To think that AI is taking over jobs far, far, FAR quicker than we anticipated?

AI has diagnosed (correctly) Dd with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, me with ankylosing spondylitis and dh with bullous pemphigoid after the GP (different ones) had no idea. I love a ChatGPT diagnosis.

This is enough internet for me today.

There are various levels of advertising. Yes advertising by a known and trusted individual is particularly effective, which is why Richard Osman/Mark Kermode/Rory Stewart get the big bucks to say "I personally use Air BnB and it's great" on their podcasts. That will always carry a premium.

But when an unknown actress on an advert / QVC presenter sniffs washing and goes "mmmm! That fabric conditioner smells lush!" surely everyone knows they're just reading a script. It might as well be AI.

Haha, most importantly did you win the argument?

I think patients want an accurate diagnosis and treatment. How many complaints do you see regarding the poor diagnostic capabilities of GPs? People die every day due to this.

Quantum Computing hasn't been fully developed yet, so nobody knows how interaction will go, but these are not conventional computers so they won't be churning out rubbishy pornographic stories or marketing drivel. They won't be used in soft toys either. QC isn't just a step up in computing, it's a whole different planet.

Well great for you that overheads are reduced but not so great for the people who lose their jobs to enable those savings. Multiply that by many different organisations and what will people do?

anyway for now I’m enjoying it as my boss hasn’t caught on yet that it takes me two days to do 5 days work! 😁

There have already been AI news presenters in other countries.

And the cliché-ridden scripts of shopping channels could easily be written by AI.

People don’t want to see general health care workers carrying out commands from an AI, though. They don’t want to go to university to learn medicine to do that either. Who checks if the AI gets it wrong? Who regulates it? The sales pitch on AI and quantum computing is totally adrift from the reality of what we know people want and how humans behave.

Did you see the video doing the rounds on Twitter a couple of months ago of the techbro dude who gave his kid an AI soft toy and then couldn’t understand why she wanted to turn the AI off and simply wasn’t interested in its marvellous capabilities? He kept pushing her to interact with it, and she simply resisted. He couldn’t get it at all.

That’s what the AI enthusiasts are like when they tell us it’s going to replace everything, just you wait and see! But: humans gonna human. Supermarkets thought it was a great whiz of an idea to get rid of staff with automated checkouts. Turns out that human customers just game them to steal more, so now because of huge losses to shoplifting they have had to re-employ staff to manage the automated checkouts. There is a reason why humans need human interaction - we’re innately cleverer than machines, no matter how much quantum computing power they have. (QC is also v much less advanced than tech dudes like to claim).

Interesting. But doesn’t in-person sales depend on at least some human connection and a belief that a fellow human has used and approves of a product or service?

If I was in the market for a face cream or an air fryer I wouldn’t want to have it recommended by a bot. I’d want to know that the recommender thought highly of it because they’d used it as I would.

QVC product demonstrating will be first on the list of jobs to be replaced by AI. It's only the cost of producing hours on end of decent quality video that stops them being produced by AI right now, and the new Chinese models are a lot cheaper.

I listen to a fair number of industry specialist podcasts with slightly half arsed amateur presenters which would absolutely be better if presented by AI podcasters prompted and checked for hallucination by professionals.

I think alot of occupational health roles will stand the test of time, physiotherapists, speech therapists, counselling. Also the care sector for which i hope salaries would massively improve for.

I feel robotics is quite a whole off in terms of having a robot do child minding, caring roles and those I mention above.

Basically I think this is the knowledge economy version of the Industrial Revolution, and all the things we’ve trained our kids to do are becoming quickly obsolete. I would have thought it was catastrophising previously but this month at work has made me think otherwise . Very sad that change like this is never actually harnessed for the good of humanity. We’re so clever and yet so stupid

My DD is training to be a dancer / singer / actress which usually would be one of those jobs where you are unlikely to work. Going forward it’s a job where ai is unlikely to reach for the near future. People love the arts and human emotion. And if thousands more want to train in years to come, dance teachers will be needed I guess. Same goes for live sports and in person sports training. Can’t emulate that with machine.

Lol. If it was another bot it was much better than the original one, which kept reproducing and summarising info from the website rather than actually answering my question!

I think you are vastly overstating. Technology eliminating routine tasks “for time immemorial” ? And what do you mean to reduce overheads for donor management and HR functions? I have worked in both areas and can vouch for the absolute need for there to be a bespoke human interaction and no room for sloppy communications.

I work in law and I’m very worried for young people entering the profession. Very recently we’ve started using it for more and more paralegal / junior lawyer jobs (meeting notes, hearing notes, drafting, edisclosure). I can see a lot of jobs going, much faster than I expected tbh. I will discourage my kids from doing law degrees / conversions.

They'll have to bring in a social credit system. The better behaved you are, the higher your UBI. Feral meatheads will only be given enough for basic food and a cage to live in, whereas nicely behaved law abiding people will get enough for a TV, car, phone, nice food etc.

I’ve heard the plane navigation explanation and I see no reason to disbelieve it at all.

But, personally, I’d rather have a computer in charge - with all its back-ups and fail-safes - than a human pilot!

Surgery I wouldn’t be so happy about. But I can imagine that a supervised AI surgery bot might be OK. The stories of people going in for an amputation and coming out with no legs because the surgeon first took the wrong one off would end, I’m sure.

There would have to a UBI. The powers that be would recognize the danger. Also, AI is going to generate enormous wealth. Once we have 3-D printing and nanobots and god knows what else, production will be on a whole other level.

The real problem is going to be equality. If everyone is on the same UBI, you've basically got communism. Now that would be fine if everyone was nice and quiet and civilized. In reality, a big chunk of the population is violent, ignorant, and anti-social. I have known two people driven to suicide attempts by feral neighbours. I'd guesstimate that around 15-20% of the population is unwilling and unable to live in a civilized way. Unfortunately, they also tend to have the most kids, who they then raise to be just like them. One of the main reasons people work hard and save their money is so they don't have to live around neighbours like that. If everyone is on the same UBI, you won't be able to escape them. (And before anyone jumps on me, I'm not talking about those on low incomes. The good people on low incomes are their biggest victims.)

Wait until quantum computing is established though. It'll make our current machines look like stone tools. Quantum ai will replace everything apart from physical work such as cleaning and installation jobs. Doctors will be replaced with a generic healthcare worker who carries out the commands made by quantum ai. Robots already perform surgery.

Women's hour also covered an interesting topic the other day on ai being used in fertility medicine. It wasn't to replace people, but to enhance and improve clinical decisions and provide more info for the patient to make an informed choice.

One thing I remember an aeronautical engineer telling me is technically a plane can be flown without a pilot, however little would trust this. For many humans, there is something about another human being there. Same as surgery, the capability is there for simple surgeries, but not many would trust it. I remember reading Oxford uni opening up a specialised ethics on ai hub and I hope the research from this will explore the downsides of ai to ensure the human race doesn't loose its collective humanistic qualities.

I work in Tax and AI is revolutionary for us. It has already cut down admin time hugely and I write for several industry publications and can research my articles much quicker and in more depth than before. This means I have more time to spend with my clients on advisory services which is good for both of us.

Except the one thing AI can do pretty well is code.

I’m sceptical about the idea that AI will replace the creative and knowledge industries. By definition AI produces mediocrity - that’s how it works. It generates text from an aggregate of lots of data. It looks for a mean and reproduces it. So anything that requires bland mediocrity will be susceptible to AI - writing documents, marketing, generating bland content, etc.

What it can’t do is genuinely innovate, or create things at the margins or outliers, or make innovative syntheses of thought, or decode things that require bodily experience that can’t easily be put into text form. It’s essentially a big set of linguistic data being recombined and reproduced. Anything that requires knowledge of the bodily world - touch, interaction, inference, instinct - it can’t do or interpret. It can’t generate anything new that isn’t contained in the data it’s trained on.

So if you want to find a job that AI can’t do, find something that requires a physical component - a people-facing job that requires human interaction, synthesising ideas, understanding people, making decisions that computers can’t do. Despite all the overblown guff from the techbros, it won’t be replacing teachers, artists, beauty therapists, social workers, barristers, scientists, doctors and nurses, yoga instructors, small business owners, carers, etc etc. any time soon. Basically anything that people enjoy or people need, people will be needed to do.

There was an author recently outed in the romance genre. She didn't even bother to remove the ChatGpt prompt from one of her pages.

That is so disgustingly lazy. It not only is deceptive to a reader by passing the work off as her own, she didn't even read that work and edit it. Such a glaring mistake that has cost her everything (or that pen name at least).

I personally do my very best to avoid authors that use AI for either their covers or content. Writing is an art form we must preserve.