this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven't used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck us harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don't seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China. Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I'm a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like "delve"). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn't alive. It isn't even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don't worry, human toil isn't going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of "enhanced" products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn't the same as having power over other humans. We won't let computers make us all useless.
Thanks for easing my mind a little. You definetly did in perspective to labor.
You also reminded me I already had my first encounter with a callcenter AI by telekom and it was just as useless as the human equivalent, they seem to get similar training!
I just hope it won't hinder or replace interhuman connection on a larger scale cause in this sphere mediocrity might be enough and we are already lacking there.
The albeit small but present virtual girlfriend culture in Japan really shocked me and I feel we are not far away from things like AI-droid wives for example.