“Intelligent” is itself a highly unspecific term which covers quite a lot of different things.

What you’re think is “reasoning” or “rationalizing”, and LLMs can’t do that at all.

However what LLMs (and most Machine Learning implementations) can do is “pattern matching” which is also an element of intelligence: it’s what gives us and most animals the ability to recognize things such as food or predators without actually thinking about it (you just see, say, a cat, and you know without thinking that it’s a cat even though cats don’t all look the same), plus in humans it’s also what’s behind intuition.

PS: Way back since when they were invented over 3 decades ago, Neural Networks and other Machine Learning technologies were already very good at finding patterns in their training data - often better than humans.

The evolution of the technology has added to it the capability of creating content which follows those patterns, giving us things like LLMs or image generation.

However what has been made clear by LLMs is that using patterns alone (plus a little randomness to vary the results) in generating textual content is not enough to create useful content beyond entertainment, and that’s exactly because LLMs can’t rationalize. However, the original pattern matching stuff without the content generation is still widely used and very successfully so, in things from OCR to image recognition.

The main issue for the company is that he’s having an affair with a person directly under him in the company - it’s a conflict of interest at the very least, with the possibility of the person higher up in the hierarchy having leveraged their position to get sexual gratification from their underling and/or of the underling having used their sexuality to influence that higher up in the professional domain (for example, to get salary raises).

Absolutely, they might both be impeccably professional and not let their romantic relationship influence their professional relationship, but the company doesn’t know that and it’s hard to disprove that it wasn’t so.

On the Moral and Ethical plan, the main issue is indeed that they’re betraying their respective partners in secret rather than having assumed their relationship.

Neural Networks, which are the base technology of what nowadays gets called AI, are just great automated pattern detection systems, which in the last couple of years with the invention of things like adversarial training can also be made to output content that match those patterns.

The simpler stuff that just does pattern recognition without the fancy outputting stuff that matches the pattern was already, way back 3 decades ago, recognized at being able to process large datasets and spot patterns which humans hadn’t been able to spot: for example there was this NN trained to find tumors in photos which seemed to work perfectly in testing but didn’t work at all in practice, and it turned out that the NN had been trained with pictures were all those with tumors had a ruler next to it showing its size and those without tumors did not, so the pattern derived in training by the NN for “tumor present” was actually the presence of the ruler.

Anyways, it’s mainly this simpler and older stuff that can be used to help with scientific discovery by spotting in large datasets patterns which we humans have not, mainly because they can much faster and more easily trawl through an entire haystack to find the needles than we humans can, but like in the “tumor detection NN” example above, sometimes the patterns aren’t in the data but in the way the data was obtained.

The fancy stuff that actually outputs content that matches patterns detected in the data, such as LLMs and image generation, and which is fueling the current AI bubble, is totally irrelevant for this kind of use.

Clearly you never actually done Tech projects in large corporate environments if you think complex shit is implemented across all sites just because it can be done, rather than because the expected profits exceed the cost and the hassle.

Also you seem to be under the impression that the social media guys would just give searchable access to their store of pictures (or provide a search service) to those big companies for free, which is a hilariously naive take on how Tech businesses work.

Automated following customers in a store with overhead cameras for the purposes of studying how they move around and purchase things is only done for some stores and has entirely different requirements for camera positions, external dependencies (no cross-referencing with external data to ID anybody is needed) and acceptable error rates (the data is not for selling to others so the error rates can be higher), because they don’t need to actually ID anybody to extract “human movement patterns” out of that data and it’s fine if the system confuses two people once in a while because there is no external customer of that data getting pissed off when the same person is reported as making purchases in two places at the same time or other stupidly obvious false positives.

Meanwhile matching the list of items bought with payment information, both of which already get sent from the tellers to the backend systems (for purposes of inventory tracking and accounting), is easy peasy and has a very low error rate.

You’re ridding a massive Dunning-Krugger there in thinking you’re the expert.

There’s a good argument to be made from the point of view of customer convenience and expediency for using self-checkouts to pay for a small number of items, but even then most existing implementations of that concept are so fucking bad that there are all sorts of stupid problems, like my case of the thing not working unless I had a bag (it literally had no button to just skip it) and yours were a normal human mistake is complex to correct even though the users are amateurs and hence naturally more likely to make mistakes hence the thing should have been designed differently.

I’ve actually worked with UX/UI designer at several points in my career, and one thing that pisses me off about most self-checkouts is just how bad their UX/UI design is.

That so many self-checkout implementations are like that is probably explained by, having moved the costs of wasting time to the side of client, those businesses are not financially incentivized to make the self-checkouts efficient to use, which probably also explains all manner of weird choices in everything from their shape to even the order of their menus - in a manned checkout it’s their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it’s bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it’s not their problem so they don’t care.

This is also another reason for me to be against self-checkouts: the financial dynamics are different with self-checkouts than with manned checkouts since the costs of inefficiency on the former are on the customer, whilst with the latter the costs are on the store (which has to pay a salary for somebody who is less productive than they could be), so stores have less (and more indirect, hence harder to measure, hence often ignored by MBAs) financial pressure to make self-checkouts efficient to use than they do with manned checkouts.

They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.

Your “argument” is akin to a claim that people shouldn’t worry about having a good lock on their door because it’s always possible to break the door down with explosives.

“Don’t be the low hanging fruit” is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.

But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.

Mate, not the previous poster but I’m a senior software engineer with an EE degree and broad enough experience that I could design and implement myself a self-checkout from the ground up, both hardware and software, including UI and backend integration, and I still tend to avoid self-checkouts for those reasons and a lot more (many which I listed in another post here).

There are two very opposite ends of the curve for people who don’t like self-checkouts: those who can’t deal with the tech (who you deem “fucking morons”) and those who have evaluated self-checkouts as a process and found it to overall be inferior to the existing process for their own usual use conditions or who look at it in a broader context and find it to have indirect social damage.

That you can only spot the “being a moron” as a reason to avoid self-checkouts is a pretty good indicator of your own intellectual limitations.

Further:

• Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you’re packaging a week worth of purchases.
• You still need an employee to come over and certify that you’re over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there’s usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
• I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it’s just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
• They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
• They’re non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
• They often don’t take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it’s just a number on a screen).

How about this: my way of thinking is how people think about the subject in The Netherlands, the most tolerant nation in Europe and for example the first to legalize gay marriage (in fact one of my English colleagues when I lived there had moved there exactly to be able to tie the knot with his partner, as it was still not legal in Britain back then).

Their whole take on sexual orientations is that “it’s all normal” and it works spectacularly well: this is a country were the first really successful Far-Right Leader of this century - Pim Furtijn - was overtly and openly gay since the very start and nobody batted an eye about it - were else in the World would the leader of the god damned Far-Right be gay and nobody cares and he’s very successful?

Meanwhile what I’ve seen when I lived there in places like Britain which practice the Identity Politics take on this is a neverending fight.

Mate, you’re basically justifying your own obcession with a specific human trait, by there having existed and existing bad people who are obcessed with it and have done and do bad things using it as a justification.

In other words; you’re accepting the hierarchy of importance and relevance of human traits which the bad people have and then just saying you’re going in the opposite direction - in other words, you claim to reject their actions yet stay within the same framework of prejudice that they defined

It’s not exactly wise to try and counter bad people within the rules of the game they themselves defined. Thinking people figure out when they’re children that it’s not smart to play a game against those who make the rules of the game whilst staying within the rules they made.

I, on the other hand totally reject their framing and prejudiced, reductive take on people, and think those who follow it are “insane” and “morons”.

That doesn’t stop me from being against injustices being commited against people by those justifying it using such reductive framings of the human nature, because I’m against ALL injustice as a broader principle, quite independently of whatever insane framing those committing the injustices are using to try and justify their actions - accepting the aggressor’s “logical” framing in order to counter-argument within that framing is not a requirement for siding with the victims, it’s not even an effective form of siding with the victims because by trying to counter-argument within that framing you are accepting the framing, thus risk prolonging the injustice.

The “insane take” is the idea that sexual orientation is some extraordinary human characteristic which defines a person.

A non-insane take is that it’s just a normal human trait whose effects are mainly limited to a few domains (or would be, if there weren’t so many morons around presuming things about and treating people differently depening on their sexual orientation).

Only a nutter would think that, say the color of one’s eyes or the size of one’s feet make somebody a better or a worse person and, as I see it that’s exactly the same for sexual orientation: outside the context of chosing romantic and sexual partners, sexual orientation is a totally irrelevant thing and having a positive or negative opinion on somebody based on their sexual orientation is about as rational as having it based on the size of their feet.

In my eyes the politics of treating sexual orientation abnormally amongst human traits, and dragging it into all sorts of contexts were it is irrelevant, is just an hypocrite distration from actually addressing those things that mater for the quality of life of most people, which is why this shit is so popular in the profoundly broken political systems of places like the US and the UK.

That crowd are fucking tens of thousands of children daily in ways other than those the pedos did to the young girls they preyed upon.

That’s just being a decent person.

There is no need to drag in the Identity Wars and the insane takes on very specifc human traits such as sexual orientation from those, into what has nothing to do with it.

Those who also care for others rather than just themselves do good things - that’s open source in a nutshell. As it so happens, in the very narrow subset of human thinking which is the Identity Wars, that means they tend to side with those who don’t want to hurt others merely for who they were born as.

Most people don’t even boycot companies for doing this shit.

worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options

(emphasys mine)

Financially, giving the higher price to those who have fewer options is exactly “what it should be” so it makes sense that a pattern finding algorithm trained to find patterns in user data that indicate they are likely to agree to higher prices, produces such a result.

It’s Ethically and Morally that this is the very opposite of “what it should be”.

The higher a percentage of your income is the price of something, the more reason there is to allocate time to find the best price - if something costs you an amount which you earn in 5 minutes, it’s not really worth it to spend time looking for the better price, if it costs an amount which you earn in 2 months, it’s definitelly worth to spend at least several hours looking around.

Granted, as you say, many don’t have the time to do this (though often the Maths for literally taking time of work to do it, do add up), and in my experience most people don’t really make the mental connection between an amount they’re considering spending and how long do they have to work to earn it hence don’t really look around enough when it’s financially logical to do it.

That said, for the reason I gave above, the rich don’t really care about things that “just” cost a couple thousand of dollars, which is why they casually just rent a private jet for a trip - there’s a whole industry for that - or even own one and employ a pilot for it fulltime.

That’s not even close to a proper test of Linux womanhood/manhood.

Oh, I’m not saying that it’s not possible or that there is any other option, I’m saying “Learn from the errors of the British leftwingers when they tried to do it there”.

Be prepared for the dirtiest of dirty tricks and the entirety of the Press revealing itself as nothing more than a Propaganda machine for the Wealthy Elites and their political minions.

Mind you, at this point and with the Israeli Genocide turning into the XXI century Holocaust and after the insane overuse of the “anti-semite” slander against people merelly speaking against the mass murder of children by the Zionists, it’s doubtful that using accusations of “anti-semitism” as basis of their dirty tricks campaign would actually work (though you can see that they’re sorta trying it against the guy in New York).

That’s what happenned inside the more-rightwing party in the US, and in the UK too (which also has a FPTP voting system hence is a similarly flawed “democracy”).

If the Fascists can infiltrate the more-rightwing mainstream party, why can’t the lefties do the same to the less-rightwing party?

That said, it’s my impression that in both the US and UK, even the less-rightwing party is a lot closer to Fascism to begin with than it is to being left-of-center - Neoliberalism is all about removing the Power from the hands of voters and putting it in the hands of the Wealthy Elites by making what voters (supposedly) control in Democracy - the legislature and executive - be secondary to the Power of Money, or in other words, to make voters come second rather than first and hence the entire system less democratic.

(Also in the UK when the lefties did try and take control of the less-rightwing party, there was a massive campaign by the entirety of the Press, the more-rightwing party and even the until then faction in power inside the less-rightwing party to revert it, even involving Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in Britain - as the campaign relied mostly in slandering the lefties and the elected leftwing party leader of being anti-semites - which succeeded and returned the Hard-Right Neoliberals to the leadership of that party - were they immediatelly started a purge of leftwingers - all of which is probably a pretty good predictor of how things would happen in the US if the leftwing tried to take over the Democrat Party by trusting the democratic nature of the voting system and other structures within that party and just electing a new leadership: in this era and in countries which Duopoly Performative Democracy systems, the power parties are not at all democratic and when push come to shove they will ditch the Theatre of Democracy they use to seem democratic and operate under the same Rules Of Power as all other authoritarians).

That would require them to represent the many rather than the few, which would mean ditching the kind of people who rose in the party for the last 4 decades because they could do exactly the opposite and be handsomely rewarded for it.

Mind you, that’s a broader problem than just the Democrat Party in the US and affects most mainstream parties in Western Democracies.