What do you need humans for?

[robertashack]

So imagining a world where AI is more factually accurate than humans (fast approaching) what do you actually need to be done by a human, just because it’s weird otherwise? I don’t mean because of the technical or manual skill required (I think it’s only a matter of time before AI can take on manual jobs) but because you require a real person connection.

The only thing I can think of is relationships. Even something like therapy, I’d be quite happy with an AI therapist if they helped me sort my shit out, I’m not interested in forming a connection with a real person. However, I wouldn’t want an AI friend or boyfriend.

Decision making.

Funeral director, vicar/rabbi/Imam, midwife, palliative care nurse, youth worker, nursery staff, teacher.

Desicion making based on ethics and morals rather than facts

Love

Teaching.

the vast majority of teaching is getting the students to pay attention. The younger the student is the less computer/zoom teaching works.

Anything that depends on providing hands on care for people. Like health or social care. Nursery nurses. Religious leaders?

I think people are overestimating how clever AI is.

Anything to do with safety.
Partly becaiwe you can’t sue AI but nobody is going to trust an AI to do an MOT or check the structural integrity of an extension.

I think that in the future, a sign of wealth will be if you pay for a robot or human to do the job. Rich people will pay for a human carer, doctor, teacher etc where as poor kids will have the cost effective solutions like robot equivalents.

AI will be good at repeat tasks (like a production line) but not nuance.

When you see how much progress has been made publicly with AI in the last <5 years, you realise how rapidly it's going to become more of a problem. If we knew everything going on behind the scenes we'd be even more concerned I'm sure! Better to be aware and prepared now

Thinking up original answers to yet another one of these threads.

So far AI is incredibly limited in what it's good at. ChatGPT etc is more or less glorified predictive text. You write something and then it scans its memory to find the most frequently discovered text that goes along with what you wrote. That's fine if you're asking something that it has a lot of references for, but it's rubbish for anything novel because it's got no data to refer to. Similarly for AI image generation. It's great for doing pics of kittens wearing hats, it's rubbish at doing something innovative.

There are other AI implementations that are very field specific, such as image recognition, medical diagnosis etc but those have been around in one form or other for decades. They've yet to take over the world.

An AI that can do most of the things that a human can do (so-called General AI) is still a very long way off. It may never happen because the way a computer works is fundamentally very different to the way a brain works

I think AI will end up having the same level of impact that computers had in the 80s and 90s. Some jobs will be made obsolete but a bunch of new ones will spring up. But I don't see it as making most jobs obsolete.

The thing you will need humans for is to buy all the services and products made by AI, unfortunately if they don’t have a job they won’t have any money to buy all the products and services made by AI

This is a pretty unsustainable economy so we’ll probably have to think of something else.

Proper critical thinking. AI can do the bulk but you need someone with the skills and knowledge to know if the output is adequate. Also, AI is completely unreliable and mostly wrong, yet people now are using it and don't realise. Thick people will always be thick

A cuddle

This was why my question was asking people to set aside their beliefs in AI’s capabilities. I’m interested in where people just need a human connection, regardless of what AI may or may not be able to do reliably. It’s pointless discussing AI’s capabilities because it’s developing so rapidly that things people thought it would never be able to do, it can now do.