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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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So last night an 80 year old family friend asked me "What are they going to do about the huggy face escape? How will they find it?" She had been left with the impression that something called huggy face had escaped, and was now running wild all over the internet, and might even be hiding on her computer, like some sort of zoo animal. Computers and AI aren't complicated. They're only complicated because journalism is dead and refuses to do its job.
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Sir Howard The Critter Cub @CritterCub@dragonscave.space
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@fastfinge Not complicated? Computers are, to people like us who use them constantly, our normal. To people who don't, they're not, and daunting. Programmers might say coding is not complicated (but they also might not), but it is to someone like me who doesn't understand it. Also, I'd just like to point out that you mentioned this person is 80. When they were born, in, if my math is right, 1956, the most complicated piece of technology the average consumer had was maybe a television. Home computers wouldn't even be a thought for another 25 to 30 years... And they went from running casette tapes to being able to fit in your pocket in that same amount of time. All that to say, yes they are complicated and being more and more over-engineered and complicated by the day. Yeah I think there could be better communications on what these things actually mean but yes, this stuff is complex and scary to a high number of people.
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Sir Howard The Critter Cub @CritterCub@dragonscave.space
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@fastfinge Sorry, my math was wrong, it's 1946
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@CritterCub Sure, but the things you need to know to make public policy decisions about computers, or understand what the dangers are and what they are not, don't require you to understand programming. But the only way anything gets explained today is in clickbait, and breathless newsbites between commercials. It was perfectly possible to explain to her what was going on and why, without getting into programming concepts.
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