How do you think AI will change things?

[Mountainhowl]

Not an AIBU just the best board I've found for traffic and discussion :)

I'm curious to know where others think AI will take us? How will things change and how do you think governments will deal with the changes?

Will there be mass job losses? Do you think we will get a UBI? What jobs do you think are likely to be safer?

Will life get better or worse?

Do you use any form of AI? I occasionally utilise chat gtp (the free one) for brainstorming ideas and help writing things like blogs for my small business, and I use some of the AI functions available in Photoshop/lightroom for image editing

Same. And some object because I have a southern accent in a company based up north and tell me they want to speak to someone "actually there"
No danger of my job ever being sent abroad!

AI will allow the creation of fake content (deepfakes, voice synthesis etc.) no-one will know what to believe anymore. A tsunami of misinformation, way more than the conspiracy theories, false celebrity endorsements and fake news we see today. Fraudsters and others will have the ability to translate convincing stories in attempt to extract money from you. So a continuation of the fraud, fakery and fuck wittery about now, but turbocharged. It will lead to watermarking online content, but that’s for another time.

It’s not all bad news. There will be huge advances in sciences, including medicine due to the number crunching, sequencing and monitoring available- that’s before we get to quantum computing.

Private enterprise will hope to relieve operatives of their jobs in retail, call centres and back offices due to the immense savings they hope to make but us humans aren’t done for yet, if my experience in the working world is anything to go by. We’ll still need carers, plumbers, cooks etc.

AI principles of transparency, fairness, reliability etc. will fall by the wayside very quickly, imho.

Not at this moment in time, when you're a teacher marking coursework and predicting target grades 😂

It's been a right pain in the arse in my industry already, I'm a writer. I was expecting my work to disappear overnight when GTP came out- what actually happened was a brief dry spell, where clients tried it out, discovered it produced pretty low-quality content, and came back. A lot of the easier jobs have permanently disappeared but there's still plenty available if you have a technical or legal niche requiring a lot of research or for clients requiring a particular tone.

The most annoying part is the 'AI detectors'. They don't work. I have a very dry writing style (mainly write in extremely dull/serious niches) and most of the stuff I write flags as AI. It's definitely not, I just sound like a robot apparently.

Goodness knows how it's all going to develop though, worry about my job keeps me up at night.

I know someone who works in planning for a council, and says his job will probably eventually done by AI.

I find this subject fascinating but must confess that I don’t really know much about it.

I do wonder about the shift in power that might happen as a result of AI. So if a few tech companies who own the AI have their fingers in all these industry ‘pies’ how much those industries will begin to be influenced by what suits the tech companies? Ultimately they will gather/ process the info for their benefit because why wouldn’t they? Yes life will get easier but at a cost. If AI can tell me what medication I need, the same company can then produce the medication and sell it to me. If AI can personalise exams and target grades, it could funnel students into ‘most suited’ roles and change the job market to suit the people who own the AI.

This shift in power is what freaks me out the most about AI.

That's really "just" very fast pattern matching. Which an awful lot of "AI".

It's the large language models that have changed the landscape. You can give them very fuzzy input (like "write a routine to parse the data in the next prompt into a csv" and the "understand"). Which removes the need to know & remember volumes of definitions, parameters and examples.

Maybe at some point we'll realise that's all human intelligence is. Just very sophisticated pattern matching.

But I return to my 2023 version of the Turing challenge. Can an AI bot render a webpage without adverts ? Something even a child could be shown how to do.

I wouldn’t judge by AI today

The main point I’ve picked up from people who know about it is it will change increasingly quickly

I don't think we should be messing about with it.

I suspect these are the same people who have been selling fusion power and hover cars since the 60s and have just moved on from crypto.

It's worth remembering that for some people, the only tangible effect of the internet (the Last Big Thing) on their lives is they can now have a basket of substituted groceries delivered in slightly less time that it would have taken in 1993. And they sit above a base of people who don't really understand what the fuss is about anyway.

I just always think of Stephen Hawking saying it was the greatest threat to humanity, not climate change.

If we get to the point of a super smart AGI it could probably come up with a solution to global warming anyway, we've just got to hope that solution isn't 'rid the planet of humans' 🙈

I have no idea where it will go or what the effects will be, it'll certainly be interesting to see it play out!

If we get to the point of a super smart AGI it could probably come up with a solution to global warming anyway,

We don't need fucking AI to tell use the solution to climate change - we've known it for decades.

No, that future will be the same as now - the best answer (now from AI instead of experts) will still be ignored as inconvenient.

Which is why governments will steer us to the "right thinking" AI. You know. Like five centuries ago we were steered towards the "right" way of religion, with the choice (of sorts) of being burned at a stake if you disagreed.

Although the idea of "government approved" AI will probably kill it faster than anything.

I mean it could come up with a way of carbon capture, some way to make oil without using fossil fuels or something else innovative like that, so that we could continue being bad stewards of the planet because it's no longer having the same effect if that makes sense. Or it could come up with a good alternative to fossil fuels that's just as viable without the drawbacks of the eco solutions we have currently

No clue if it's possible I'm just sure it's an idea I've heard floating around in one of the podcasts with people much smarter than me 😂

Like everything else it will be hijacked by the richest people and instead of being used for the greater good of humanity, will be used to make a select group of people richer and everybody else will either stay trapped in a cycle of working to afford the basics.

Seems some of us are with the program.

It "could" do lots of things. But people will only pay attention to the bits they like.

We already know how this ends. We set ourselves up with an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being (or beings) who handed down some pretty good rules like "be nice to one another", "don't kill", "don't steal". And low how quickly we managed to "interpret them".

Ignore the capabilities or otherwise of AI. Just look where it will fit into our lives. Just another god. Truly fashioned in our own image.

AI principles of transparency, fairness, reliability etc. will fall by the wayside very quickly, imho.

@Onemorestepintheworld was very prescient, given the lawsuit between Musk and OpenAI.

F.