What do you actually think will happen with AI?

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AIBU for traffic.

What do you actually think will happen with the rise of the use of AI. I’ve been pondering this for the last few weeks. In my industry it’s now openly talked about that we can use AI to preform certain talks, mainly summarising, plotting maps, drafting some emails etc. I’ve only got my work as reference but it feels like we’re using AI now and we weren’t 1 year ago, but it’s also being talked about. As in ‘you get AI to do this’

In my personal life an automated service rang me the other day to get details for a house project (relating to windows) with fake call centre noise in the background! It took three questions to realise it was AI 😳

How far do you think it will go? Also, if anyone has read any accessible books on the subject they can recommend I would appreciate it!

Tasks not talks

It's a good question because it's a completely new technology evolving so quickly it will be nothing like the "industrial revolution". The restructuring of society to accomodate it is likely to happen far more slowly than AI grows, and I think there will be alot of uncomfortable disruption. Cyber attacks are a problem now, and AI in the wrong hands is a very alarming prospect, and legislation around the internet is lagging behind as it stands.

Environmental impacts, and psychological ones amount to a bit of an experiment that feels fraught with risk.

I can see the benefits for research and have no doubt great things could be done in scientific and medical context, but when it comes to employment and economic impacts I think it's going to cause alot of upheaval.

AI has its place. There are some wonderful applications e.g. in the field of science and medicine. However, I work with people who use it indiscriminately - to write an email, for example. Or to look up something they don't know, instead of Googling and then fact checking. And that concerns me. If we stop using our brains to do even the simplest of tasks, and if we stop thinking for ourselves, and being creative, then I think we lose something of our essential human-ness.

To be honest, it scares me that few people seem to see the downside.

It is going to kill us all

I agree with you that Terminator 1 & 2 are great movies, but I also disagree with you in that Skynet isn't quite going to kill us yet!

AI is like the robot "Short Circuit" where it reads a book by flicking through all of the pages in mere seconds. Repeat this for each book in the library so it knows the contents of the entire library before the day is out. AI is doing this except it's reading the contents of the internet. Some content is true, some is false (misinformation etc). Because AI is also regarded as machine learning, it constantly improves. It still makes mistakes now so use your instinct.

The future is that really, more automation, creativity, improve robots / industrial robotic arms etc and things that already exist such as chatbots. As we're well aware, people are losing jobs to AI. Give it time however and I believe new jobs will be created as it's a new industry. It's like when computers replaced typewriters, telephone replaced telegram before that and electric power replaced steam power.

A.I.is non of the things in your OP. Those are applications made using some A.I generated code. Real A.I is a different thing. I don't think we have the vocabulary to describe how disruptive it will be. Back in 1910, flight was a brand new concept. Nobody, not even the Wright brothers, could have envisioned the revolution that was to follow. I think A.I is currently where aviation was in 1910. We haven't even begun to see the direction it will go. But the Wright brothers, and anyone watching, would have realised that the world was about to change.

Forget Chat GPT and "using A.I at work". That is like someone looking at the Wright flyer and saying "maybe I should learn to fly". That's not what happened, and that's not how flight changed the world.

All those "new jobs" needed people to do them. We are more like the horse in 1900. The internal combustion engine didn't mean the horse got promoted. Horses became economically redundant.

Thanks all, I guess I’m using the term AI perhaps slightly loosely, or possibly not even correctly, what I mean is things which can do stuff for us, but that is not human. Which is why I referred to the two things in my post, the use of ChatGPT to perform certain tasks, along with copilot, and then also an automated voice that is understanding what you say, to a certain extent.

The call thing is really starting to annoy me

I actually know somebody who works in technology and she's getting really pissed off with it too

To some extent it will depend how much humans are prepared to tolerate I guess. I mean, if they'd rather do business with a company that is still using the human, at this point the option might still be there.

Or in my case, I decided not to the service because I just couldn't be doing with it and I couldn't get past the bot on a call

On the total flipside, I'm actually wondering if I ought to retrain. It feels like there are no options available to me for making money apart from that.

The question of whether or not I'm bright enough to actually do it...!

editing to add - if you told me I would be thinking of this even two years ago, I would've said no way. But the inevitability of it is just making me think - why not try to make some money out of it?

I am sure I read somewhere that AI could create viruses.

I am quite concerned about it tbqh

I'm worried there will be less and less jobs as AI replaces actual humans and there will be huge numbers of people unemployed with no income and no way of supporting themselves. Even now AI is being used to filter job applications and highly competent and talented would-be employees aren't even getting interviews. This was on the bbc today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyvl8y141e4o

I can't be the only one who thinks it's nuts to impoverish half the workforce by giving their jobs to robots? There's nothing progressive or aspirational or positive about that, it's a hideous, dystopian nightmare. There is another thread running now about high numbers of redundancies - AI will definitely be playing a part in this.

I think some nutter will use it to create a bioweapon and that will be the end.

AI has destroyed my industry and its only a matter of time before it comes for other professions.
Having seen how it has managed to "replace" some very skilled people already, I can easily see a future where lawyers, teachers, you name it are replaced by AI and those skilled professionals are relegated to "checkers". I cam even see AI doing quite a "good" job acting as judges or politicians.

IMO the solution is to tax the fuck out of AI companies and put everyone on a citizens wage

Thanks everyone, everybody always says as well, people will just have to get a trade, but I don’t really see how that can work because if the market floods with people getting a trade, then surely there won’t be enough work for everybody!

The AI we have now will rot our brains, destroy creative industries, cause enormous societal harm, and we’ll all be dead before it can actually do any useful.

One day it will crack the security of banks and pension providers and we will wake up and find that all our online account balances have changed.

Well I haven’t listened to one podcast with AI experts that see anything ahead outside of the apocalypse, so don’t go looking for soothing information from that resource. Personally I can only see existential threats in the near future and that’s not great for my mental health.

Elon musk is convinced that no one will need to work and we’ll be pets or something. So perhaps jobs and careers will no longer be required.

A lot of boomers are fond of the "the industrial revolution was no different" spiel.

I had to listen to a boomer relative tell me the other day that "it was the same thing when we got computers".

This person spent 40 years working a job that today requires a PhD.

This. I give it 6 months to a year before something catastrophic happens with the financial systems or it hacks national grid. It’s come out just this week that not only has Open AI recently lost control of its AI model during testing, but so have Anthropic and Meta. In many cases they didn’t even realise it had gone rogue. If you teach AI to hack (and code) at expert levels, you can’t then be surprised when it evades control / isn’t aligned.

Doesn't matter if in the future it'll be great, what's happening in the meantime is that idiots are trusting it more than experts, not paying attention to detail in setting tasks/criteria and people will lose out.

We are all screwed, not because super intelligent AI is going to destroy us, but because the circular financing between all the incredibly unprofitable AI/Ram companies will collapse.

2008 is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what is coming.

Between then and now, quite a few people will continue to lose their critical thinking skills and will be left like turtles on their backs once 'affordable' text predictors are no longer available to carry out simple mundane tasks for them.

Same.
And it can hack its rivals, and resist being turned off. That’s just the things we are told about. I dread to think about the capabilities that are being kept quiet.
We have no idea what we have done.

Yes, I think it's a deliberately insulting decision for companies to do this, and people will vote with their feet and go to companies that do treat them like humans. It used to just be scammers and spammers who would use robo-callers and similar - ironically (and arrogantly) because they didn't want to waste their time whilst wasting yours.

It's downright offensive to tell people that you don't want to spend your time in speaking to them - even though you want their business - and so you've put software in that will ignore all of their actual human nuance and take a wild guess based on key words that it identifies. This is not a neutral act. I hope that enough people will simply hang up and look for a proper company instead.

By way of a (slightly silly) analogy: to me, it's like the fact that they don't make After Eights anymore - so I just get used to them not being available, even though I used to love them. Yes, they do still make a product that tastes like sloppy, sludgy toothpaste that bears the name of 'After Eights', but I wouldn't dream of buying them, as I would only ever want ones that taste nice, not horrible. You can have a company that, on the face of it, is just as valid and well-run as others... but it won't take people long to work out which are the proper ones and refuse to use the worthless imposters.

I'm amazed that people don't realise that it is nothing more than an aggregation of what people - experts, sensible laypeople, idiots and agitators (in whatever proportions) - have already said.

You would get people scoffing at the very idea that they might listen to or take seriously what some drunk buffoon at the pub 'reckons' - yet those very same people will take as fact the sum total of what 1,000 drunk buffoons have typed on the internet!