The twins are it again. And I don’t mean waking up too early. Some things are so obvious, but yet we are still completely oblivious. The net effect of the information age is not necessarily enlightenment, but a dark age of filters.
Watching the latest Anthropic release of “computer use” made me sad as I followed the brief demo of AI gathering data from the computer screen to fill in an online form somewhere else.
It is impressive, but it is also a tragedy.
On the surface, it is a relatively harmless example of attempted automation, but it is missing the bigger question of whether it needs to be done at all.
Information gathering is important and useful up to a point. But a lot of information is collected just in case. While machine learning is powerful, human learning is more powerful.
Creating AI models to interact with other AI models seems like a great way to cede control over information.
While controlling information is extremely difficult, handing that control to machines is a complete deriliction of responsibility. Maybe the machines will make optimal, defensible and auditable decisions, but then again maybe they won’t.
But most information is noise. Some percentage of it is real, some percentage is made up, but the majority of it is filler.
The dominant strategy right now is to capture all the information that we can and use algorithms to find meaning and some kind of digital truth.
