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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#171

Post by giuscri »

thumbuddy wrote: post #164
giuscri wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have AGI we won’t have to work anymore so why worrying about the future? In the meantime enjoy and try to partecipate in this new paradigm. (Unless the AGI will come up capitalism is the best of the possible systems and they will rule them out of the equation)

I hope you watch more scifi movies and read more books. What people do with technology is basically never utopian or utopia adjacent.

I get a decent amount of that and dystopian scenarios are just our horror fantasies. I like them too but I like to have faith in people.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#172

Post by sanderjd »

raincole wrote: post #84
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 a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

I think "doomers" is a better description in this case. "Evangelists" are "AI will do everything and that's great" and doomers are "AI will do everything and that's terrible". The OP is a representative of the middle way: AI is an important new tool and that's a mixed bag but net positive.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#173

Post by sanderjd »

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…

This is the main thing I'm curious about, as with any technology: fad or paradigm?

I can't see anything on Twitter anymore, but before that happened I think I hadn't seen many of the entertaining ChatGPT conversation screenshots anymore. That entertainment use case had the hallmarks of faddishness.

It seems far more useful as a productivity aid though, but as the OP discussed, I doubt the chat prompt UI is going to be the paradigm for that. Copilot is already mostly a more useful UI for me, and I suspect that's where this is headed, with a bunch of different specializations (and even more failed attempts).

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#174

Post by ChatGTP »

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…

What would an economy like the one you describe look like in practice?

What would be the use of an AI picking coffee beans if there is no one with a job to buy the coffee beans? There is an unresolved issue here for sure. Unless the machines are self-sustaining, there's not going to be much use for multi-billion dollar data-centers and millions of dollars in electricity bills and expensive robots if there is absolutely zero need for anyone to be using these systems.

Tesla has robots making cars, ok, who has a job therefore money to buy a car? Many, many of those who are out of work from the Tesla factory will no longer participate in the economy, and that Robot cop at the airport? That will be pretty lonely once people stop flying for their profession, which would be a large customer base for air travel.

A shock this big to the economy could happen quite quick and it would be fairly devastating.

I love to think about all this and play with thought experiments, we have very litte clue where this is going. I actually think Robots are more of a human problem than we realize. AI systems probably have, much, much less need for robots than biological species because we actually heavily depend on manipulating the environment for survival.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#175

Post by synxos »

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 .

Same for me. The benefits are obviously not going to be uniformly distributed because intelligence is not uniformly distributed.

If I was more intelligent I would be less impressed with it because I would probably already know what it has taught me. I understand the thermodynamics of that submarine implosion now but if I had taken any kind of physics I would have already known all that. I didn't take physics though. This pretty much extends to all subjects.

I will have to have it teach me to setup docker containers.

The exercise I really need to get on is to try make something in a language that I have no clue about. Like Rust or Go I know nothing other than they are programming languages. Then it is an exercise in the skill of going from zero to not zero with the help of AI and that not zero will hopefully keep scaling up and up over time.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#176

Post by spi »

keiferski wrote: post #86
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…

Yes, my experience is that most hype comes from people that don't actually work in the jobs they claim will be replaced. Writers, for example. While generative AI does make writing some things more efficient, it almost always has a bland, generic style that is immediately recognizable. The only jobs it will be replacing are ones that didn't require much effort in the first place.

Isn't that almost always the case, and in truth the beauty of automation? Replacing simple, repetitive tasks that, if you have to do that, you say "I wish I had a machine doing this for me"?

Of course, that might impact the number of available jobs and it's something that need to be taken under control.

But, if talking about writers, while AI won't realistically replace imaginative authors and investigative journalists (at least, certainly not in the short term), it will likely replace (some) copy editors and dollar-per-thousand-words "journalists" that have to fill tabloids and free subway "newspapers". While it might be a financial loss for the people involved, the society will hardly sink due to that. In fact, if I feel optimist, in theory it might reduce costs for publishing houses and newspapers, to invest more into quality (human-made) content.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#177

Post by zzzeek »

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 one of the first jobs they will automate

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#178

Post by tsimionescu »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #111
dsign wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

>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. In europe there's 1-2…

A bit ironic to talk about how ok it is to have police with guns in France given the enormous portests still underway caused by a policeman with a gun...

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#179

Post by jiggawatts »

rushingcreek wrote: post #77
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.

How on earth are you affording the OpenAI API fees?

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#180

Post by jiggawatts »

Shorel wrote: post #165
shepherdjerred wrote: post #41

I am pretty concerned about AGI. I love computer science and programming. I would love to get into research after I finish my Masters in a couple of years. I think it's fair to say that _some day_ we will achieve AGI. It might not be in 10 years, or 1000, but eventually we'll get there. When we do have AGI, what would that mean for someone like me? Would there be any reason to have programmers (or similar) at all? Wo…

What's the point of research if some new student can do it better than me, right now? What's the point of playing chess if Magnus Carlsen will beat me every time we play? This seems a bit absurd, but it's something I have feared since I learned I am not the best at everything.

There's only one Magnus Carlsen.

Now ask yourself what's the point of playing chess if every chessplayer except you is a copy of Magnus Carlsen.

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