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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#101

Post by vnorilo »

shaunkoh wrote: post #57
abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible .

The strange thing is, search engines used to be able to do this. But they have gotten progressively more terrible at finding a very specific result based on a very specific query.

My ChatGPT experience is not that different from the "good old days" of searching the internet. This time the search is in latent space which has up- and downsides.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#102

Post by esskay »

dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

> A security guard at an airport can be a machine gun with wheels, it is more intimidating that way.

Out of all the dumb things people could suggest AI for this is without a doubt the dumbest.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#103

Post by hackernewds »

llogiq wrote: post #91

Having seen state of the art neural networks in the 70s and 80s, I am both in awe at the progress that has been made since and deeply unconcerned about AGI. Yes, storage capacity and compute have made major leaps, but it's still only lossily compressing a semantic space. It won't generate things from thin air, and it's certainly not sentient, no matter how far you scale it up. That said, it may be a useful tool in so…

the problem is there are those that are naturally stupid, often elected to positions of unimagined amounts of power

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#104

Post by taneq »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #69
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to…

An autonomous robot cleaning the dishes on its own in an unfamiliar kitchen without breaking anything: how many years? What's your bet?

They could call it something snappy like, I dunno, a DishWasher.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#105

Post by dsign »

danmaz74 wrote: post #72
dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

>> It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being with robots or people, period.

>> That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people.

Yes, if you ever are allowed to pull the trigger. And in that case, I wouldn't trust machine nor person; I have been profiled on the basis of my physical appearance more times that I can count.

But in some cases, like the airport above, the goal and effect is to simply terrify civilians. You can't deny that a machine would do a better job at that[^2].

[^1]: Just search Google images for "Security at Charles de Gaulle airport." I've been there, and that's exactly how they look.

[^2]: Here, have a Dalek with a white paint job: https://www.knightscope.com/ .

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#106

Post by FeepingCreature »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #73
FeepingCreature wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An autonomous robot cleaning the dishes on its own in an unfamiliar kitchen without breaking anything: how many years? What's your bet?

So you mean like something you can wheel in and install or a humanoid style robot you could use in any kitchen? Cause in theory you're just talking about a dishwasher lol. If you mean a robot that could clean in any kitchen without breaking anything, I'd say at least 20 years. As in you could move it from kitchen to kitchen with no install needs. I suppose another way to look at it is this: how many businesses use ro…

A dishwasher isn't autonomous. I'm talking about the second. I think if we don't solve general intelligence first, we should be able to get there in three to four years.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#107

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dsign wrote: post #105
danmaz74 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

>> It's the last job you want to automate with "AI". Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being w…

The police look like that in Paris’s suburbs as well, for I guess obvious reasons.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#108

Post by FeepingCreature »

js8 wrote: post #81
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean like something you can wheel in and install or a humanoid style robot you could use in any kitchen? Cause in theory you're just talking about a dishwasher lol. If you mean a robot that could clean in any kitchen without breaking anything, I'd say at least 20 years. As in you could move it from kitchen to kitchen with no install needs. I suppose another way to look at it is this: how many businesses use ro…

I can imagine a "box", say 1x1x2 meters, that you get in your home, it will have a plexiglass on it, and inside, it will have several AI-controlled arms, and you will be able to command it to fix anything in that space. Not really sure about cooking, but you could ask for example to fix your trousers, or repair a notebook, or make a fitting for water tap, and so on, and it would autonomously do it (it would ask to or…

I find bipedal robots more plausible. Our living spaces are configured for humans; ultimately, something that looks like a human will be best suited to navigate them.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#109

Post by inciampati »

> This is one reason I think the future of LLMs is to move from prompt boxes to GUIs and buttons - I think ‘prompt engineering’ and natural language’ are mutually contradictory.

Yes. Just like search. But that didn't mean that search was replaced by a bunch of radio buttons and click boxes. On the contrary, we learned how to use freeform search. And we will do the same for LLMs.

What I'm seeing is that the systems are most powerful when driven through and conversational interface. They are strong translation systems. They can ask questions and incorporate the answers into their outputs. The way to use them is only clear to a few people who are deep in the experimentation process now, but it will become common knowledge and their outputs will improve to the point that what we are doing with them now will seem primitive.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#110

Post by starbugs »

abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

I agree. It may be helpful under certain circumstances, but under different ones it might actually slow you down, thereby yielding a net productivity gain of zero. At least, that's what it did for me personally.

What I worry about is human greed in relation to AI, be it GPT or anything else. The incentives are lined up to produce something akin to AGI and the tools are becoming more tangible. The goal is to tap the honey pot of automating current knowledge labor first and foremost. Later, other areas of labor.

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