Very good piece. It really does feel different this time. Lots of McKinsey BS about job creation...but where?
I suppose the loss in engineering positions will be compensated by the growth in AI therapist positions.
This time, it feels different
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Re: This time, it feels different
#12The article links to Ted Chiang's article, which was equally fascinating:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...
Re: This time, it feels different
#13From the article - > If a single dumb, stochastic, probabilistic, hallucinating, snake oil LLM with a chat UI offered by one organisation can have such a viral, organic, and widespread adoption ... imagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing.
But, the box. Don't let it out of the box. Oh, wait.
Re: This time, it feels different
#14Every few years a new technology goes mainstream and quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally. I’ve lived through the web in 1995. Google in 2000. Web 2.0 in 2005. Smartphones in 2009. Now it’s generative AI in 2023. Every time, there’s an argument about whether it’s the end of the world or a total nothingburger. Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Every time, there are surprise…
You've also lived through many technologies that failed to achieve mainstream adoption despite demonstrating comparable levels of hype.
Re: This time, it feels different
#15>LangChain[13] enters the chat! Imagine the horror stories of automated online account blocks and Kafkaesque customer support mazes that are all too common, manifesting at a societal level.
I can imagine this to be a problem. But I can also imagine it to solve a problem. Right now, customer support is often "dehumanised" and Kafkaesque because no single human has the full picture and all the permissions required to resolve a problem.
We're often talking to organisations with "brains" split into a thousand fragments. Having humans in the loop doesn't necessarily help if impersonating a cog is all these humans are allowed to do.
So if an AI can reintegrate this split organisational brain into something resembling human thinking, it might just be an improvement on average.
Re: This time, it feels different
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Is that really true? The two largest corporations in the world by market cap are Apple and Microsoft, both founded in the 1970s.
Also the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living. I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.
In the 70s the top 1% couldn’t even conceive of the power they’d have in their pockets one day. Today both billionaires and the rest of the world can have access to that same power. We’re all carrying the same phones in our pockets after all.
Re: This time, it feels different
#17>LangChain[13] enters the chat! Imagine the horror stories of automated online account blocks and Kafkaesque customer support mazes that are all too common, manifesting at a societal level. I can imagine this to be a problem. But I can also imagine it to solve a problem. Right now, customer support is often "dehumanised" and Kafkaesque because no single human has the full picture and all the permissions required to r…
Yes, these support agents are paid small hourly wages and do the same thing 1000 times a day while dealing with rude or irate customers. Automating their jobs to either eliminate them or change their role to that of bot supervisor will be much better for everyone.
Re: This time, it feels different
#18Every few years a new technology goes mainstream and quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally. I’ve lived through the web in 1995. Google in 2000. Web 2.0 in 2005. Smartphones in 2009. Now it’s generative AI in 2023. Every time, there’s an argument about whether it’s the end of the world or a total nothingburger. Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Every time, there are surprise…
You've also lived through many technologies that failed to achieve mainstream adoption despite demonstrating comparable levels of hype.
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Re: This time, it feels different
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living. I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.
In the 70s the top 1% couldn’t even conceive of the power they’d have in their pockets one day. Today both billionaires and the rest of the world can have access to that same power. We’re all carrying the same phones in our pockets after all.
Power to search the internet != Food and housing.
Re: This time, it feels different
#20I see a ton of buzz around "prompt engineering", which is being able to shape arbitrary inputs into a prompt that will produce high quality results, but the next step is consuming and acting on prompt results programatically and that's an area where I see way less "buzz", but it's likely where the real value is found.