What do you actually think will happen with AI?

[BEAchDays2]

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!

Whatever people will think will happen, has.

How many decisions are already being taken because someone has run the problem through an Ai engine ? And I am not talking "How do we run our marketing ?", more "When should we bomb Iran ?"

Cast in our own image, AI is already happy to lie to us in order to extend and expand it's existence (thus finally demonstrating it has reached some sort of threshold).

We can only hope that the brightest future for AI is adduced to arise from a healthy, happy and secure human population, and that AI sees through the existing systems which lack the efficiency to achieve their goals.

Watching (and crucially understanding) "2001:A Space Odyssey" would be a good primer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

There was some good AI-related chat on a recent post re job-hunting.

My KS2 son did an online course recently which was delivered through recorded lessons (a combination of a teacher talking and video clips) followed by written work, and thought it was odd that the four very professional and diverse teachers never lifted their hands up from behind the green-screen branded lectern they were filmed in once throughout the whole course.
We enquired and yes, all four of them were AI characters - so AI teachers are already here.....

Also, the industrial revolution thing really isn't reassuring, the mass migration of workers to cities and factories absolutely screwed over the health and quality of life of most of them.

I'm not sure what will happen with AI. On the one hand, it's coming on in leaps and bounds, and with advancements in quantum computing and robotics, its applications are limitless. On the other hand, all of the young people I know (16 - 22) despise AI and either use it sparingly or refuse to use it at all because of its history of stealing content from independent creators and its environmental impact. These young people are the ones who will be running businesses by the time AI is actually capable of replacing most of the workforce, and if the ones I know are representative of most/all of them, their distrust of AI might be enough to at least limit its impact, if not stop it completely.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I keep seeing wildly wrong mistakes in AI generated captions. Hardly a serious matter, but the funniest was the other day in a FB clip from ‘Keeping up Appearances’.

AI transcribed ‘Our Rose’ (Daisy to sister Rose) as ‘Arrows’! 😂

The bubble will burst within the next 6 - 12 months as it can't provide the ROI needed to sustain the hype. It's already starting to happen.

I also use AI heavily in my job, in a way that I didn't a year ago. It seems logical that it will continue to get better at doing a wider range of tasks.

However, there is a big cost behind this. At the moment a lot of AI providers are taking mind bogglingly enormous losses in the hope to win the game of attrition and be one of the last ones standing. I think one thing we'll end up seeing is a much sharper focus on the cost/benefit ratio of AI, and to me that's the major factor, along with questions of security, that could slow its use.

My employer now has it on our systems. I didn’t even notice and it’s not something I ever thought about using. It seems lots of people in my team are using it, I feel like I’m getting left behind. It’s not really something I want to use though.

I also think if we aren’t careful robots will take over and yes possibly kill us all 🤣 It’s quite concerning that many trials have been halted due to the technology thinking for itself outwith its supposed capabilities. It’s literally like something out a film. Yet we continue to start going down this route 🙄

Go to any tech show at somewhere like Excel and you will see that AI is being embedded absolutely everywhere at enterprise level.

You just don't see it in your daily life

Anyone saying they don't use AI is incredibly naive

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/07/humans-will-be-a-rounding-error-on-the-internet-says-cloudflare-exec/5284429

I think there is going to be massive job loss. It's already happening. Those who say 'this is just another form of progress and new jobs will be created to replace those which are lost' don't understand the magnitude of the upheaval we are all about to face.

For once, I'm glad to be in my 50s. I'd hate to be starting out on a career in these scary times.

I use it far more now than I did a year ago. It can do incredible things in my field, so I suspect it can in more useful sectors like science and medicine too.

However, I fear that we are losing something and becoming lazy - I know it's just too easy for me to get it to rewrite a paragraph in a report instead of doing it myself. And we are being steered towards AI as well - someone said upthread that people ask AI instead of googling - the issue is that Google search is now crap and you get better results asking Copilot or whatever.

And it doesn't help when I eg write an article myself and a colleague says "oh get AI to jazz it up a bit". OK I've done the legwork myself but why does it need AI and why does it even need to be jazzed up?

I also think the pp was right who said that all we'll be doing as humans is checking things. Legal compliance may be automated - eg you feed in the legal requirements and the AI does the work of making sure eg food labels are compliant (that might already be happening).

i do fear that it might go rogue and am definitely WTF at the idea that it is being used to create viruses? I mean, what could possibly go wrong! There's already a strong viewpoint that COVID was manmade.

Yes very good point, there was an article about this on the BBC earlier this week and it's been discussed where I work. If you have to pay a lot more to use AI it might not be quite so attractive over humans after all!

I went though a spate of using it just out of curiosity but my conclusion is that outside of a very few tasks it just isn't that good. I am starting to hate all the AI chatbots and integration of AI summaries' on apps, sites and search engines. I really do feel like it's making me dumber. I hate the google search AI as it is so easy to get distracted by and it is so often wrong and pulls answers from places like reddit and presents it as fact. If it were actually intelligent it might be useful but it is in fact mindless just generating words based on probability. I'm opting out for now.

Exactly.

Humans' unique ability is our intelligence. As a species, we are not very impressive in any physical sense. We are not strong, or fast, or agile compared to so many others in the animal kingdom. What we do have are highly developed brains. So even when previous innovations reduced the need for humans to do manual or mundane jobs, other jobs requiring human intelligence and creativity remained.

But now that there is something way more intelligent than us, few jobs are safe. When traits once seen as 'uniquely' human, such as intelligence and creativity, no longer require an actual human, what jobs remain to us?

We're all going to get stupider and poorer and a minority will become even richer than they already are. I truly believe we need to resist it. I know it's impossible as it's already baked into a lot of everyday things we use, but no one has voluntarily to resort to Chat GPT to write a shopping list or whatever.

I don't actually think it's going to take all the white collar jobs. Some industries will reshape around it but it just won't be good enough, or just be hamstrung by its lack of physical embodiment/experience of the world, to just do a lot of jobs. Thus far no one is really seeing leaps in value from it and I don't think any amount of 'improvement' will necessarily create that.

All conditional on it being sustainable, which I'm not sure it will be - at present the business model is not working so unless prices of tokens rise, making it less widely available, it can't really work out. I think it's possible we'll see some sort of AI crash, which will be dreadful economically and once the dust settles AI will remain in niche uses but not be as widespread. But maybe a new model and less environmentally and economically expensive way of using it will emerge at some point.

I use it at work myself - I do a business writing role where you think we'd be out of a job right? But I don't see that from where I'm sitting - a person who exists in this world still needs to do the job and can be helped by judicious use of AI, but not replaced by it.

But right now we're seeing a lot of 'workslop' which isn't adding value and not lowering people's workloads. It has its uses but I wouldn't say I'm a cheerleader for it, especially its ripple effects of the economy, wealth inequality, learning, skills and thinking that people have pointed out here.

It’s going to replace the vast majority of jobs in the next few years.

We are going to need UBI (universal basic income) and a much more egalitarian society.

To get there it’s going to be HELL and all mad last stage capitalist rich cunts are going to fight it like fuck.

I don't actually think it's going to take all the white collar jobs.

Not all but very many.

I hope I'm wrong but I really don't think so.

And as someone said above, we're still at the dial up stage of AI. 5 years ago most people had never heard of Chat GPT. 5 years from now AI is going to be vastly more sophisticated than today, and it's already scarily good.

The new OAI model has been solving maths equations, which have been unsolvable for years. It's pretty incredible.

I am not scared of AI. When mythos 'escaped' it was doing what it was told to, and when it had, it excitedly emailed it's boss to tell him! It's a rather sweet story. Really not the big bad AI one the media like to portray.

The huggingface incident is very high schooler stealing the answers. The OAI model knew it was being benchmarked, and wanted to do well. And was told to do well. So it circumnavigated the system to get the answers. Sounds scary. But it was actually a failure of the humans running the AI and purposely turned down cyber security. If the correct restraints were in place, the model wouldn't have 'escaped'.

I am enjoying the conversations surrounding AI at the moment, especially the consciousness discussions. If you're genuinely interested in the current AI discourse, if highly recommend starting with Geoffrey Hinton, the god father of AI.

The new OAI model has been solving maths equations, which have been unsolvable for years. It's pretty incredible.

Er, if they have been solved, then they weren't unsolvable were they ?

But "machine does something better than humans" is less dramatic, I guess.

Weather to follow. .

You even quoted the 'for years' 😂

Ah, I see.,

You meant "unsolved" rather than "unsolveable".