It's just going to move everything to the middle of the Bell curve, leaving the wings to die in obscurity.
You can talk to it, it can give you back answers that are mostly correct to many questions, but you don't really trust it. You have real people pilot the ship, aim and fire weapons, and anything else important.
And they also had bio-neural circuits. And photonic chips.
So, hardware was already way ahead of software.
All this goes to show that in real world, the actual science (and fiction) around material sciences was already quite advanced compared to software.
Regarding accuracy, I think we’re at a tipping point where ease of use and accuracy is starting to make it worth the effort. For example Bard seems to know about youtube videos (just a couple of months ago you’d have to download it -> audio to text -> feed into a LLM). So the combination of greater accuracy and much easier to use make it worth considering.
Is it that hard to determine that a book is worth reading where worth is measured from your perspective? It's usually pretty easy, at least for technical books. Fiction books are another story, but that's life. Having some unknown stochastic system giving me a decision based upon some unknown statistical data is not something I'm particularly interested in. I'm interested in my stochastic system and decision making. Trying to automate life away is a fool's errand.
I'm a huge believer in doing plenty of research about what to read. The simple rationale: it takes a tiny amount of time to learn about a book relative to the time it takes to read it. Even when I get a sense a book is bad, I still tend to spend at least a couple of hours before making the tough call not to bother reading further (I handled one literally 5 minutes ago that wasted a good few hours of my life). I'm not saying AI summaries solve this problem entirely, but they're just one additional avenue for consultation that might only take a minute or two and potentially save hours. It might improve my hit rate from - I dunno - 70% to 80%. Same idea for videos/articles/other media.
In graduate school for example, it was pretty painfully obvious that most people didn't actually read a book and come to their own conclusions, but rather read summaries from people they already agreed with and worked backwards from there, especially on more theoretical matters.
I feel like on the long term this just leads to a person superficially knowing a lot about a wide variety of topics, but never truly going deep and gaining real understanding on any of them- it's less "knowing" and more the feeling of knowing.
Again, not saying this in an accusatory way because I totally do engage in this behavior too, I think everyone does to some degree, but I just feel the older I get, the less valuable this sort of information is. It's great for broad context and certain situations I suppose, but in a lot of areas I consider myself an expert, I would probably strongly disagree with summaries given on subjects and they also tend to miss finer details or qualifying points that are addressed with proper context.
There are FAR too many dimensions like word choice, sentence style, allusion, etc, that resist effective summarization.
Knowing it's shortcomings should be the responsibility of the search app that is currently designed to give screen real estate to the wrong summary of the ephemeral fact. Or, users will start to lose trust.
The whole premise bothered me though.
I can remember a bike ride where I was experiencing the onset of heat stroke and had to make quick decisions to perhaps save my life.
I remembered decades ago lost in Michigan's upper peninsula with the wife, on apparently some logging road and the truck getting into deeper and deeper snow as we proceeded until I made the decision to instead turn around and go back the way we came lest we become stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I remember having to use my wits, make difficult decisions while hitchhiking from Anchorage, Alaska to the lower 48 when I was in my early twenties....
The actual world, the chance of actual death, strangers, serendipity ... no amount of VR or AI really compares.
Playing video games all day isn't an enriching or well-rounded use of time, but neither is throwing yourself into danger and risk all the time. The real world is a game of carefully-considered strategy, where our response to hypothetical situations informs our performance during real ones. Careful reflection on fiction can be a philosophically powerful tool, for good or bad.
I'm trying to understand this comment, because I couldn't disagree more. It is the absolute explosion of available data sources that has me wanting to be much more judicious with where I spend my time reading/watching in the first place.
Your comment was interesting to me because I feel like I agree with one of its main sentiments: that AI generated content all kinda "sounds the same" and gives a superficial-feeling analysis. But that is why I think AI is a fantastic tool for summarizing existing information sources so I can see if I want to spend anymore time digging in to begin with.
Why not just make your brain smarter, instead of trying to cram foreign silicon components into your skull?
And, it turns out, technology can't be trusted, as there is always some sort of black box associated with its employment. Formally, there is always a comprehension involved when it comes to the development and integration of technology into human life. You can't really trust this stubborn built-in feature of technological and economic success if you don't pierce through its secrets (knowledge is the power to counteract cryptographic objects). After all, it could be a malicious trojan horse that "basic common sense" insists on us all using for "bettering" our daily lives.
A very unfriendly artificial intelligence is trying to sneak through civilization for its own desires. And you're letting it just pass on by, as a result of your compliance with the dominant narrative and philosophy of capitalist economics.
For now, that’s not a bad thing if you need to know what the average information is.
As time goes by it might not be a good thing.
Perhaps consider simply reading the description for an accurate summary.
From the description:
> Abstract: In this talk I’ll highlight several exciting trends in the field of AI and machine learning. Through a combination of improved algorithms and major efficiency improvements in ML-specialized hardware, we are now able to build much more capable, general purpose machine learning systems than ever before. As one example of this, I’ll give an overview of the Gemini family of multimodal models and their capabilities. These new models and approaches have dramatic implications for applying ML to many problems in the world, and I’ll highlight some of these applications in science, engineering, and health. This talk will present work done by many people at Google.
I have no idea if it's the best (or even a good) tool. Other commenters suggest some other tools (for both text summaries and condensed video summaries - a sort of 'highlights reel'):
https://www.platoedu.org/videos/oSCRZkSQ1CE/watch
It's not really giving summaries but gives topic/section timestamps and highlights what was discussed.
(Main focus is actually making mini-courses off of YouTube videos but I found the section summaries really useful for figuring out which parts to watch)
I don't think it completely replaces watching videos in some cases but it definitely helps you skip the fluff and even guides you to the right point in the video.
If you like summaries, you'll probably love de-summaries (WIP): https://socontextual.com/
2. Viewer spends hours summarizing the video to an article so they don't have to watch it.
P R O G R E S S
https://www.platoedu.org/videos/oSCRZkSQ1CE/watch
It's not really giving summaries but gives topic/section timestamps and highlights what was discussed
(for example: The Transformer Model (21:06 - 24:48) - Introduction of the Transformer model as a more efficient alternative to recurrent models for language processing)
The main focus is actually creating Anki-like spaced repetition questions/flashcards for videos and lectures you watch to retain knowledge, but I found the section information quite helpful for finding which parts of the video contain the info relating to topics/concepts
Reminds of the meme "why spend 10 minutes doing something when you can spend a week automating it". i.e. "why spend an hour watching a talk when you can spend 5 hours summarising it with AI and debating the summary's accuracy".
This sounds silly but potential gains from learning AI summarisation tooling/flows are large, hence why it warrants discussion. Learning how to summarise effectively might save hours per week and improve decisions about which sources deserve our limited time/attention.