Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
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There was a Twitter post about great uses for AI but it’s not being developed. The one I aligned with was scraping grocery store ads and creating a shopping list based on the best prices and personal preferences.
AI is solving problems for the business class. They are trying to stop paying people. AI has use cases to actually make our lives better but are antithetical to the capitalistic companies and would likely try to stop any AI use that undermines their bottom line.
You don’t need AI for that. All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org and a discoverable price list page that can be read and understood by everyone.
We already had something similar with RSS, where you subscribe to your favorite blogs and forums, and the RSS reader on your computer would tell you which sites have new posts, so you don’t need to scan all of them each day. For some reason people stopped using RSS, and instead published their stuff (or notifications about new posts) on Facebook, twitter etc.
The same system could be adapted for (grocery-) price lists. However the big brands would never do that, because then it would be very easy to discover which products suddenly got more expensive.
All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org
Which is the problem AI is solving here - getting every supermarket chain to agree on this (when it’s actually against their interests to do so, since it increases price transparency) would be an impossible task, but AI can get around this requirement with minimal extra effort.
I’m hardly an AI evangelist, but this is actually one of the rare situations where it’s a good fit.
Do you have the link? I would like to go through other use cases as well.
I’m not sure how that’s a useful thing besides convincing people to spend money on something they done need? Like, you either need a product at the grocery store or you don’t. I don’t need corpo bullshit ad bots to beg me to buy shit.
I don’t think I explained it well.
I shop at 4, maybe 5, different grocery stores. Some products I have preferences whereas others I don’t.
For example, say this is my grocery list for the week:
- grapes (never buy at Walmart)
- composition notebook
- ground turkey (only buy at Wegmans, unless there’s a sale)
- oat milk
- chocolate chips
- eggs
I want an AI to scrape every grocery store’s weekly ad or their website along with any coupons that are available, and determine the best price and, based on patterns of sales, what I should wait on and what time of day I should shop.
I think you explained it fine, it just doesn’t make sense to people who only go to the same place.
It doesn’t make sense to me and I’ve got three grocery stores and a walmart within miles of me.
Do you regularly use their ads to compare prices and select what to buy at each one, or generally stick to one place with a few trips to another one?
I shop for convenience and brands I prefer. One store has some items I prefer over the others. That’s to say I shop like a normal person.
Normal based on what? The ads exist because plenty of normal people use them to decide where to buy things or certain items. If they didn’t bring people in the stores wouldn’t bother.
I got what you were saying, it’s just not something I can imagine ever caring that much about. Either I need a notebook or I don’t. I’m out of grapes and want some or I don’t. I don’t need a shoddy piece of software to tell me any of those things. And attempting to micro optimize for sale events? Like, this just isn’t a sensible way to live your life.
You have failed to understand it AGAIN. Good job failing.
It does NOT tell you what the list is. Period. Stop assuming it will advertise to you. You are repeatedly describing how you have FAILED to understand what it’d even be attempting…
Nobody said it made the list for you. The idea was moronic that it would tell you when to get these things. Which is idiotic because YOU ALREADY NEED IT.
If you relied on shitty software less your reading comprehension would be better.
Who tf thinks ai will solve climate change? I’ve never heard that ever.
People selling AI certainly would like you to believe it’ll fix that and everything else that ails ya
iirc, there were some statements from companies (Microsoft?) that we won’t have to worry about AI’s effect on climate change because it’ll also come up with the solutions
I mean it’s good for predicting climate models, but it certainly uses a lot of power to do so, which is the main issue with AI.
I’ve heard that from plenty of people
Literally Bill Gates.
Same kind of people that think we can effectively pump enough CO2 out of the air, and other idiotic climate solution magic. Wishers that want to keep consumption at all time highs, basically.
I got a mail about that from my union recently… I think they had some talks about it.
Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is
And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like
What it will actually do is transfer more wealth to the top. That is what these projects do.
