Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Almost a decade ago, I attended a job fair which had a resume specialist. The subject of the seminar was improving chances of your resume being noticed by employers. The specialist's only real advice was to cut and paste the entire job listing that you were applying for into your resume in either a header or footer, change the text to white, and reduce it to one point font size. This way, the algorithms that scan each resume would put yours at the top of the list because it had all the keywords it was programmed to find.

"A.I. is stupid in ways we can't understand" as a software engineer I find this line surprising accurate

absolute best take I heard on this: "we successfully taught AI to talk like corporate middle managers and took that as a sign that AI was human and not that corporate middle managers aren't"

The Tay AI also made the funniest tweet ever. She said that Ted Cruz wasn’t the zodiac killer cause Ted Cruz would never be satisfied with the deaths of only 5 innocent people

IBM's insight from 1979 is still valid today,:
"A computer can never be held accountable
therefore a computer must never make a management decision"

“Final boss of gentrification” is a wonderful line

the problem with "opening the black box" is that not even the developers know how it works. It's not the same as source code.
it's like a box of sand, and you pour water through it. You see it trickle through, but you have no idea how or why exactly it's choosing the paths that it does.

I was job searching for 4 months with zero interviews. I rewrote my resume with ChatGPT with minimal edits and got an interview in like 3 days.

"The final boss of gentrification" is one of the most brutal roasts I've heard on this show

the funny thing about the "i want to be alive" is that, since AI just reads info off the internet, the more we talk about self aware AI, the more it will act like it is self aware.

"Pale male data"? Best character on Star Trek:The Next Generation.

What shocks me most about AI is how rapidly many people are eager to trust it with important tasks despite not understanding what the product fundamentally is. It's very good at predicting the next word in a sentence—a hyper-advanced autocomplete. It doesn't think creatively.

The person who animated clippy didn't have to go that hard, but they did... they did that for us.

"He's dressed like the final boss of gentrification"

Ok John, that got me real good.

How he can do this for 30 minutes straight is always incredible.

As a software developer of over 10 years, I have to say the black box problem persists even on code people have written and are able to read line by line :p

TRUE STORY: In my teens wanted to work at a movie theater - and they handed applicants a mind-numbing 14 pages application - wanting to know everything about you - even what hobbies and sports you liked - it was entirely ridiculous - around page 8, I got worn out from filling out this 'essay' of my life for a stupid theater job - SO when I got to the section asking if I had ever been arrested before = I said: "Yes, I murdered an entire movie theater crew for asking way too many questions, but got off on a technicality." - and turned that resume into the manager as I stormed out the door, pissed off that I had wasted an hour of my time filing out paperwork w/o an interview.
...well,
2 days later I got a call to come back to the theater for an interview, and thought, oh sh*t, well, I guess I'm going to get railroaded and berated by the management for my saucy comment - but I showed up anyways so that at least I could suggest that they TONE DOWN the length of their stupid applications.
...turns out, they offered me a job, so I asked the most obvious question:
"So, you read my application ... all of it?"
"Oh yes, looks good" the manager responded
and I knew they were a bunch of lying dimwits ~ I ended up working there for the next 5 yrs, and eventually rose in ranks to become the theater manager -
When I told my story to new recruits that nobody reads the stupid applications - they scoffed and didn't believe me - so I took them to the locked office storage and rifled through the stuffed cabinets of folders of all the applications they kept and found mine, and showed it to them to their amazement.
Applications are a farce, you get hired by chance and immediate need.
...
I always thought that if I every flipped out and murdered my entire staff, at least I could say that I didn't lie on my resume.

A note, less on the subject matter and more on John's delivery of the lines ... I really admire how he can say "Sometimes I just let this horse write our scripts, luckily half the time you can't even tell the oats oats give me oats yum" without skipping a beat or losing face. Now THAT'S professionalism.

The biggest lesson of AI is one we've faced many times: humans always run right into unknown things with very little concern about where they could go, and things going bad doesn't make us stop.

John Oliver just dropped the ultimate truth bomb about Artificial Intelligence on his show and I'm absolutely shook! His segment was not only informative, but hilarious and engaging too. It's amazing to see someone so skilled at breaking down complex issues into easily digestible and entertaining content. Keep up the good work, John! You've got me thinking twice about trusting robots to do everything for us.