Some of these things are not like the others. One of these people is a tv scientist not an actual data engineer or data scientist, while another is an activist and while is extremely respected, has no room in a data+ai talk -.-

This is almost like a meme

My 2 cents. On positive light, it could attracts more mass and you know spark new data scientists.

They are probably the mentioned "visionaries and thought leaders"

Its probably more about the "philosophic" and "cultural" aspects of AI and how it will influence society.
Probably better to avoid it if you don't care about whether basic human rights would apply to sentient AI or not...

@Oktokolo "Sentient AI" - meanwhile state of the art AI: this cat is next to a weird dot, so I'm 99.9% it's a toaster.

@hitko
Exactly.

@Oktokolo All those "activists" and "scientists" love to talk about hypothetical sentient AI and how people should prepare for that, meanwhile nobody talks about how AI is already making people lazier and dumber by their own choice, how to recognise biases companies are imposing onto their AI, or how meaningless various "data science" reports are without proper context and error metrics.

@hitko
AI-induced laziness?! I did not see any yet.
And how would i - there is no AI capable of doing any uncomfortable meat space task.
Even the existing cleaning bots don't actually clean anything that isn't the lightest dust. Mower bots don't mow anything longer than a few centimeters. Selfsteering cars aren't reliable yet...

What i see is businesses and state agencies trying hard to cut costs or making a fortune by using "AI" as modern oracles.
None of these "applications" actually work, but normally, the affected people have no lobby...
That isn't lazyness - it is greed-fueled malice.

@Oktokolo “Alexa, add bananas to my Whole Foods cart” would be a prime example. Then you have blue collar workers losing their hands-on skills because they're spending more and more time just sitting around and occasionally checking that AI-guided machines are operating properly. Don't forget people buying AI-suggested products (e.g. Amazon's pick) because they're too lazy to check and compare other search results, and the same goes for media articles and other online content.

And I'm guilty too, I've got a robotic lawnmower - even though it doesn't do an exceptionally good job, going after it takes me maybe 10% of the time I used to spend to mow the whole lawn. You can bet your ass I just waste the remaining time it saves me on some bullshit, before I at least got some sort of recreation out of it.

@Oktokolo If you're more of a car guy, you might know there's software which connects to the car and uses AI for diagnostics. There are already mechanics who use it so much they have a hard time looking at cheaper and older cars where they have to manually check for problems.