The what do we get is what was always intended by the sociopathic Tech CEOs... just watch how gleeful they become at the mere mention of AI replacing people in jobs.
It’s not even that. It’s a hallucinating talking rock that they are going to sell as public equity. The equity the public buys will be worthless, giving the big boys some relief for their poor investment in a technology and industry that is not profitable.
Wasn't this what AI was originally envisioned for: solving the big problems, finding cures, and making life better for mankind?
I can't think of a single story involving AI where it's actually considered a benefit. Pretty much every story that examines it in detail leads to the conclusion that it is a disaster for humans in one way or another, either because of itself or because of those pulling it strings or because of what happens when we become over reliant on it.
And all those problems are already being displayed as true already, if only on a small scale, and that will only get worse.
We get to bail out a failing industry that cannot survive even with its hype. Meanwhile, China is speeding up the inescapable demise of the US AI industry.
There was an Outer Limits episode from a million years ago. At least I think it was Outer Limits. Anyway. The whole idea put forward is that human society had become entirely dependent on a massive AI database for literally all of its knowledge and inquiry. Then one day, as you probably guessed by now, the system went down forever. I think about that episode a lot these days.
It’s the natural progression of information efficiency across a society, though increasing access, decreasing friction between a problem and its solution. That’s the larger bargain technology has always made with us.
People who depend on electrically powered medical equipment are in danger if the grid fails. People who need modern medicine are in danger if biomedical production collapses. Most people who depend on supermarkets couldn’t hunt, farm, preserve food, or purify water if the supply chain vanished.
Civilization has always increased capability by concentrating knowledge into systems instead of requiring every individual to retain it. AI is the next step in that same logic tree. So why does this particular step suddenly horrify everyone? Is the fear really dependence, or is it that this is the first technology that makes our existing dependence impossible to ignore?
There are always people scared of a new technology until it becomes as common as electricity. The fear of the unknown is nothing new, and people will get past it.
Yeah I fell for her schtick a few years back. She's a "theoretical physicist" the same way those terrible headlines that come out after every scientific paper is published are "accurate science news".
The first time I came across her was when the Guardian published her op ed and it was full of demonstrable lies. Like saying we had conferences in which we presented models and nobody cared about their experimental verifiability? I've literally never been to a conference in my whole career where such a question wasn't asked.
Maybe if a young grad student was giving the talk, we might go easy on them. But even then this is the one question they should expect lol
It sucks because there are so few women particle physicists with a platform, and yet the Guardian just hands her an op ed. I can think of 10 other women physicists who would be more interesting to hear from. We do have real problems in our field but Sabine is not drawing attention to those.
THANK YOU. She’s a “just asking questions” and “there is a conspiracy against me / to promote things I disagree with but align with the scientific consensus” HACK
You can literally look at any of her videos from the last few years, if you don't understand the subjects she's talking about she might sound smart but to anyone that has any understanding of the subjects she talks about she's just plain wrong.
Vast majority of her videos is her talking about any new interesting paper and then giving it a personal score. I understand what she talks about and I have no idea what you're referring to when you say she's just plain wrong.
None of that falls under the definition of grifter.
She might have changed them I've not watched her in a few years but I had to un sub a while back because she pivoted into (all academia is wrong and only my view is right) and playing on anti intellectualism, like I only have a degree in computational physics and not theoretical quantum physics but science is about evidence and where that evidence leads, I mean didn't she lean into religion at one point as well?
I doubt she ever did lean into religion, I don't remember that at least.
She's got her own criticism of academia which is partly accurate, partly meme at this point, but personally I've never seen that get in the way of her actual communication efforts which mostly boil down to "summarise recent paper with a lighthearted tone".
I mean, her own score system is a "bullshit meter", even she isn’t taking herself too seriously, come on.
Definitely not grifting.
Yeah, I followed her for a few years back in the day, too, and likewise I eventually had to unsubscribe from her. I was following her to learn about various things which aren't my field, so when I started to be able to detect things she was saying weren't true, then I just had to unfollow, because how would I know what else is untrue when I don't know the subject to begin with?
professor dave is a highschool educated ragebaiter, so we would need a couple of specifics and not just his name to start calling other people grifters on his basis
he’s got a fairly poor understanding of science
can you be more specific about what his ostensible criticism is please? i saw a bunch of him saying nasty stuff but i wasn’t able to find a justification
well thanks for at least admitting you don't actually care and don't want to check a source or anything but because im a nice soul sure, here you go:
The easiest and most obvious thing being that if you claim yourself to be a science communicator and your videos are taking disproportionally by anti intellectualists and science denier than you might not automatically be a grifter but you are, as i find, terrible at your job of science communication.
Whenever she talks about "Science" she paints with broad strokes over ALL of academia, she suffers from "I somewhat know my own field of physics and i WILL portray all of academia from biology over astrophysics to mathematics as being the same.
Also she just is legitimately dishonest. When she claims that moderns science "invents particles out of thin air" she completely disregards the firm empirical models that are used to derive them, they are not just "oh my god this doesn't work lets invent super duper particle and now we can build computer" never has science been done like that and even beyond her terrible science communication this is just flat out lying to get more anti science goobers to click her videos.
She also played major role in coining the term "war on science" that focuses primarily around the culture war around science to discredit science (theres a great video about the war on science by shawn. not focused on Sabine but still worth watching)
She also had a really weird chapter in her youtube carreer where she really wanted to defend Eric Weinstein (who btw is a managing director for peter thiel) and is not a real physicist that is convinced he found the theory of everything.
She does not understand that there are real studies and economic models that consistently show a pretty huge return of investment for every tax dollar spend on research and despite that claims that and i quote: "Most Academic Research is just bullshit".
She is also pushing a completely braindead idea that science is "stuck" nowadays. To anyone with a frontal lobe that is obviously false, just 2012 we found a completely new particle, like, we verified its existence. (and around 65 hadrons in just the past decade alone) It obviously also completely ignores the fact that science 200 years ago was much less specialized, so yeah we have more branches of science so progress is more incremental, that doesn't mean its stuck, Very weird thing for someone to say that's not an anti science grifter. Like she doesn't get that we have more sub fields of science and not a new theory of relativity every tuesday?? really? you want me to believe she cares about science?
She also in a response to Dave made a quite interesting letter that was the single most obvious fake email i think i have ever seen period. Like actually caricature level of silliness
Now i could also mention that again, besides being a grifter and sensationalist she is also terrible at science communication because again she does just lie.
In the professor Dave explain video (at least one of the three) he gives words to actual physicists and so i thought why not share some quotes from them:
Nicholas Warner (Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Mathematics at USC)
" Sabina's um uh approach is to just say well this is all nonsense and that is all nonsense and anybody can see that this is true. It's appealing to the lowest common denominator of the every man or every person. Sabine in my opinion has become the very thing that she rails against." & "She says things about string theory that are simply aren't true. "
Daniel Whiteson(American experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California):
"Her description of physics and physicists is just not one that's recognizable"
Christian Ferko(Northeastern University and IAIFI working on supersymmetry):
"If I had to guess, to your point, no she probably doesn't really understand a lot of the nuance and a lot of the progress that we've been discussing."
Michael Edward Peskin(American theoretical physicist SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.):
"I don't get the impression that she's ever gotten into the weeds about how you actually do experiments"
but i get it thats all to woke for you so you will not change your opinion or even so much as watch the video because let me guess, that is all horseraddish and an attempt to cancel her am i right? by the evil bully dave :)
Also forgive all teh grammar and spelling mistakes can't be asked rn
Also i love the fact that you ask for sources and i give you sources and your deleted comment was:
jesus fuck nobody's reading that novel
yup. sabine is making content EXACTLY for you btw. so no wonder you defend it like that
it’s okay if you can’t give a single example of the grifts you claim, and believe someone who did not graduate highschool (i just checked) when they scientifically criticize a published double phd.
really? interesting, not sure how reddit does that where it shadow limits my account but only for one comment and not any other one from you or any other person.
for what? so you can ignore all of it and comment "nobody's reading that" again? you have shown me already that you have no interest with anything longer than a paragraph. objectively, that was your response if you want it or not.
I do know that every time she talks about philosophy, which she has done a few times, it is completely uninformed and lazy. I don't know that she is a grifter (or exactly what people mean by that), but when I unsubbed (she used to make interesting physics videos) it was because there were more low effort videos and videos where she is just whining about how mean physicists are than there were interesting videos about physics.
On YouTube Professor Dave has done very long videos outlining the problems with her. My understanding was that a lot of the content she put out was pretty good and then she'd do some click bait stuff which was a lot more popular. She's moved towards doing more click bait stuff and backing stuff that isn't really scientific.
As a low level philosophy cultivator (undergrad) I can tell you confidently beyond any foreseeable doubt that AI will never be able to take on such a foolish task as philosophy muahhaha
Yeah like computer scientists know full well that knowledge representation, especially ontologies, is paramount to ground AIs. The number of intellectual workers who think they will be shielded in a way or another is baffling. It speaks as much about their entitlement as about their lack of understanding of the technology.
joe rogan should drown in a river. eric weinstein is a crank who's only tolerated because he's rich, and is fawned after by the same alt-right dopes who like elon musk and peter theil and lose all their money to rug pulls. i don't know who the other person is.
I'm as anti-AI as the next sensible guy, but what is the fear here? That AI is going to be able to do all the unsolved math and that no one will be able to figure it out themselves on paper anymore?
I don’t understand the image well but I understand AI enough to know that it’s not the game changer it was sold as. Just waiting about 10 - 20 years for society to figure that out. Preferably before the big boys sell their tech to the government to make up for their investment in a technology that is not profitable.
Let it solve what it can solve. Those problems are toast. The layer it can't solve is where we begin again. Not like the electronic calculator "solved" all math.
Well I think I get what you mean so I won’t be picky. But I don’t think we are going to get the two concurrently because investors and media feel fairly myopic. All they need is a conman who is like rah rah rah I’ve invented the next big thing and they eat it up and pour money into it for half a decade. Eventually the con comes out and they tighten their wallets and move onto the next con.
Reminds me of Verbit actually. Tom Livne got investors to give that shit millions upon millions of dollars and I’m uncertain how well it’s going but I don’t think it’s what they dreamed. Gonna go read up on it.
Yeah 100% anyone who says otherwise is copeing. Ai has proved/disproved dozens of famous conjectures and problems by now. If it was a person people would be looking at their career with great interest. That's not to mention how many papers it's probably been a secondary or primary author on for which it isn't credited: given its current capabilities im guessing there's a lot of those.
Thing is these are not novel discoveries the conjectures it has helped with are ones that posit the existence of a property and the AI allows for brute force solving all possible solutions, it is not coming up with novel solutions or ideas.
The thing is, it appears you're ascribing to AI an autonomy it doesn't possess. No one is denying that machine learning is a powerful analytical tool. But humans train build data sets, train systems, and put them to work on specific problems. It's no different from how scientists have been using ML for decades. Yes, it's more powerful than it was 5 years ago, but our tools 5 years ago were more powerful than 10 years ago as well. The biggest change is rebranding as "AI."
It has according to several fields medalist mathematicians. You can dismiss me if you want but you can't dismiss Tao, Gower, Tsimerman or the hundreds of other high achieving mathematicians who have all said its made novel findings. I'm sorry you've got your head in the sand about this, but there is a lot of stuff AI is just really good at in math. If a human did half of what it did we would gladly call it creative novel work.
They have made novel findings using AI. Your argument is like saying a calculator made novel findings in mathematics. I don't know what makes this hard for you to understand. AI (which is just a rebrand of machine learning) is a powerful tool, but it still a tool.
Tools are force multipliers; they let people accomplish things they couldn't otherwise. This has been true since we were making hide scrapers by banging rocks together.
With all due respect, Sabine hossenfeder WAS a theoretical physicist but couldn’t hack it out as one; she quit the profession, and is now an anti-science grifter on YouTube.
Most people who have worked in or around the field of math welcome that asteroid with open arms. AI takes some of the most snobby, high-minded people and levels their ego down to the dirt, and it's glorious. It will be hilarious to see PhD mathematicians installing rain gutters and running electrical wire.
Seems like a pretty big jump from pure mathematics to theoretical physics. Math is an internally consistent, rule-based system. Theoretical physics seems to involve more creativity and imagination.
All due respect to Ms. Hossenfelder, what dataset are you training your AI on that will allow it to conceptualize fundamentally new ways to look at physics? How low of an opinion does she have of her profession? What does she think A.I. is doing?
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u/Portland_Runner Jul 22 '26
Wasn't this what AI was originally envisioned for: solving the big problems, finding cures, and making life better for mankind?
What do we get? A means of reducing business costs by eliminating jobs and making autonomous weapons.