To worry that AI will alter the world beyond all recognition, and not for the better?

[Appalonia]

I know it's only in its infancy but it's already created music, screenplays, works of art, photos, essays, marketing, and has the ability to create so much else which will basically erase the necessity for so many jobs, including creative ones. What will pp DO when most of us are essentially irrelevant? And what will be the purpose of life when there's no point learning a skill when AI can do it so much better, and cheaper? I was watching an interview with Elon Musk who was saying that universal basic income is the only way forward. Which is great, but, if human beings are going to become essentially redundant ( apart from purely physical jobs such as cooking, building, hairdressing, beauticians, farming etc), what will be the point of us?

People felt like this about the Railways.

I have unleashed chat GPT at work and it IS unnerving, but I’d save real worry for climate change

Our over reliance on computers is frightening. The Internet whilst useful hasn't exactly been without its problems for mankind. AI. shouldn't be allowed to become a runaway train. It needs to be controlled and used responsibly.

YANBU OP.
AI is stupider than people. And it is a multiplier of people's stupidity. It's one of the reasons I challenge outright lies on the internet.

I use it a lot in my work. My kids use it for exam preparation. And a lot more obviously. Personally a big fan.

Elon Musk is just a fucking nightmare though. Seriously twisted individual.

On AI in the NHS - I've seen this argument about algorithms triaging patients and speeding things up but I've also seen that when AI has been asked to write essays, it's made up fake references and conclusions, so can you imagine the issues that would create if it was used to diagnose and come up with treatment plans? Even for things like AI generated advertising copy, I think some human intervention will be needed to check outputs make sense and read well. And I do worry about human biases being amplified in the systems created, as well as jobs being made unnecessary.

Stone Age
Metal Ages
Agricultural revolution
Industrial revolution
Electrical / gas takeover from steam
IT and the internet revolution
AI

The world continues to change. AI will achieve a lot, but we are still teaching machines how to think. Our wants as humans will always exceed our abilities, so AI fills the gaps. Those farm workers who went to factories and then into call centres and IT support... each time it was "what will they do?" and they needed to be in education for longer. Under AI they will pick up the roles in handling the edge cases, describing to the AI what new tasks to pick up, doing the manual tasks described by AI etc etc etc. Until the next big change comes, presumably the robots. And then we will find the next gap that they can't quite achieve.

How does it work? I asked a human this question and they said it draws all knowledge from the internet. So surely we need to keep inputting the knowledge. If it is all algorithms, won't it get out of date? At some level we need to keep inputting information. Or have I misunderstood?

Lots of human knowledge comes from assessing vast quantities of data, which we call research. We can reduce the time and intellect needed to do that, and instead have literally anyone ask a question to the AI. E.g. "tell my why her foot hurts" (someone needs to run the tests AI asks for and have inputted all known data), or "tell me how much to charge for X" (someone needs to have told AI what to take into account for pricing, and what not to take into account e.g. race, age), or "tell me what roads need resurfacing" (someone needs to add information, add criteria like to fill and prevent potholes at the cheapest cost over the next 5 years)... In all cases, people are still needed to teach the AI how to do the job, but it then can do the job better than those people because it can bring all the data into even very small decisions.

In my industry (translation) AI has already destroyed jobs. The hourly wage has decreased from £30+ to £7. So I am retraining in law, which is said to be replaceable by AI in a few years time.

People who use AI train it at the same time to make it better. Each time you have to enter a captcha for Google you're teaching its AI machine to get better at recognising images. DeepL (machine translation engine) is the same - within the suggested translation you can select words that you think are more idiomatic. So the engine learns the better sentence for the future.

Translation quality overall has gone down since because too many translators (now called 'post-editors') accept the machine translation without changes due to time pressure / poor pay or laziness, but people are getting quite used to this new, sub-standard language and even start using it themselves.

Not progress at whatever cost.

Deploying an automated chatbot reduces wait times and allows the same 5 agents to answer the really complex queries. Result!

Will never work because Mr Shouty Wanker wants the satisfaction of ruining a real human's day.

That mumsnet poem is awful. It clearly doesn't know a thing about this place.

I work in tech and on the one hand we can't really guess what will happen - it isn't comparable to previous technological advances, and it's all getting better and more advanced at unspeakable speed.

On the other I think we'll see huge shockwaves across industries and economies - we're already seeing the tiny ripples here.

ChatCPT is terrifying & the pre teens all have it on snap. Already using to write & submit homework

Who knows? However the future is not set, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

AI + quantum computing = the end of the world as we know it.

I agree, it's as though no one has ever watched The Terminator and seen what Skynet did.

Men who use AI to create porn of the wome they know is so scary to me.
All it takes one photo of you online and they can create the most abusive, degrading stuff out there.

The news that came out some time a go how men create AI girlfriends was terrifying!

Imagine how this is going to shape mens and even more so boys views on women.
Misogyny is already so bad.

*photo of womans face

I worry that we will be unable to tell what's AI and what's real, AI politicians can be saying things they wouldn't in real life, families could be destroyed by AI being used to imitate people saying or doing things they wouldn't normally. It's a very scary thought with sm being huge that we won't know what's being said is real or by AI.

Maybe there will be a switch away from SM if no one can tell what's fake or real even more

How do you know if I’m real or AI?

Jobs are one worry. False information is the other.

How unique is each of really? To what extent can the essence of humanity be codified? Perhaps it already has been, and we're all the product of AI?

These were some thought provoking questions discussed on a recent Joe Rogan podcast about AI. It blows my mind what it might be capable of.