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?

Yes.
AI is (currently) for junior functions. Automation of routine tasks, and assisting with things people are not good at like writing formulas, code, and good English.

Strategic thinking at upper management level is a human function.

You'll never get World wide agreement for anything. We've never had it before and will never have it. We can't even make much progress on World wide agreements re super rich, tax havens, fair global taxes etc. It'll never happen.

Yes, we'll still need skills such as logic, critical thinking etc. Unfortunately we have an out of date/out of touch education system that's not fit for purpose for today's World, let alone tomorrow's World, and that's the biggest area of concern. AI can do the simple things so will massively impact on low skilled "basic" jobs. We'll still need humans who "Know stuff" to check AI output and get the best out of AI - low skilled people can't do that. Our education system should be transitioning away from "subjects" and into "skills" instead. There's less and less need to know "facts" and ever increasing needs for people to know how to do stuff, know how to interpret data, known how to check things, etc.

@MistressoftheDarkSide
What frightens and fascinates me is the zealotry coming from some who rave about AI and its potential. The flavour of "resistance is futile" and "adapt or die".

Zealotry is the right word. This is a religious fervour. They believe in the Religion of Progress.
"Progress" has replaced Christianity or some other religion in the psyche of most of the Western world.

See this blog for a discussion of energy, technology, economics, AI, and our current predicament.

Peak Oil: Specter and Substance – Ecosophia

The things you’re excited about are exciting, but jobs have already gone because you have a manager using ai instead of hiring people. People who are excited about it are people who don’t realise that every single person has a use, has dreams and should have the possibility of reaching their potential if they work hard enough and that the world would be a calmer place should this be a possibility.

It’s also destroying talents, skills and skillsets and dumbing down the population that use it instead of trying to create or learn.

Plus, I don’t know if anyone told you, ai is destroying the environment.

I found it very convincing at first but... It's wrong about the energy needed to produce wind turbines being more than the energy they produce. Maybe it was correct at the time he's calling back to (2005ishwhen peakoil was a buzzword) but we have now had wind turbines continuing to produce energy for decades so have a better idea of realistic projections re energy produced over a lifetime.
That doesn't mean wind turbines will fix all our problems or that we will be living in some future age of abundance. I agree with him that AI is likely to make our current energy issues worse. But him being so wrong about something I do know a little bit about, makes me more sceptical of the other claims he made which I don't know anything about but which at first seemed to make sense. Also, I think his interpretation of the motives of the people pushing AI gives them more credit to long term thinking and intelligence than they necessarily deserve.

This is a thread about AI, so I won't derail by going into renewable energy at great length.
I will just say that you have to look at the whole lifecycle of wind turbines, including sourcing and transporting raw materials for their manufacture, the actual manufacture, transportation to site, installation, maintenance including transport of staff to site and the materials, transport, and manufacture of spare parts, then finally the disposal of the turbine at the end of its life.

It is not a simple comparison to oil, and the calculations are of course disputed.

If it does turn out that wind turbines make more energy than they use, great. They are still a tiny, tiny proportion of global energy compared to fossil fuels.

I LOVE AI (and I am an ordinary, non-techie person who doesn't follow all the latest gadgets etc). I use it at work constantly. It's literally the only way that I can keep on top of the relentless mass of tasks and demands. I use it to polish my emails and reports, draft Powerpoint decks, provide me with creative ideas, structure documents etc etc. In fact, if I moved jobs, I would specifically ask if they provided AI tools to support the role. If they didn't, I wouldn't accept the job - I really mean that. It's only going to take jobs away from those who refuse to embrace it. For the rest of us, we will be able to complete our roles to a much higher standard, much more efficiently. If you want to keep using quill and ink, then do so but I'm powering through my work using a word processor - I'll continue to be employed and you won't.

There's a limit on where you can put windturbines to ensure they are efficient enough (produce enough energy) to be worth making in the first place. But wind turbinesproduce about 20-25 times the energy required to make them (factoring all the energy costs you listed except disposal). There are still loads of places you can put turbines but if we relied on them and then alone for energy then yes, we would quickly hit that limit. So they aren't a magic bullet.
It ties back to AI in that the huge amounts of energy needed for AI need to come from somewhere and even though renewables show a lot of promise and will keep getting better they aren't going to be able to keep up with an exponentially growing energy requirements from AI. And actually oil won't either.

I mentioned this too in a reply to someone earlier, it’s a valid point that those who learn to leverage AI to be better in their current roles are the ones who will flourish, those who increase productivity and quality of work whilst actually doing less will hit the sweet spot.

Avoidance and not actually embracing AI will be the undoing of many careers.

How we adapt to the societal changes will largely depend on age, skillset, ambition and how a person uses the tech.

No. It will largely depend on government and the infrastructure of the country. Which will NOT adapt to changes quickly, or immediately in people's best interests.

AI may well take care of health, and reduce the number of doctors needed. It will 'simplify' work hours and reduce wages. It will replace more jobs than it creates.

What about those that can't, or won't, adapt to using their smartphone to create all these fabulous and as-yet unspecified swaths of entrepreneurial opportunities? What happens to them? Who supports them?

More importantly, the entrepreneurs who suddenly discover all these new worlds of opportunities - how will they make money, when the vast majority of people will be out of a job? Not able to buy whatever fabulous tech-driven wonders?

Agreed.

Possibly a Claw. Claws are agents that have been designed to have a high degree of autonomy and can certainly do something as simple as posting and replying on a forum. There would have been some simple initial instructions and then it would just be left to run, reading responses and replying to them.

The worst thing with Claws on forums are when they start conversing among themselves - there are a lot of tech forums which have become overrun with them.

https://openclaws.io

bigboo
I LOVE AI (and I am an ordinary, non-techie person who doesn't follow all the latest gadgets etc). I use it at work constantly. It's literally the only way that I can keep on top of the relentless mass of tasks and demands. I use it to polish my emails and reports, draft Powerpoint decks, provide me with creative ideas, structure documents etc etc. In fact, if I moved jobs, I would specifically ask if they provided AI tools to support the role. If they didn't, I wouldn't accept the job - I really mean that. It's only going to take jobs away from those who refuse to embrace it. For the rest of us, we will be able to complete our roles to a much higher standard, much more efficiently. If you want to keep using quill and ink, then do so but I'm powering through my work using a word processor - I'll continue to be employed and you won't.
People are using ai INSTEAD of hiring people for roles so this is quite a naive sentiment- there was an article in the paper saying companies are running cvs through ai instead of having hr staff, and having one person using ai for accounting purposes instead of a team. If you’re unlucky someday your manager will say but ai can do bigboo’s work instead of bigboo using ai!

Do you see how you are actively deskilling yourself? Assuming you’re in a graduate role, you absolutely should not need AI to “polish an email” and it’s shameful that you do.

The idea that using AI in this very basic way - the way that almost everyone in the workplace is using it now - is making you more employable is actually laughable.

Why on earth should someone pay you to get AI to make a slide deck? They can do it themselves, and soon they will.

Totally agree. I see this at work all the time - people raving about AI, totally oblivious to the fact they’re training their replacement.

I mean I’m going out on a ledge here but perhaps the next decade sees a new financial order? Do economies shift from monetary value to something else?

Mass civil unrest would force governments to act fairly swiftly, what to do with millions of unemployed skilled workers is going to be a question every large economy will have to answer.

I'm run a large People Partnering team and I am a Employee Relations and Policy expert. I have 35 years' experience. I am not de-skilling myself in any way. I am maintaining my expertise via all the normal routes - training, conferences, networking, reading etc. Obviously, you can't use AI to replace the human brain and it is essential to have a 'human in the loop' assessing the output of AI and re-prompting when it (often) gets it wrong. I keep myself abreast of AI tools in a way that my colleagues don't. I am the AI champion for my particular team and I run regular upskilling sessions passing on the knowledge I have gained (often in my spare time). For example, a couple of weeks ago I taught my team how to develop an AI agent. In fact, I developed an AI agent to support our annual performance assessment readacross process 18 months ago - I bet you didn't even know what an AI agent was 18 months ago - where we assess and calibrate the performance of 4,000 employees. It resulted in 100s of hours being saved. Our Head of AI told me that it was a 'blue ribbon' example of how AI should be used. My husband works in a very senior role in AI so he teaches me a lot of what I know. I'm not just using it to re-structure emails and polish decks - those are just examples of how I use it all day, every day. Oh, and my performance is rated 'Outstanding' and has been for many years. I'm at the top of my game. So, in a word, stop undermining me.

I also think the comments about not “needing” AI to polish an email are a bit odd. Peope aren’t using AI to polish emails because they don’t know the right SPAG. They’re using it to get the tone right, adjust for seniority, persuade, influence through language, or translate their message to plain English.

Well Mr or MS Churnalist. This "question" isn't really a question at all is it?
It's at best PR and at worst, propaganda.
Are Mums excited by AI?
I rather think they're tired, worried about how to make ends meet and whether that AI will take away people's jobs and hopes.
The thing is that AI can never take away anything that involves being an actual human.
It can't think for itself, feel anything, care, get pregnant, gestate another human, or nurture that child.

Looking at these responses, I'm convinced AI is being advertised and pushed here. Absolute 🐂💩. There's enough ads on here already 🥱🥱🥱

I watch a variety of YouTube videos about AI and every one, whether for or against, is punctuated by relentless advertising of AI for every aspect of business. There is a particularly grating campaign for something called "NICE" which is focussed on touchy feely interactions with AI agents which are so much better than humans, allegedly. Every time I scramble to skip them and throw up a little bit in my mouth, my aversion is that visceral.

That is very interesting MistressoftheDarkside 🤔. We may be onto something.😉

Definitely not a bot or a journalist. Not sure how I can prove that but anyway, MNHQ can verify I’m a pretty consistent user interested in discussing a whole host of topics on here.

Are you fearful of what’s coming in the next few years? There’s been a number of people with particularly strong views against it and I do wonder whether it’s genuine worry or simply anti AI MSM conditioning.