Posted on 05/24/2024 5:37:58 AM PDT by Lazamataz
I'm deeply involved in AI in my current company. While it is not my described role, I feel it is stupid to wait to be assigned a task. I feel it is best to see an opportunity, and seize it. Therefore, I am now my division's AI Advocate.
I recently put together a use-case, ensured it worked, and made it available to the company. During a town hall, I continuously mentioned the use case (in the chat) and got well over 25 requests for more information.
The use-case is how to record a Zoom meeting, how to create a transcript for it, and how to have our in-house AI create summaries of the meeting. It works, and works well, so I produced an instructional video on how to accomplish it. I was noticed by the Associate VP in charge of AI Engineering. I suspect I will transition to his team sometime in 2025.
All this has got me thinking: How will AI transform society? Here are my current predictions.
I also see a long-term extremely dangerous trend: Vast increases in human incompetence. As people are replaced by AI and robotics, how can they hope to retain their skillset in their chosen profession? If there are far fewer software engineers, who will be able to truly assess and proof AI-generated code? If robotic units take over such things as plumbing or welding, how can humans hope to retain skills in these practices? What happens if AI quits on us, and we have billions of people who no longer have the skill to perform their formerly-chosen profession?
I am not considering Superintelligent AI in these predictions. Upon the advent of ASI, all bets are off and we have zero idea how that will unfold.
There is also this angle, explored by other professionals in the AI field: When most jobs are gone, what is our purpose? They call it the Crisis of Meaning.
AI brings a type of post-labor world. They go hand in hand.
AIs also train themselves and end up creating their own environments.
Wasn't that a Grace Jones song?
I disagree. We have had "prompt engineering" in one form or another since computers started using non-machine language for code, such as Fortran, Cobol, C, SQL, Java, etc.
All of these "high level" programming languages are translated into machine code which a target computer can run, by the computer itself.
And in the case of Java, machine language can be generated on the fly while a program is running to optimize its performance.
We assume, for ourselves, that we are capable of original thought. But the most creative things we have done have always been variations of existing work.
Lord of the Rings is a re-working of the Catholic faith into secular symbolism, mixed in with Norse myths and political commentary on socialism.
Very well done, inspired even. But it was not original in the sense that Tolkien made it out of nothing.
That written specification, for the system I work on, would be about the size of the novel "War and Peace."
Someone has to do the specifications, and it is best if a person versed in software engineering does it.
Good prediction. A post-labor world, however, requires a Universal Basic Income.
Can you please give an AI101 summary on AI choices? I have played with a couple but don’t really know my choices and why I would use one over another. I read about people using some for videos, pictures, text, and so forth. So, what are the choices, what are each best at? THANKS!
I think that is a topic for another thread... but as I am actually becoming a groundbreaker for AI in my company, I may be well-suited to address this.
I won’t get credit for being correct.
The only thing I can take with me is other people.
I don’t think there will be people who just code. Coding will be just a part of a bigger job, such as business analyst, or Subject Matter Expert.
Just as today, a lot of things programmers were required for in the past, can be done with an Excel Spreadsheet. A lot of jobs these days require proficiency with Excel.
I still have to develop a thread on the impacts of AI to the creative arts.
My understanding is that it is agreed upon that AI cannot absolutely replace human intelligence. At least not yet. We can’t presume it won’t eventually. I mean, it does know how to lie. :) Maybe it will go after your girl too. :)
But it reduces the work that you’ll have to do, which will reduce the number of people in your industry at the lower end where there is less creative work going on. The work that is basically drone work, it will learn to do.
You won’t have those thirty in your area doing checklists, because AI will be doing the checklists flawlessly, or flawlessly enough that one guy will be needed to double check everything.
It just cannot yet replace the higher end of the creativity ability in your industry.
So, as you've already shared, I think there will be a strong demand for the "AI Whisperers", as you called them. My addendum to the prediction might be the creation of an AI Fact Checker. This would be a paid researcher/editor who verifies and tests the content output. For example, AI compiled decent open source info on my father's historic legal achievements, but with major inaccuracies that were spotted by me only because I was his son. This scares me as history can be further rewritten (or erased) and new generations would never know any better. (Of course, a coded fix to this might be the best solution through producing a data output option of notated references.)
You will with me.
Absolutely true!
Humans seem incapable of creating anything that is not the result of jumbling together previously known things.
I follow the latest developments in AI fairly closely, and think you’re overestimating the speed with which our enormous economy can be turned. It won’t be 5 years, but maybe 10 and surely 20 to get most everything thoroughly changed. Though it is astounding how fast things are changing.
Still remember telling friends and family in the late 90s that I’d never live anywhere without “high speed “ internet. They were like “what’s the internet?”
The world is changing quick.
F-no.
With UBI, they can reduce your income on the spot when you are insufficiently compliant to the state. They are setting things up to make things so miserable that you will remove your genes from the gene pool until we get to a billion people.
The mad dash to become the AI king of the hill is on. Prompt engineers have been earning $400k, but that is changing.
The UBI becomes a phase, too, as criteria for who gets what is in play now.
I’ve discovered, in AI Whispering, that context is everything. The more context you give it, the better the results. I’ve also discovered a Magic Word when getting AI to deliver coding results. It stops at a point. Simply say “Continue” and it will deliver more of the code. Rinse and repeat.
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