Unlike Bill Gates, I believe that this AI is the most revolutionary technology in human history, but at the same time, I am also concerned about its impact. The potential for AI to automate a significant number of jobs in a short period of time is alarming and unprecedented. It is ironic that the jobs we once believed to be the most difficult for AI to replace, such as those requiring high levels of human intelligence and creativity, are now at risk of being taken over.
The Age of AI has begun
151–160 of 228 posts
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#152It looks like AI is having self-driving hype moment. It works neatly on simple roads while you keep your hands on the steering wheel and watch the car. There are wowzers but the whole Internet feels like ChatGPT is about to disrupt the very fabric of the Universe. Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.
I think the types of error chatgpt makes are indeed very similar to the ones a tesla autopilot does ( probably due to the nature of NN) There is one big difference though : there are TONS of tasks chatgpt can do that don't require 100% accuracy to be useful and actually replace humans.
What are some of those tasks humans are doing today where they need information but it doesn't have to be accurate information? Brainstorming for sitcoms?
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the longest time I would have said the internet was the most revolutionary moment in the last century. But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket touchscreen smartphone was really the moment. Before phone, I printed Mapquest onto paper. The end result was pretty similar to me using an old paper map. The internet was evolutionary in that regard. It replaced some newspaper, and letters/phone calls. Text mes…
The internet would work just fine without smartphones. Smartphones would be pretty useless without internet.
Smartphones without the internet would be PDAs with amazing cameras. Still rather valuable, though with a somewhat lower set of price brackets for budget/medium/premium.
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#154Considering everything, it sounds more like another big wegde hammered into the divide. This will just make the rich richer, because now they can even save on artists, writers and other "expenses", all of which they can just add to their bonus now. All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did…
> This will just make the rich richer
Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your friends who got laid off had their jobs automated. Now what will happen, is they will go to other parts of the economy and add value where they are more needed. Total economic output has just increased and the world economy is now slightly more productive (same number of people making more stuff). You can't protest against your friends losing their jobs in this instance and not do the same for every previous technological invention going back to the wheel, all of which put someone out of a job. Because what you'd be advocating for is a lot of suffering and misery, in the form of material poverty.
If you want to protest against a lack of social policies contributing to wealth inequality, then just do that.
> All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer.
It's far cheaper.
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name "AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then. Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time. This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its nam…
I hope not… it’d mean the current generation is obsolete, and it’s already scary enough as is
I can see the failures of the current tech as well as its benefits. There's at least one more generation, and so it's not at all impossible to me that these two, Transformation and Diffusion, will cease to be called AI in the same way as those other things.
(Although myself I would still call most of them AI).
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I've been a technophile all my life but this is probably the first development I don't see as a net positive. All the use cases I've seen so far lead to a shittier world, and we probably won't even get sci-fi AGI in return.
Personally I think there’s a distinction to be made between generative AI and that of say, self driving cars. I’d definitely consider the latter a net positive for safety.
Massive net negative for anyone who can't afford a new car once those become required. Without expansion of public transportation basically everywhere, self-driving cars are a money making method that will lock out millions of people, not a real solution.
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft was the main driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software come to a point where they could be in every home and in every classroom around the world. They have done more to educate people in developing countries and offer them a path out of poverty than maybe any other company in history.
At one point, I remember windows vista license being a significant price of a new computer. At the same time, microsoft made huge efforts to hurt linux image on the desktop, which could really bring "down the price of computers and software". One may see them as a good "driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software" for a very limited time. I don't know if the result of 90's and early 2000's…
What hurt Linux was that it was – and still is – completely unusable for the average non-technical person. Microsoft wasn't the one holding back adoption.
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.
It also makes me question how different this is from what we (humans) do. We learn a bunch of information from a variety of sources and experiences and synthesize that into answers. Sometimes we are correct and sometimes we are not. I suppose the difference is that we can extrapolate from our synthesized information vs simply formulating answers, but what the best LLMs do doesn't seem radically different than the ave…
The difference is that we are reading and comprehending information, while the model is making a prediction of what word is most likely to come next based on a huge dataset of words. As such, there have been many documented cases of the model seeming correct at first glance, maybe even second glance, but its actually totally wrong in a way that a human isn't totally wrong. Like chatgpt will give you a summary and a title and an author and a year and be entirely confident that this is the truth, whereas the title was written by a different author in a related field perhaps or was made up entirely. A human would not behave like this at all. If I asked you for some info you hardly knew, you wouldn't word vomit a paragraph like this, you'd reply with a confidence score, "I don't know," or "I know about this but not that," perhaps. Seems that if there is any money or time on the line, you'd rather use the human.
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s play a game of “conservative impacts of AI on the labor force” - the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks we should have 15% more software engineers in 10 years. What if we had 10% fewer? -800k project managers - how about 650k in 10 years? -nearly 4 million executive assistants and admins - let’s take 1M off that total -millions combined (still) in clerical roles across industries, including financial, medical, w…
In what sense is any of that “conservative”? (I mean, my intuition would be, for example, that it means more software engineers, and disproportionately even more PMs -- though probably often with a different title -- as it expabds the market for software solutions, and reduces the engineering effort to product decision ratio. But that’s not conservative, any more than your catastrophizing is.)
Okay let’s take the software industry out of it. Do you think millions of non-software jobs will be affected?
Re: The Age of AI has begun
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would actually assume there is something more powerful than ChatGPT-4 at work helping the US military right now. Likewise for Russia. There's even a possibly that's the reason the conflict is dragging on so long.
You only think the conflict is dragging on for tomorrow long time because of the media hype that one of the sides is going to win... any day now! The fact is that most wars tend to drag on for years.
I've never got any impression either side is about to win at all. And yes, there are plenty of wars historically (and even recently, e.g. the Syrian civil war) that have dragged on for many many years. But Putin would never have launched the attack against Ukraine if he thought things would be where they are now.
How far off are we from a military-trained AI that could make that sort of prediction accurately?