US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.
In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that “experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public” and “far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years” (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).
The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that “they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life.” They’re much more likely (51 percent) to say they’re more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.
If it was marketed and used for what it’s actually good at this wouldn’t be an issue. We shouldn’t be using it to replace artists, writers, musicians, teachers, programmers, and actors. It should be used as a tool to make those people’s jobs easier and achieve better results. I understand its uses and that it’s not a useless technology. The problem is that capitalism and greedy CEOs are ruining the technology by trying to replace everyone but themselves so they can maximize profits.
This. It seems like they have tried to shoehorn AI into just about everything but what it is good at.
The natural outcome of making jobs easier in a profit driven business model is to either add more work or reduce the number of workers.
This is exactly the result. No matter how advanced AI gets, unless the singularity is realized, we will be no closer to some kind of 8-hour workweek utopia. These AI Silicon Valley fanatics are the same ones saying that basic social welfare programs are naive and un-implementable - so why would they suddenly change their entire perspective on life?
we will be no closer to some kind of 8-hour workweek utopia.
If you haven’t read this, it’s short and worth the time. The short work week utopia is one of two possible outcomes imagined: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
This vision of the AI making everything easier always leaves out the part where nobody has a job as a result.
Sure you can relax on a beach, you have all the time in the world now that you are unemployed. The disconnect is mind boggling.
Universal Base Income - it’s either that or just kill all the un-necessary poor people.
Yes, but when the price is low enough (honestly free in a lot of cases) for a single person to use it, it also makes people less reliant on the services of big corporations.
For example, today’s AI can reliably make decent marketing websites, even when run by nontechnical people. Definitely in the “good enough” zone. So now small businesses don’t have to pay Webflow those crazy rates.
And if you run the AI locally, you can also be free of paying a subscription to a big AI company.
Except, no employer will allow you to use your own AI model. Just like you can’t bring your own work equipment (which in many regards even is a good thing) companies will force you to use their specific type of AI for your work.
Presumably “small business” means self-employed or other employee-owned company. Not the bureaucratic nightmare that most companies are.
No big employer… there are plenty of smaller companies who are open to do whatever works.
Mayne pedantic, but:
Everyone seems to think CEOs are the problem. They are not. They report to and get broad instruction from the board. The board can fire the CEO. If you got rid of a CEO, the board will just hire a replacement.
And if you get rid of the board, the shareholders will appointment a new one. If you somehow get rid of all the shareholders, like-minded people will slot themselves into those positions.
The problems are systemic, not individual.
Shareholders only care about the value of their shares increasing. It’s a productive arrangement, up to a point, but we’ve gotten too good at ignoring and externalizing the human, environmental, and long term costs in pursuit of ever increasing shareholder value.
CEOs are the figurehead, they are virtually bound by law to act sociopathically - in the interests of their shareholders over everyone else. Carl Icahn also has an interesting take on a particularly upsetting emergent property of our system of CEO selection: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit
We shouldn’t be using it to replace artists, writers, musicians, teachers, programmers, and actors.
That’s an opinion - one I share in the vast majority of cases, but there’s a lot of art work that AI really can do “good enough” for the purpose that we really should be freeing up the human artists to do the more creative work. Writers, if AI is turning out acceptable copy (which in my experience is: almost never so far, but hypothetically - eventually) why use human writers to do that? And so on down the line.
The problem is that capitalism and greedy CEOs are hyping the technology as the next big thing, looking for a big boost in their share price this quarter, not being realistic about how long it’s really going to take to achieve the things they’re hyping.
“Artificial Intelligence” has been 5-10 years off for 40 years. We have seen amazing progress in the past 5 years as compared to the previous 35, but it’s likely to be 35 more before half the things that are being touted as “here today” are actually working at a positive value ROI. There are going to be more than a few more examples like the “smart grocery store” where you just put things in your basket and walk out and you get charged “appropriately” supposedly based on AI surveillance, but really mostly powered by low cost labor somewhere else on the planet.
Maybe that’s because every time a new AI feature rolls out, the product it’s improving gets substantially worse.
Maybe that’s because they’re using AI to replace people, and the AI does a worse job.
Meanwhile, the people are also out of work.
Lose - Lose.
Even if you’re not “out of work”, your work becomes more chaotic and less fulfilling in the name of productivity.
When I started 20 years ago, you could round out a long day with a few hours of mindless data entry or whatever. Not anymore.
A few years ago I could talk to people or maybe even write a nice email communicating a complex topic. Now chatGPT writes the email and I check it.
It’s just shit honestly. I’d rather weave baskets and die at 40 years old of a tooth infection than spend an additional 30 years wallowing in self loathing and despair.
30 years ago I did a few months of 70 hour work weeks, 40 doing data entry in the day, then another 30 stocking grocery shelves in the evening - very different kinds of work and each was kind of a “vacation” from the other. Still got old quick, but it paid off the previous couple of months’ travel / touring with no income.
It didn’t even need to take someone’s job. A summary of an article or paper with hallucinated information isn’t replacing anyone, but it’s definitely making search results worse.
Removed by mod
Maybe if a service isn’t ready to be used by the public you shouldn’t put it in every product you make.
LLM can’t deliver reliably what they promise and AGI based on it won’t happen. So what are you talking about?
I think they have a point in this respect though. AI doesn’t really think, it doesn’t come up with new ideas or new Innovations it’s just a way of automating existing mental tasks.
It’s not sci-fi AI, It’s not going to elevate us to utopian society because it doesn’t have the intelligence required for something like that, and I can’t see how a large language model will ever do that. I think the technology will be useful but hardly revolutionary.
“Everyone else is an idiot but me, I’m the smartest.”
lmao ok guy
60 million Americans just went to the polls 4 months ago homie. It ain’t about me.
Theres a hell of alot more Americans than 60 million.
EST 346.8million according to Gemini and ChatGPT. 😂
Bruh what the fuck are you even on about? AI shouldnt be in everything just because, it needs to be reliable and have a legit need.
Removed by mod
Yeah maybe if your present decisions were smarter you would be even smarter in the future and could agree with his incredibly smart argument. Make better present decisions.
Removed by mod
It’s not really a matter of opinion at this point. What is available has little if any benefit to anyone who isn’t trying to justify rock bottom wages or sweeping layoffs. Most Americans, and most people on earth, stand to lose far more than they gain from LLMs.
Everyone gains from progress. We’ve had the same discussion over and over again. When the first sewing machines came along, when the steam engine was invented, when the internet became a thing. Some people will lose their job every time progress is made. But being against progress for that reason is just stupid.
being against progress for that reason is just stupid.
Under the current economic model, being against progress is just self-preservation.
Yes, we could all benefit from AI in some glorious future that doesn’t see the AI displaced workers turned into toys for the rich, or forgotten refuse in slums.
We are ants in an anthill. Gears in a machine. Act like it. Stop thinking in classes “rich vs. poor” and conspiracies. When you become obsolete it’s nobody’s fault. This always comes from people who don’t understand how this world economy works.
Progress always comes and finds its way. You can never stop it. Like water in a river. Like entropy. Adapt early instead of desperately forcing against it.
We are ants in an anthill. Gears in a machine. Act like it.
See Woody Allen in AntZ (1998 movie)
Adapt early instead of desperately forcing against it.
There should be a balance. Already today’s world is desperately thrashing to “stay ahead of the curve” and putting outrageous investments into blind alleys that group-think believes is the “next big thing.”
The reality of automation could be an abundance of what we need, easily available to all, with surplus resources available for all to share and contribute to as they wish - within limits, of course.
It’s going to take some desperate forcing to get the resources distributed more widely than they currently are.
I’m not sure at this point. The sewing machine was just automated stitching. It is more similar to Photos and landscape painters, only it is worse.
With the creative AI basically most of the visual art skills went to “I’m going to pay 100$ for AI to do this instead 20K and waiting 30 days for the project”. Soon doctors, therapists and teachers will look down the barrel. “Why pay for one therapy session for 150 or I can have an AI friend for 20 a month”.
In the past you were able to train yourself to use sewing machine or learn how to operate cameras and develop photos. Now I don’t even have any idea where it goes.Machine stitching is objectively worse than hand stitching, but… it’s good enough and so much more efficient, so that’s how things are done now; it has become the norm.
Good enough is the keyword in a lot of things. That’s how fast fashion got this big.
Fast fashion (and everything else in the commercial marketplace) needs to start paying for their externalized costs - starting with landfill space, but also the pollution and possibly social supports that are going into the delivery of their products. But, then, people are stupid when it comes to fashion, they’ll pay all kinds of premiums if it makes them look like their friends.
AI is changing the landscape of our society. It’s only “destroying” society if that’s your definition of change.
But fact is, AI makes every aspect where it’s being used a lot more productive and easier. And that has to be a good thing in the long run. It always has.
Instead of holding against progress (which is impossible to do for long) you should embrace it and go from there.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Because you write like you think this can’t reach you, like you’re always going to have food and shelter no matter what happens.
If it reaches me, so be it. That’s life. Survival of the fittest. It’s my own responsibility to do the best in the environment I live in.
AI makes every aspect where it’s being used a lot more productive and easier.
AI makes every aspect where it’s being used well a lot more productive and easier.
AI used poorly makes it a lot easier to produce near worthless garbage, which effectively wastes the consumers’ time much more than any “productivity gained” on the producer side.
I use AI for programming questions, because it’s easier than digging 1h through official docs (if they exists) and frustrating trial and error.
However quite often the ai answers are wrong by inserting nonsense code, using for instead of foreach or trying to access variables that are not always set.
Yes it helps, but it’s usually only 60% right.
I used to do this, but not anymore. The amount of time I have to spend to verify it and correct it sometimes takes longer than if I were just to do it myself, and the paranoia that comes with it isn’t worth the time for me anymore.
The worry is deeper than just different changes in production. Not all progress is good, think of the broken branches of the evolution.
The fact that us don’t teach kids how to write already took a lot of different childhood development and later brain development and memory improvement out of the run.
Qith ai now drawing, writing and music became a single sentence prompt. So why keep all those things? Why literally waste time developing a skill that you can not sell? Sure for fun…
And you are bringing up efficiency. Efficiency is just a buzzword that big companies are using to replace human labor. How much more efficient is a bank where you have 4 machine and one human teller? Or a fast food restaurant where the upfront employee just delivers the food to the counter and you can only place order with a computer.
There is a point where our monkey brains can’t compete and won’t be able to exist without human to human stuff. But I don’t need to worry in 2 years we will be not able to differentiate between ai and humans. And we can just fake that connection for the rest of our efficient lifes.
I’m not against improving stuff, but qhere this is focused won’t help us in the long run…That’s the first interesting argument I’m reading here. Glad someone takes an honest stance in this discussion instead of just “rich vs poor”, “but people will lose jobs” and some random conspiracies in between.
To your comment: I agree with your sentiment that AI will make it challenging for new brains to evolve as solving difficult tasks is a problem we will encounter much less in the future. I actually never thought about it that way. I don’t have a solution for that. I think it will have two outcomes: humans will lose intelligence, or humans will develop different intelligence in a way that we don’t understand yet today.
And you are bringing up efficiency. Efficiency is just a buzzword that big companies are using to replace human labor. How much more efficient is a bank where you have 4 machine and one human teller? Or a fast food restaurant where the upfront employee just delivers the food to the counter and you can only place order with a computer.
I disagree with that. Efficiency is a universal term. And humanity has always striven to do things more efficient because it increases the likelihood of survival and quality of life in general. It’s a very natural thing and you cannot stop it. Much as you cannot stop entropy. Also, I think making things more efficient is good for society. Everything becomes easier, more available, and more fun. I can see a far future where humans no longer need to work and can do whatever they want with their day. Jobs will become hobbies and family and friends are what you care about most.
I do not agree that efficiency is good.
If its is good, we would live like we keep pigs and chickens in meat farms. More efficient is to eat bug based protein, and why waste time on eating instead of 100% meal replacement foods.
Why keep people with disabilities or with different “colors of skin” (insert any other thing there) from the most “efficient” ones?
The best way to think is Matrix-esqe pods for humans and living in a simulation.
Only bad part of that picture is that we are not needed at all.And these are the dark points of unlimited change.
We all know capitalism is very bad for the majority. We know big money do not care about marginalized groups. These are all just numbers. And at the end you and I we are all numbers that can be cut. I’m probably not going to be alive, but I hope for a bright future for the upcoming generations. The problem is that I do see AI potentially darkening their skies.
Don’t get me wrong AI can be a great tool if you learn how to use it. But the benefits are not going to be in the people hands.We need a general society overhaul where not the profit is the only thing that matters. Efficiency is good when you burn renewable wooden pellets and you want to get the most out of the chemical reaction. Efficiency is good when you are using the minimum amount of material to build something (with 3x oversized safety measures). But efficiency in AI and in social terms are going to be a problem.
Humans will not have worry free lives in current society. All the replaced labor keeps the earnings in the stockholders hands. But this went really far from AI. Sorry for the rant, but I do worry for the future.
I believe blindly accepting something before even attempting to look into the pitfalls not a great idea. And we never see all the pitfalls coming.
What progress are you talking about?
We don’t know it yet. I can’t see the future and you neither. But you cannot question the fact that AI has made a lot of things more efficient. And efficiency always brings progress in one way or the other.
The current drive behind AI is not progress, it’s locking knowledge behind a paywall.
As soon as one company perfects their AI, it will draw everyone to use it, marketing it as ‘time saver’ so you don’t have to do anything (including browsing the web, which is in decline even now). Just ask and you shall receive everything.
Once everyone gets hooked, and there won’t be any competiton left, they will own the population. News, purchase recommendations, learning, everything we do to work on our congitive abilities will be sold through a single vendor.
Suddenly you own the minds of many people, who can’t think for themselves, or search for knowledge on their own… and that’s already happening.
And it’s not the progress I was hoping to see in my lifetime.
Everyone gains from progress.
It’s only true in the long-term. In the short-term (at least some) people do lose jobs, money, and stability unfortunately
That’s true. And that’s why so many people are frustrated. Because the majority is incredibly short-sighted unfortunately. Most people don’t even understand the basics of economics. If everyone was the ant in the anthill they’re supposed to be we would not have half as many conflics as we have.
And as someone who has extensively set up such systems on their home server… yeah it’s a great google home replacement, nothing more. It’s beyond useless on Powerautomate which I use (unwillingly) at my job. Copilot can’t even parse and match items from two lists. Despite my company trying its damn best to encourage “our own” (chatgpt enterprise) AI, nobody i have talked with has found a use.
AI search is occasionally faster and easier than slogging through the source material that the AI was trained on. The source material for programming is pretty weak itself, so there’s an issue.
I think AI has a lot of untapped potential, and it’s going to be a VERY long time before people who don’t know how to ask it for what they want will be able to communicate what they want to an AI.
A lot of programming today gets value from the programmers guessing (correctly) what their employers really want, while ignoring the asks that are impractical / counterproductive.
You’re using it wrong then. These tools are so incredibly useful in software development and scientific work. Chatgpt has saved me countless hours. I’m using it every day. And every colleague I talk to agrees 100%.
Then you must know something the rest of us don’t. I’ve found it marginally useful, but it leads me down useless rabbit holes more than it helps.
I’m about 50/50 between helpful results and “nope, that’s not it, either” out of the various AI tools I have used.
I think it very much depends on what you’re trying to do with it. As a student, or fresh-grad employee in a typical field, it’s probably much more helpful because you are working well trod ground.
As a PhD or other leading edge researcher, possibly in a field without a lot of publications, you’re screwed as far as the really inventive stuff goes, but… if you’ve read “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” there’s a bit in there where the Manhattan project researchers (definitely breaking new ground at the time) needed basic stuff, like gears, for what they were doing. The gear catalogs of the day told them a lot about what they needed to know - per the text: if you’re making something that needs gears, pick your gears from the catalog but just avoid the largest and smallest of each family/table - they are there because the next size up or down is getting into some kind of problems engineering wise, so just stay away from the edges and you should have much more reliable results. That’s an engineer’s shortcut for how to use thousands, maybe millions, of man-years of prior gear research, development and engineering and get the desired results just by referencing a catalog.
My issue is that I’m fairly established in my career, so I mostly need to reference things, which LLMs do a poor job at. As in, I usually need links to official documentation, not examples of how to do a thing.
That’s an engineer’s shortcut for how to use thousands, maybe millions, of man-years of prior gear research, development and engineering and get the desired results just by referencing a catalog.
LLMs aren’t catalogs though, and they absolutely return different things for the same query. Search engines are tells catalogs, and they’re what I reach for most of the time.
LLMs are good if I want an intro to a subject I don’t know much about, and they help generate keywords to search for more specific information. I just don’t do that all that much anymore.
I’ve found it primarily useless to harmful in my software development, making the work debugging poorly-structured code the major place that time is spent. What sort of software and language do you use it for?
I’ll admit my local model has given me some insight, but in researching more of something, I find the source it likely spat it out from. Now that’s helpful, but I feel as though my normal search experience wasn’t so polluted with AI written regurgitation of the next result down, I would’ve found the nice primary source. One example was a code block that computes the inertial moment of each rotational axis of a body. You can try searching for sources and compare what it puts out.
If you have more insight into what tools, especially more i can run local that would improve my impression, i would love to hear. However my opinion remains AI has been a net negative on the internet as a whole (spam, bots, scams, etc) thus far, and certainly has not and probably will not live up to the hype that has been forecast by their CEOs.
Also if you can get access to powerautomate or at least generally know how it works, Copilot can only add nodes seemingly in a general order you specify, but does not connect the dataflow between the nodes (the hardest part) whatsoever. Sometimes it will parse the dataflow connections and return what you were searching for (ie a specific formula used in a large dataflow), but not much of which seems necessary for AI to be doing.
I think a lot depends on where “on the curve” you are working, too. If you’re out past the bleeding edge doing new stuff, ChatGPT is (obviously) going to be pretty useless. But, if you just want a particular method or tool that has been done (and published) many times before, yeah, it can help you find that pretty quickly.
I remember doing my Masters’ thesis in 1989, it took me months of research and journals delivered via inter-library loan before I found mention of other projects doing essentially what I was doing. With today’s research landscape that multi-month delay should be compressed to a couple of hours, frequently less.
If you haven’t read Melancholy Elephants, it’s a great reference point for what we’re getting into with modern access to everything:
If you were too lazy to read three Google search results before, yes… AI is amazing in that it shows you something you ask for without making you dig as deep as you used to have to.
I rarely get a result from ChatGPT that I couldn’t have skimmed for myself in about twice to five times the time.
I frequently get results from ChatGPT that are just as useless as what I find reading through my first three Google results.
You’re using it wrong. My experience is different from yours. It produces transfer knowledge in the queries I ask it. Not even hundreds of Google searches can replace transfer knowledge.
You’re using it wrong.
Your use case is different from mine.
Removed by mod
Your comment doesn’t exactly testify intelligence yourself.
You might want to elaborate on some arguments actually relate to the comment you’re responding to.
deleted by creator
This is like asking tobacco farmers what their thoughts are on smoking.
More like asking the slaves about productivity advances in slavery. “Nothing good will come of this”.
See also; the cotton gin.
The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society “needed” slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.
My understanding is that the cotton gin led to more slavery as cotton production became more profitable. The machine could process cotton but not pick it, so more hands were needed for field work.
Wiki:
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.[35] While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[36] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850."
That is also true, the cotton gin wasn’t the total economic turning point, and the Civil War pre-dated automation’s economic turning of the corner against some economic measures of slavery’s cost, but slavery has very difficult to quantify costs, it was an entrenched lifestyle much more than a pool of day labor hanging out at Home Depot waiting for work, where both employers and employees could easily change their ways on very short notice.
After the Civil War it looks like “free person” cotton harvesting labor persisted until about 1926 - that could have changed earlier, but farm owners needed a kick in the butt to figure out how to improve:
https://www.printmag.com/creative-voices/lessons-from-cottons-slow-motion-robot-takeover/
Al Gore’s family thought that the political tide was turning against it, so they gave up tobacco farming in the late 1980s - and focused on politics.
The first thing seen at the top of WhatsApp now is an AI query bar. Who the fuck needs anything related to AI on WhatsApp?
Who the fuck needs
anything related to AI onWhatsApp?Lots of people. I need it because it’s how my clients at work prefer to communicate with me, also how all my family members and friends communicate.
Right?! It’s literally just a messenger, honestly, all I expect from it is that it’s an easy and reliable way of sending messages to my contacts. Anything else is questionable.
There are exactly 0 good reasons to use whatsapp anyways…
Yes, there are. You just have to live in one of the many many countries in the world where the overwhelming majority of the population uses whatsapp as their communication app. Like my country. Where not only friends and family, but also businesses and government entities use WhatsApp as their messaging app. I have at least a couple hundred reasons to use WhatsApp, including all my friends, all my family members, and all my clients at work. Do I like it? Not really. Do I have a choice? No. Just like I don’t have a choice on not using gmail, because that’s the email provider that the company I work for decided to go with.
SMS works fine in any country.
And you can isolate your business requirements from your personal life.
I have 47 good reasons. There’s 47 good reasons are that those people in my contact list have WhatsApp and use it as their primary method of communicating.
SMS works fine.
No it doesn’t. It’s slow, can’t send files, can’t send video or images, doesn’t have read receipts or away notifications. Why would I use an inferior tool?
Why do you even care anyway?
Meta directly opposes the collective interests and human rights of all working class people, so I think the better question is how come you don’t care.
There are many good reasons to not use WhatsApp. You’ve already correctly identified 47 of them.
Hardly ever I come across a person more self centered and a bigger fan of virtue signaling as you. You ignored literally everything we said, and your alternative was just “sms”. Even to the point of saying that the other commenter should stop talking to their 47 friends and family members.
Android Messages and Facebook Messenger also pushed in AI as ‘something you can chat with’
I’m not here to talk to your fucking chatbot I’m here to talk to my friends and family.
It’s easier to up-sell and cross-sell if you’re talking to an AI.
Depends on what we mean by “AI”.
Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
LLMs and the like? Yeah I’m not sure how positive these are. I don’t think they’ve actually been all that impactful so far.
Once we have true machine intelligence, then we have the potential for great improvements in daily life and society, but that entirely depends on how it will be used.
It could be a bridge to post-scarcity, but under capitalism it’s much more likely it will erode the working class further and exacerbate inequality.
As long as open source AI keeps up (it has so far) it’ll enable technocommunism as much as it enables rampant capitalism.
I considered this, and I think it depends mostly on ownership and means of production.
Even in the scenario where everyone has access to superhuman models, that would still lead to labor being devalued. When combined with robotics and other forms of automation, the capitalist class will no longer need workers, and large parts of the economy would disappear. That would create a two tiered society, where those with resources become incredibly wealthy and powerful, and those without have no ability to do much of anything, and would likely revert to an agricultural society (assuming access to land), or just propped up with something like UBI.
Basically, I don’t see how it would lead to any form of communism on its own. It would still require a revolution. That being said, I do think AGI could absolutely be a pillar of a post capitalist utopia, I just don’t think it will do much to get us there.
It will only help us get there in the hands of individuals and collectives. It will not get us there, and will be used to the opposite effect, in the hands of the 1%.
It would still require a revolution.
I would like to believe that we could have a gradual transition without the revolution being needed, but… present political developments make revolution seem more likely.
or just propped up with something like UBI.
That depends entirely on how much UBI is provided.
I envision a “simple” taxation system with UBI + flat tax. You adjust the flat tax high enough to get the government services you need (infrastructure like roads, education, police/military, and UBI), and you adjust the UBI up enough to keep the wealthy from running away with the show.
Marshall Brain envisioned an “open source” based property system that’s not far off from UBI: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
Machine learning is just large automated optimization, something that was done for many decades before, but the hardware finally reached a power-point where the automated searches started out-performing more informed selective searches.
The same way that AlphaZero got better at chess than Deep Blue - it just steam-rollered the problem with raw power.
The problem could be that, with all the advancements in technology just since 1970, all the medical advancements, all the added efficiencies at home and in the workplace, the immediate knowledge-availability of the internet, all the modern conveniences, and the ability to maintain distant relationships through social media, most of our lives haven’t really improved.
We are more rushed and harried than ever, life expectancy (in the US) has decreased, we’ve gone from 1 working adult in most families to 2 working adults (with more than 1 job each), income has gone down. Recreation has moved from wholesome outdoor activities to an obese population glued to various screens and gaming systems.
The “promise of the future” through technological advancement, has been a pretty big letdown. What’s AI going to bring? More loss of meaningful work? When will technology bring fewer working hours and more income - at the same time? When will technology solve hunger, famine, homelessness, mental health issues, and when will it start cleaning my freaking house and making me dinner?
When all the jobs are gone, how beneficial will our overlords be, when it comes to universal basic income? Most of the time, it seems that more bad comes from out advancements than good. It’s not that the advancements aren’t good, it’s that they’re immediately turned to wartime use considerations and profiteering for a very few.
I see it lowering people’s ability to focus and for analytical/critical thinking.
AI has it’s place, but they need to stop trying to shoehorn it into anything and everything. It’s the new “internet of things” cramming of internet connectivity into shit that doesn’t need it.
You’re saying the addition of Copilot into MS Paint is anything short of revolutionary? You heretic.
Now your smart fridge can propose unpalatable recipes. Woo fucking hoo.
So far AI has only aggravated me by interrupting my own online activities.
First thing I do is disable it
I wish it was optional. When I do a search, the AI response is right at the top. If I want AI advice, I’ll go ask AI. I don’t use a search engine to get answers from AI!
I imagine you could filter it with uBlock right?
Or switch search engines.
I do as a software engineer. The fad will collapse. Software engineering hiring will increase but the pipeline of new engineers will is dry because no one wants to enter the career with companies hanging ai over everyone’s heads. Basic supply and demand says my skillset will become more valuable.
Someone will need to clean up the ai slop. I’ve already had similar pistons where I was brought into clean up code bases that failed being outsourced.
Ai is simply the next iteration. The problem is always the same business doesn’t know what they really want and need and have no ability to assess what has been delivered.
A complete random story but, I’m on the AI team at my company. However, I do infrastructure/application rather than the AI stuff. First off, I had to convince my company to move our data scientist to this team. They had him doing DevOps work (complete mismanagement of resources). Also, the work I was doing was SO unsatisfying with AI. We weren’t tweaking any models. We were just shoving shit to ChatGPT. Now it was be interesting if you’re doing RAG stuff maybe or other things. However, I was “crafting” my prompt and I could not give a shit less about writing a perfect prompt. I’m typically used to coding what I want but I had to find out how to write it properly: “please don’t format it like X”. Like I wasn’t using AI to write code, it was a service endpoint.
During lunch with the AI team, they keep saying things like “we only have 10 years left at most”. I was like, “but if you have AI spit out this code, if something goes wrong … don’t you need us to look into it?” they were like, “yeah but what if it can tell you exactly what the code is doing”. I’m like, “but who’s going to understand what it’s saying …?” “no, it can explain the type of problem to anyone”.
I said, I feel like I’m talking to a libertarian right now. Every response seems to be some solution that doesn’t exist.
AI can look at a bajillion examples of code and spit out its own derivative impersonation of that code.
AI isn’t good at doing a lot of other things software engineers actually do. It isn’t very good at attending meetings, gathering requirements, managing projects, writing documentation for highly-industry-specific products and features that have never existed before, working user tickets, etc.
I work in an environment where we’re dealing with high volumes of data, but not like a few meg each for millions of users. More like a few hundred TB fed into multiple pipelines for different kinds of analysis and reduction.
There’s a shit-ton of prior art for how to scale up relatively simple web apps to support mass adoption. But there’s next to nothing about how do to what we do, because hardly anyone does. So look ma, no training set!
If it walks and quacks like a speculative bubble…
I’m working in an organization that has been exploring LLMs for quite a while now, and at least on the surface, it looks like we might have some use cases where AI could prove useful. But so far, in terms of concrete results, we’ve gotten bupkis.
And most firms I’ve encountered don’t even have potential uses, they’re just doing buzzword engineering. I’d say it’s more like the “put blockchain into everything” fad than like outsourcing, which was a bad idea for entirely different reasons.
I’m not saying AI will never have uses. But as it’s currently implemented, I’ve seen no use of it that makes a compelling business case.
I too am a developer and I am sure you will agree that while the overall intelligence of models continues to rise, without a concerted focus on enhancing logic, the promise of AGI likely will remain elusive. AI cannot really develop without the logic being dramatically improved, yet logic is rather stagnant even in the latest reasoning models when it comes to coding at least.
I would argue that if we had much better logic with all other metrics being the same, we would have AGI now and developer jobs would be at risk. Given the lack of discussion about the logic gaps, I do not foresee AGI arriving anytime soon even with bigger a bigger models coming.
If we had AGI, the number of jobs that would be at risk would be enormous. But these LLMs aren’t it.
They are language models and until someone can replace that second L with Logic, no amount of layering is going to get us there.
Those layers are basically all the previous AI techniques laid over the top of an LLM but anyone that has a basic understanding of languages can tell you how illogical they are.
Agreed. I would add that not only would job loss be enormous, but many corporations are suddenly going to be competing with individuals armed with the same AI.
For once, most Americans are right.
New technologies are not the issue. The problem is billionaires will fuck it up because they can’t control their insatiable fucking greed.
exactly. we could very well work less hours with the same pay. we wouldnt be as depressed and angry as we are right now.
we just have to overthrow, what, like 2000 people in a given country?
No surprise there. We just went through how blockchain is going to drastically help our lives in some unspecified future.
Experts are working from their perspective, which involves being employed to know the details of how the AI works and the potential benefits. They are invested in it being successful as well, since they spent the time gaining that expertise. I would guess a number of them work in fields that are not easily visible to the public, and use AI systems in ways the public never will because they are focused on things like pattern recognition on virii or idendifying locations to excavate for archeology that always end with a human verifying the results. They use AI as a tool and see the indirect benefits.
The general public’s experience is being told AI is a magic box that will be smarter than the average person, has made some flashy images and sounds more like a person than previous automated voice things. They see it spit out a bunch of incorrect or incoherent answers, because they are using it the way it was promoted, as actually intelligent. They also see this unreliable tech being jammed into things that worked previously, and the negative outcome of the hype not meeting the promises. They reject it because how it is being pushed onto the public is not meeting their expectations based on advertising.
That is before the public is being told that AI will drive people out of their jobs, which is doubly insulting when it does a shitty job of replacing people. It is a tool, not a replacement.
All it took was for us to destroy our economy using it to figure that out!
