AIBU to say AI will completely change how we parent and live?

[Ellis12]

I’ve been experimenting with AI tools recently (like ChatGPT and others), and it’s honestly been a game-changer for managing household stuff, helping with schoolwork, meal plans, even emotional support during tough days.

But it got me thinking are we at the start of something huge? Will AI end up changing how we raise our children, do our jobs, and even build relationships? AIBU to feel both excited and a bit nervous about how fast it's all happening?

Curious what others think, especially parents juggling a million things!

It’s not a species. It’s not going to have dna running through it that makes it ensure its own survival.

Probably think they’ll be the chosen one as portrayed in many films!
i do feel like we are sleep walking into a future we don’t want

What a useless comment. Expecting people to withdraw completely from society in order to ease their carbon emissions while also excusing the 1% completely destroying the planet is a lazy argument. I could give up everything, move off grid and grow everything myself and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.

However if everyone revolted against things such as AI? Private jets etc., we’d be better off.

Rude. And that’s not my argument!

No, it’s not. If your argument is “well you drive, so you can’t be against AI”, it’s a lazy argument.

i drive a hybrid vehicle, btw.

The singularity & self aware AI…

See experiment where ai blackmails engineer to ensure its survival.

I think it will change things,some for the good (medical issues) and some not so good (taking people's jobs). I was listening to an expert on the radio last night talking about AI. Someone said that if AI ends up taking thousands of people's jobs, and these people cannot find other work,there will have to be a Universal Basic Income brought in,which does not require unemployed people to look for work. But as someone else pointed out,how will the government find this UBI if there is no one working and paying tax to fund it? Quite frankly,I'm rather glad that this has all started now when I'm only 5 years from pension age,than 10/20/30 years ago. I feel sorry for young people starting out now, knowing that in a few years time they will possibly be made redundant because of AI.

Agree. It’s another form of UPF in my mind. Makes us further away from our humanity, not for the better if we value our happiness

Yes, you could say that.

Think of how technology currently "controls" us, we have direct and indirect control. We aren't forced to stare at our smartphones for 11 hours a day, but that's the average for significant numbers of people, especially teenagers. But that's more passive, for active control measures think of QR codes for parking or ordering food. As A.I developes we will not just accept it, we will expect it. If you go to any Popeyes Restaurant in the UK, drive thru orders are taken using A.I, and it's (from personal experience) pretty much flawless, I can hesitate, umm and ahh as much as I like, change order mid sentence, the A.I always gets my order correct.

It's not hard to see how A.I tech could control most of our movements and dictate our behaviour. The UK government has just rolled out personal digital wallets for all UK citizens, they will contain all government I.D, as well as linking medical info, bank account details, car registrations and biometrics. So the government now has complete oversight, each of us will be monitored to a degree that would make Orwell turn in his grave. With a simple click the government will quite literally be able to see a spreadsheet of your entire existence, who you communicate with (including the content of all messages and emails), what you buy and when, where you go, who you associate with (thanks to Bluetooth proximity records and clicker counters). What car you drive, where you go, even track your driving behaviour thanks to most manufacturers putting "driver safety scores" in their cars, thanks Peugeot, kia, BMW, Renault and the rest.

Now imagine A.I monitoring your digital wallet, it could stop your card working, shut your car down (An EU and US directive mandated all manufacturers back in 2023 to provide access to a "kill switch" so the authorities can remotely shut your car down) All for safety you understand, to avoid pursuits and enforce Geofencing restrictions. Basically they can now literally stop you from turning your car on by remotely accessing it. You signed up for all this when you downloaded that fancy app for your phone when you bought your new car.

I can easily see digital curfews being used for "environmental" reasons. Flying too much, they can stop you going over your yearly quota. Driving too much, they can shut your car down, for example they could decide that your car will only start every other day. Eating too much meat, your card won't work if you try to pay for meat at the supermarket.

This is the world we are heading into.

Absolutely 💯 Someone explained to me only the other day the amount of energy this uses. I was gobsmacked. We might as well forget recycling and go back to Co2 sprays, pumping raw sewage into our water and coal fires if we want because if we are going to embrace this we are officially saying we don't give a crap about our planet. Of course the big tech companies and other companies will be using it, they never gave a shit about anything anyway. People do have some power here, we don't have to just move with the times because we are told to do so (by tech companies of course), we can refuse to engage if we wish.

Good points, sounds like an Asimov story or I Robot movie. I really think this may be the ‘Great Filter’. Why universe not teeming with life?

Will the best resources only be available to those deemed by AI to have IQ for ‘professional’ jobs?

Presumably the elite will try to be immune?

Still not my argument, you’re making stuff up.

You said this to someone else:

”does it feel good? Killing the planet to save a little bit of time?”

I chimed in “hope you don’t drive”.

That’s all.

Yes. Your argument being that because you drive, you can’t criticise much worse practices.

I think AI is useful for planning stuff or guidance but it can’t change parenting or anything that requires a person to be present . Unless we expect robots to babysit them no it won’t take over

Yesterday I asked Chat GPT to write me a short summary of research on a particularly issue for a report I was writing. It was two paragraph and included four references. I checked the sources and only one out of the four articles it used as evidence actually existed. Had I just used the text I would have put more misinformation out into the world for it to be used as evidence. It was a real wake up call on the risks of reliance on AI.

Crap I’m going to start using cash from now on

There was an article in The Register (IT news site) this week about the beginning of AI model collapse, which is when there is so much AI-churned out “data” out there that the AIs end up training & referencing mainly AI-created data (complete with hallucinations) rather than human-created data, let alone verified data. It’s a real problem.

Oh shit RayonSunrise yes of course I hadn’t thought of that happening over time. That’s really scary.

I’m confused about these hallucinations though. There must be a quick and easy way for the AI to also check that the references it is giving are actually in existence as a real webpage? How is it able to just make stuff up? Obviously no guarantee that the webpage referred to is a legitimate one but I don’t understand how completely nonexistent things get referenced.

Thankfully, our kids are already adults.

It will definitely do some of those things.

There's already been a tax tribunal case where a woman defending herself against HMRC challenge produced a few court case/tribunal rulings to defend her stance. Luckily, someone in the prosecution team took the time to check the tribunal/case precedents and found they didn't exist and had been fabricated. The woman obviously lost her case as she had no real statute nor precedent to defend her stance.

What wasn't made clear in the reporting was whether she was a "victim" of made up cases via AI etc and genuinely believed they were real cases, or whether she made them up herself and hoped the prosecution wouldn't notice.

That's why it's always worth performing a "sanity check" on anything generated by AI. And also why "professionals" will always be needed to supervise AI to check it over, just as they currently "supervise" trainee and junior staff to check they're doing the work properly. It's the junior levels of staff who'll be the ones at risk from AI - the experienced/senior professionals should be OK.

Of course that leads on to "how" people will ever become experienced in the future if firms take on fewer trainees and junior staff! So firms will have to keep taking on such staff to train them up to "fill the boots" of older experienced staff as they leave or retire. A few big firms got caught out like this during the Covid lockdowns as they made the decision to recruit far fewer graduates/trainees due to uncertainty as to how many businesses wouldn't survive the lockdowns. It was OK short term, but the year after, they realised that they had no "1 year trainees" to step up to do the "year 2" work, but the year 2 trainees had to step up to do year 3 work, and so on, creating a vacuum of work needing doing but no workers! So they had to hold some 2/3/4 year trainees back to do the work until the number of year 1's was back to normal in 2021 and 2022 to feed through again and recruit some more experienced staff from other firms (at higher cost) to fill the gaps at all levels.

Like anything else new, I think ultimately there'll have to be controls etc., Trouble is, like anything new, politicians are far too slow to realise problems and take years to come up with controls etc., by which time it's fire-fighting. Such a shame that politicians are never pro-active. As there WILL be pain from AI before things get too bad that politicians will finally have to do something to impose rules and controls, etc. They have no foresight!

AI (or rather, Large Language Models like Chat GPT, which is what we’re talking about specifically) work by predicting the next word in a sentence based on existing writing/what’s gone before. They don’t fact check or verify. (Or even do maths accurately, it’s been found.)

There is a growing number of computer scientists who are very concerned at how oversold LLMs are. They generate plausible sounding text and excellent images, but they do not reason, fact check, or source check. And they make it VERY easy to generate reams and reams of LLM slop across the internet.

I quite like Wes Streeting and his approach to the NHS problems as he doesn't appear to want to shy away from big changes which is what is needed.

AI could revolutionise the NHS. Obviously in clinical matters like analysing scans, x-rays and blood test results which are currently prone to Human error.

But more significantly with the whole problem of administration and management. Let AI into the myriad of different systems and start learning how to streamline things and increase efficiency, i.e. knowing that a blood test has to be precisely x days before chemotherapy treatment, knowing which pharmacy has stocks of a particular drug in short supply, searching appointment databases in different clinics, different hospitals, different trusts, etc., to give patients a choice of quicker appointment times if they're willing to travel a bit. So many areas where "humans" slow down the process.

My OH needs numerous hospital and clinic visits, treatments etc., for his treatable but incurable cancer that he's had for around 7 years. It's a sodding nightmare as all the different departments are incapable of communicating with eachother. If, say, the oncologist refers him to orthopaedics for a bone problem, he'll just get a random appointment through the post several weeks later, which almost certainly will clash with an existing treatment or medical appointment, so he has to phone (multiple attempts to get through as they don't answer!), to cancel and arrange another appointment, etc. A monumental waste of everyone's time. Then he'll ask if there's a sooner appointment somewhere else, and you'd think he'd asked the appointments clerk to sacrifice her first born as it's "such an effort" to look at a different hospital/clinic in the same trust, you can hear the sighing and almost hear the eye-rolling! And if nothing local within a few months (bearing in mind most of his referrals are marked as urgent because of potentially relating to his cancer and chemotherapy), and he dares ask whether there are appointments quicker in our neighbouring trust across the county border - you can almost hear the appointment clerk's head imploding as that no doubt means logging into a different system to check! AI could do all that in a few seconds, produce a list of potential consultants/clinics with timescales and locations/distances and save hours of admin time for each appointment.

Same after treatments, admissions, tests, etc - it could review the latest results against previous results and all other clinicians involved and flag up contra-indications, potential drug conflicts etc., to the relevant doctors/consultants.

Finally, the potential for "joined up" thinking and actions in the NHS. Can't wait!