about what you do and how you spend your time and what value you provide change when the cost of writing code goes down 10x or 100x?
For all of human history, the speed of acheiving every goal has been limited by available high-IQ-hours. At every moment in human history, there was unimaginable value not being created because it didn't make the cut compared to everything else that also needed doing - the brains capable of doing it didn't have the remaining hours to do it.
Artificial intelligence is changing the math on that. Unbounded level of available hours at what appears to unbounded level of IQ.
You are trapped in a prison made of your own lack of imagination.
(I'm not saying I'm not, by the way)
I don't understand your point. Can you explain it for me?
I assume you have never tried making an AI model of the type we're discussing (near-frontier LLM), and you have also never tried making a printing press.
Neither have I.
However, knowing a bit about how LLMs work, and knowing a bit about model training for non-LLM models, and having done a bit of word working and metal work, I assume it's actually easier now to make an AI model at home than it is to make a printing press at home.
My response included assumptions which might not hold.
If the way that police work actually worked was "we pick 100 names randomly out of the phone book, arrest them all, and 10 were innocent"
So the way to think about it is, "we detain 100 people for whom we have probable cause - we believe a crime was taking place, and we believe they were proximal or involved in that crime.. and we have only a 10% false positive rate"
That's really quite good.
So for instance, if you have a riot and you arrest 100 people, and then later you find out that 90% of them are actually criminals, but 10% of them actually didn't break any law, and release that 10% - I'm fine with that. It was completely reasonable to arrest all 100 of them in the first place - they were, after all, in physical proximity to a riot, and they looked and acted enough like the 90% of actual rioters that the police (correctly) detained them.
A fine way of not getting arrested in this scenario is to stay the hell away from riots. And when "protests" become riots, _leave_.
If revolution, anarchy, and violence are the goal, fine. But then don't expect due process.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work. -- John G. Pollard
