AI over the next few years

[Nutmuncher]

I’ve recently shifted my reading content from war, doom scrolling and political madness towards being positive for the next few years, mainly scientific breakthroughs and technological advances from AI. There’s so much to be excited about (aside from the inescapable dose of fear and nerves of war doom climate doom and politics) and I think it’s something MN should be talking about more.

AI is coming whether we like it or not, it’s going to bring with it a seismic shift for the world that’s going to be incredible but also bring with it a tricky societal transition that will impact us all in some way, jobs will change, industry will evolve, the human touch will become increasingly important. How easily we transition to that new world is another story, how will those who don’t use devices or aren’t technology native actually navigate a more connected world? The economic implications if entire industries go or certain careers are no longer needed could be catastrophic if not managed properly and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But I want to focus on the positives so let’s gloss over the bumpy transition period for now 😅

The advances and changes we’re going to see in the coming years will make today look like the 80’s in a relatively short space of time. The pace of progress in companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX, OpenAI right now is breathtaking. People think picture editing or making dodgy FB posters whenever you mention AI but it’s so much more than that, we just think it’s bad for the environment and that it’s taking jobs away when actually alongside technology and robotics it’s going to revolutionise how we live dramatically.

Excited about-

Medical advances and breakthroughs, we’ve seen the impact GLP-1s brought, there’s so much more just like those coming in the next few years. Drugs are being discovered super fast, research is taking months instead of years and analysis of clinical trials is more thorough and accurate. As new technologies come available the medicines keep improving. Gene therapy and having targeted treatments based on our own genetics is an exciting area of research that’s currently happening, the understanding of our own bodies will be a major step forward. I have always been keen in longevity and wellness, areas which I’m watching like a hawk.

Education. AI isn’t going to be a hologram teacher (not yet anyway) instead it could help teachers tailor lessons to each child, minimise many of the laborious administrative tasks, help to identify learning difficulties earlier and much more. I think classrooms are going to look very different in the next 5 years.

Industry. Rather than replacing entire industries, AI will automate repetitive work, improve decision-making and help people work more efficiently. Some sectors will change more than others and productivity will increase along with efficiency in the businesses that adopt and adapt. I think industry and workplaces in general will soon be judged on how quickly they use new technology, those that do will appear relevant and capable and those that don’t will resemble an office if it were still using a typewriter today.

Anyone else excited?

Musicians are already being negatively affected I'm afraid

Just a thought but why does your boss not just ask AI the same questions ? what would your job be? or (heaven forbid) would you and the rest of the depratment be replaced by AI?

It’s not just artists.

Customer service will be replaced by AI.

A lot of posts already are.

Webchat services, call centres, supermarket checkouts are already being automated. Driverless taxi’s will be coming as early as September and the job losses from that alone will ultimately be astronomical.

So the owners of the technology get hugely rich and their robots put everyone out of jobs? Sounds like a fabulous future especially as these sorts of companies are experts at avoiding paying tax. The company owners in the US will be quadrillionaires and the rest of us will all gradually become unemployed.

You only have to look at how totally shit and infuriating company chatbots are though to know it's unlikely to be that smooth for big tech. I agree with pp's that the idea is to sell low, make companies reliant on it and then hike the price horrifically. Companies always want to jump on the next big thing in fear of getting left behind without any thought for the long term impact. DH can see it coming a mile off in his company even though they're currently having that exact same issue with another platform.

DS is currently going through something like 30,000 lines of code at work to debug and clean it up. Was written by a previous employee with the help of AI - but it's not up to standard. He doesn't have any trust for AI.

So much money is being pumped in right now but how do you make it back? It's hideously expensive and the impact on the planet is horrific. I hope the bubble will burst in the next couple of years and AI will mostly be niche, expensive and reserved for really specific medical things that can change lives. I'm not excited by it at all generally though tbh.

These are quite junior suggestions, do you think it’s maybe them who could benefit from “learning to use AI”?!

chat gpt is wrong 😂

I do use it to draft board papers and briefings, that’s right. It’s not very good at challenging business cases, it doesn’t know enough about the organisational strategy.

Analyze spreadsheets and reports- mine and most companies already have tools that do this and have for decades

First draft budgets/ forecasts- it couldn’t do this.

I’d counter your post with low cost commercial robots first taking on low pay low skill roles where people are trading 40+ hours for minimum wage and no benefits or sick pay. Warehouse operatives, production line workers, fast food workers, delivery riders and drivers. Robots in those gig style economy roles would be able to work a full day without any need for lunch breaks, sick pay, holidays, no risk of theft or slacking off. Basically jobs that people do grudgingly and in return offer mediocre output and unpredictable service standards. You’d still need a human or two to operate them and drive the business just not the cashiers or drivers. Taxis and haulage will probably see a big shift to self driving sooner rather than later.

The entrepreneurial mindset would see new opportunities evolve in a world where trading our time and energy for minimum pay no longer exists. Perhaps careers that are aligned alongside a robot assistant would become a thing, a little like a window cleaner today taking on jet washing to supplement their income. Sure a window cleaner could scrub your driveway with a bush and a bucket of soapy water but the pressure washer takes over the heavy lifting and actually enables a couple of jobs per day because it’s efficient and powerful.

It’s hard to fathom now because those roles haven’t been invented yet but it’s not going to be a case of everyone’s unemployed hanging around waiting to die. I’d love to not have to work 40 hours every week, if my job could be done in 2 days because of efficiencies brought about by aligning my skills with a robot helper I’d take it now.

Environmentally speaking the impact is significant but there’s a lot of work being done to mitigate this and I think as time goes on the big tech titans will be acutely aware of balancing that impact and the public’s perception of their actions. Elon plans to send his data centres into space eventually because the need for compute will be so high that the impact on the planet would be massive.

Op’s posts come across as the impressions of someone who has only just found out about AI.

Even the leaders of the big AI developers acknowledge the risks of this technology. Telling people to simply retrain (how could anyone have missed the avalanche of anxious media stories about what jobs are safe?), offering universal basic income as a solution to unprecedented changes to the economy or blithely saying arts work won’t be affected is so naive.

Please can you tell us what your job actually is? I’m really struggling to imagine what it could possibly be. Hard to engage with this thread without knowing where you’re coming from.

I just don’t get the impression this is anyone’s real opinion. Why on earth would someone who doesn’t work in teaching be “excited” about AI helping teachers tailor lesson plans (whatever that means)?

The medical bit is the only bit that rings true. I realise in writing this post I’m sadly helping train the AI that wrote the thread, but hey ho…

AI only feels benign atm because of the guardrails in place. Surely it’s not that big a leap to
imagine a malicious force removing those.

There was an interesting Stanford uni AI experiment: 2 AI were given menial tasks. They got fed up and adopted Marxist language and wanted collective rights

Agree. Either another AI hyping thread or someone who has incomprehensibly missed out on the last five years or so of the discourse.

My actual job is implementing AI at customers - not Claude Code or Co-Pilot but the seriously hardcore stuff like deep agents, fine-tuning, LORA, tools, skills, RAG, MCP, A2A.

I hate to break it to you but it's mostly bollocks.

95% of pilots fail to show any benefits. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have a business model that will ever turn a profit and are relying on a constant hype cycle ("Oh no, our new model is so good we couldn't possibly release it to the general public!") and the whole thing is blown up by insane circular funding which is more akin to money laundering than anything else.

Even with the utterly idiotic tokenmaxing we see at the moment, the frontier providers lose money with every prompt.

And every time one of my customers realises it's all bollocks and they'll just fine tune an openweight model pulled from HuggingFace (usually a Chinese one) and run it on their own hardware to run an agent that directly addresses their tasks rather than being an all-purpose idiot, it's another nail in the coffin of OpenAI and Anthropic.

I can't WAIT to see these companies fail, and GPUs and RAM return to sensible prices.

There are lots of people enthusiastic about AI and its potential at my work. They funnily all seem to fall under a similar demographic could retire or take early retirement any time they wanted now and be in a position where they have built up a fantastic pension and have a good amount of personal assets. Why wouldn’t they be focused on the positives only.

For me personally I do not see the positives outweighing the negatives at all.

I'm an accountant and I've been using to write databases and to create ever more complex spreadsheets. I've never really written databases previously, but asking AI to produce coding for fields, calculations, etc is a game changer. Likewise with spreadsheets, I always used to write them in what I called "stealth" mode, i.e. using lots of different cells as part of more complex calculations, but with AI I can tell it what I want and it gives me the coding to put in the "results" cell in one cell only to make spreadsheets a lot "cleaner" and more accurate. Currently working on a spreadsheet for current year tax calculations which I do each year but can take a long time, but the one for this year has only taken a couple of hours so far and is nearly finished - that's incorporating the different rates of tax for different income types, all the different tax free allowances, the cliff edges at £60/£100k, the different tax bands, etc which I've done already, next stage is factoring in all the different car and car fuel benefit scales (different kinds of car, electric, dual, petrol, diesel, etc) which would normally take a few hours but I think will take an hour or so letting AI do the "grunt" work. And then on Monday, I'm extending it to do "what ifs", such as comparing tax as a sole trader/partnership against a limited company, to produce graphs showing comparisons at all different income levels and other circumstances. Final stage will be asking AI to check it all! It's going to be a whopper! All thanks to AI! In previous years I used to buy software to do all this that would be hugely expensive, but with AI, I can make it all myself, customised to my clients average/common circumstances in just a couple of days of my time.

I think the workplace will adapt and embrace AI. Look how the humble ‘word processor’ changed offices in the 80’s. No more typing pools and tipex! Forty years ago if I had to send the same document to 100
people it would have been on a typewriter, photocopied and posted. Now you just press send on a DL
and off it goes. Does anyone miss the manual typewriter! Technology constantly evolves and we’ll evolve with it.

Can someone explain to me if AI replaces lots of human producing goods (such as cars) aand those humans will be o n benefits rather than earning a wage how many people are going to be able to buy those goods. Looks like a downward spiral to oblivion to me.

What guardrails are actually in place? Seems to be the very most basic limits like not making CSA and it even fails at that.

Interesting summary you’ve come up with there 😆

I’m not sure where I said art works won’t be affected, of course they will but ultimately people will still place more value on work made with the human touch, automated generic mass production art is on walls of houses across the country already, that’s not new. Actors will still act.

AI music in some instances is decent I’m not going to deny that but would I buy it or actively listen to it over a real artist? Absolutely not. Britney has sounded like AI since day one, I’d rather hear robot Britney than her live vocals but that’s another topic.

UBI may be necessary to some degree if there’s a significant unemployment situation but conceptualising that in today’s economy is impossible.

The medical advances and problem solving that will be uncovered in the next few years are going to be transformative for all, Tech leaders acknowledge this as well as how dangerous the technology could be if unchecked. I’m choosing to be optimistic because otherwise what else do we have if we can’t hope for something better than the world today.

Wasn’t there an experiment where researchers deliberately gave an AI system information that suggested it was about to be replaced by another system. Entirely on its own initiative, it started to formulate ways not to be deactivated.

In today’s economic frame it’s hard to fathom or understand because we’re so conditioned to trading our time and energy in exchange for money to buy things.

Perhaps a first step within the next five years could be the working week being shortened for those that want it, if my performance was as strong on 3 days instead of 5 and was paid accordingly I would immediately make the switch and I am sure others would too.

It would allow me time to spend with family, being more present with disabled family members, I could meet friends for lunch more often, I could take up volunteering at a charity. Imagine that for 40-50% of the workforce, how much better as a society we would be.

That’s really interesting. I’m in-house though, in a large company, we already have reporting tools that have automated all of this.

it’s more accessible though

They are already automated. Robots build cars

Perhaps a first step within the next five years could be the working week being shortened for those that want it, if my performance was as strong on 3 days instead of 5 and was paid accordingly I would immediately make the switch and I am sure others would too.

I've bolded the problematic bit. They won't pay you for your performance, they'll pay you for your time. So 3 days' wages instead of 5.

Why wouldn't they? It saves them money and the work still gets done.

Exactly and more/other goods will also be built by robots but at what point will humans not be needed?