US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.
In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that “experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public” and “far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years” (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).
The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that “they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life.” They’re much more likely (51 percent) to say they’re more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.
https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_of_voice#demo
Try this voice AI demo on your phone, then imagine if it can create images and video.
This in my opinion changes every system of information gathering that we have, and will usher in an era of geniuses, who grew up with access to the answer to their every question in a granular pictorial video response. If you want to for example learn how white blood cells work it gives you ask your chatbot for a video, and you can then tell it to put in different types of bacteria to see the response. Its going to make a lot of systems we have now obsolete.
This presume trust in its accuracy.
A very high bar.
Removing the need to do any research is just removing another exercise for the brain. Perfectly crafted AI educational videos might be closer to mental junk food than anything.
It is mental junk food, its addictive, which is why I think it will be so effective. If you can make learning addictive then its bound to raise the average global IQ.
Same was said about calculators.
I don’t disagree though. Calculators are pretty discrete and the functions well defined.
Assuming AI can be trusted to be accurate at some point, your will reduce cognitive load that can be utilized for even higher thinking.
you can’t learn from chatbots though. how can you trust that the material is accurate? any time I’ve asked a chatbot about subject matter that I’m well versed in, they make massive mistakes.
All you’re proving is “we can learn badly faster!” or worse, we can spread misinformation faster.
remember when tech companies did fun events with actual interesting things instead of spending three hours on some new stupid ai feature?
Depends on what we mean by “AI”.
Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
LLMs and the like? Yeah I’m not sure how positive these are. I don’t think they’ve actually been all that impactful so far.
Once we have true machine intelligence, then we have the potential for great improvements in daily life and society, but that entirely depends on how it will be used.
It could be a bridge to post-scarcity, but under capitalism it’s much more likely it will erode the working class further and exacerbate inequality.
Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
Machine learning is just large automated optimization, something that was done for many decades before, but the hardware finally reached a power-point where the automated searches started out-performing more informed selective searches.
The same way that AlphaZero got better at chess than Deep Blue - it just steam-rollered the problem with raw power.
As long as open source AI keeps up (it has so far) it’ll enable technocommunism as much as it enables rampant capitalism.
I considered this, and I think it depends mostly on ownership and means of production.
Even in the scenario where everyone has access to superhuman models, that would still lead to labor being devalued. When combined with robotics and other forms of automation, the capitalist class will no longer need workers, and large parts of the economy would disappear. That would create a two tiered society, where those with resources become incredibly wealthy and powerful, and those without have no ability to do much of anything, and would likely revert to an agricultural society (assuming access to land), or just propped up with something like UBI.
Basically, I don’t see how it would lead to any form of communism on its own. It would still require a revolution. That being said, I do think AGI could absolutely be a pillar of a post capitalist utopia, I just don’t think it will do much to get us there.
It will only help us get there in the hands of individuals and collectives. It will not get us there, and will be used to the opposite effect, in the hands of the 1%.
or just propped up with something like UBI.
That depends entirely on how much UBI is provided.
I envision a “simple” taxation system with UBI + flat tax. You adjust the flat tax high enough to get the government services you need (infrastructure like roads, education, police/military, and UBI), and you adjust the UBI up enough to keep the wealthy from running away with the show.
Marshall Brain envisioned an “open source” based property system that’s not far off from UBI: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
It would still require a revolution.
I would like to believe that we could have a gradual transition without the revolution being needed, but… present political developments make revolution seem more likely.
People aren’t very smart, have trouble understanding new things and fear change - of course they express negative options.
Most Americans would have said the sama about electricity, computers, the internet, mobile phones…
I do as a software engineer. The fad will collapse. Software engineering hiring will increase but the pipeline of new engineers will is dry because no one wants to enter the career with companies hanging ai over everyone’s heads. Basic supply and demand says my skillset will become more valuable.
Someone will need to clean up the ai slop. I’ve already had similar pistons where I was brought into clean up code bases that failed being outsourced.
Ai is simply the next iteration. The problem is always the same business doesn’t know what they really want and need and have no ability to assess what has been delivered.
If it walks and quacks like a speculative bubble…
I’m working in an organization that has been exploring LLMs for quite a while now, and at least on the surface, it looks like we might have some use cases where AI could prove useful. But so far, in terms of concrete results, we’ve gotten bupkis.
And most firms I’ve encountered don’t even have potential uses, they’re just doing buzzword engineering. I’d say it’s more like the “put blockchain into everything” fad than like outsourcing, which was a bad idea for entirely different reasons.
I’m not saying AI will never have uses. But as it’s currently implemented, I’ve seen no use of it that makes a compelling business case.
A complete random story but, I’m on the AI team at my company. However, I do infrastructure/application rather than the AI stuff. First off, I had to convince my company to move our data scientist to this team. They had him doing DevOps work (complete mismanagement of resources). Also, the work I was doing was SO unsatisfying with AI. We weren’t tweaking any models. We were just shoving shit to ChatGPT. Now it was be interesting if you’re doing RAG stuff maybe or other things. However, I was “crafting” my prompt and I could not give a shit less about writing a perfect prompt. I’m typically used to coding what I want but I had to find out how to write it properly: “please don’t format it like X”. Like I wasn’t using AI to write code, it was a service endpoint.
During lunch with the AI team, they keep saying things like “we only have 10 years left at most”. I was like, “but if you have AI spit out this code, if something goes wrong … don’t you need us to look into it?” they were like, “yeah but what if it can tell you exactly what the code is doing”. I’m like, “but who’s going to understand what it’s saying …?” “no, it can explain the type of problem to anyone”.
I said, I feel like I’m talking to a libertarian right now. Every response seems to be some solution that doesn’t exist.
I too am a developer and I am sure you will agree that while the overall intelligence of models continues to rise, without a concerted focus on enhancing logic, the promise of AGI likely will remain elusive. AI cannot really develop without the logic being dramatically improved, yet logic is rather stagnant even in the latest reasoning models when it comes to coding at least.
I would argue that if we had much better logic with all other metrics being the same, we would have AGI now and developer jobs would be at risk. Given the lack of discussion about the logic gaps, I do not foresee AGI arriving anytime soon even with bigger a bigger models coming.
If we had AGI, the number of jobs that would be at risk would be enormous. But these LLMs aren’t it.
They are language models and until someone can replace that second L with Logic, no amount of layering is going to get us there.
Those layers are basically all the previous AI techniques laid over the top of an LLM but anyone that has a basic understanding of languages can tell you how illogical they are.
AI can look at a bajillion examples of code and spit out its own derivative impersonation of that code.
AI isn’t good at doing a lot of other things software engineers actually do. It isn’t very good at attending meetings, gathering requirements, managing projects, writing documentation for highly-industry-specific products and features that have never existed before, working user tickets, etc.
I work in an environment where we’re dealing with high volumes of data, but not like a few meg each for millions of users. More like a few hundred TB fed into multiple pipelines for different kinds of analysis and reduction.
There’s a shit-ton of prior art for how to scale up relatively simple web apps to support mass adoption. But there’s next to nothing about how do to what we do, because hardly anyone does. So look ma, no training set!
It should. We should have radically different lives today because of technology. But greed keeps us in the shit.
Maybe that’s because every time a new AI feature rolls out, the product it’s improving gets substantially worse.
Maybe that’s because they’re using AI to replace people, and the AI does a worse job.
Meanwhile, the people are also out of work.
Lose - Lose.
It didn’t even need to take someone’s job. A summary of an article or paper with hallucinated information isn’t replacing anyone, but it’s definitely making search results worse.
Even if you’re not “out of work”, your work becomes more chaotic and less fulfilling in the name of productivity.
When I started 20 years ago, you could round out a long day with a few hours of mindless data entry or whatever. Not anymore.
A few years ago I could talk to people or maybe even write a nice email communicating a complex topic. Now chatGPT writes the email and I check it.
It’s just shit honestly. I’d rather weave baskets and die at 40 years old of a tooth infection than spend an additional 30 years wallowing in self loathing and despair.
The first thing seen at the top of WhatsApp now is an AI query bar. Who the fuck needs anything related to AI on WhatsApp?
Android Messages and Facebook Messenger also pushed in AI as ‘something you can chat with’
I’m not here to talk to your fucking chatbot I’m here to talk to my friends and family.
It’s easier to up-sell and cross-sell if you’re talking to an AI.
Who the fuck needs
anything related to AI onWhatsApp?Lots of people. I need it because it’s how my clients at work prefer to communicate with me, also how all my family members and friends communicate.
Right?! It’s literally just a messenger, honestly, all I expect from it is that it’s an easy and reliable way of sending messages to my contacts. Anything else is questionable.
Experts are working from their perspective, which involves being employed to know the details of how the AI works and the potential benefits. They are invested in it being successful as well, since they spent the time gaining that expertise. I would guess a number of them work in fields that are not easily visible to the public, and use AI systems in ways the public never will because they are focused on things like pattern recognition on virii or idendifying locations to excavate for archeology that always end with a human verifying the results. They use AI as a tool and see the indirect benefits.
The general public’s experience is being told AI is a magic box that will be smarter than the average person, has made some flashy images and sounds more like a person than previous automated voice things. They see it spit out a bunch of incorrect or incoherent answers, because they are using it the way it was promoted, as actually intelligent. They also see this unreliable tech being jammed into things that worked previously, and the negative outcome of the hype not meeting the promises. They reject it because how it is being pushed onto the public is not meeting their expectations based on advertising.
That is before the public is being told that AI will drive people out of their jobs, which is doubly insulting when it does a shitty job of replacing people. It is a tool, not a replacement.
Most people in the early 90’s didn’t have or think they needed a computer.
80’s. 80’s we had apple iis, commodores, tandys, ibm pcs, etc. 90’s it was cell phones
I’m not saying people didn’t have them at all. Majority of families absolutely did not until the very late 90s. Many more people use AI now than had computers back then.
How did those barbarians sit on the toilet without memes to scroll?
That was the job of reader’s digest.
I thought Reader’s Digest was for when the roll ran out.
And if you’re desperate, the back of a shampoo bottle
AI has it’s place, but they need to stop trying to shoehorn it into anything and everything. It’s the new “internet of things” cramming of internet connectivity into shit that doesn’t need it.
You’re saying the addition of Copilot into MS Paint is anything short of revolutionary? You heretic.
Now your smart fridge can propose unpalatable recipes. Woo fucking hoo.
New technologies are not the issue. The problem is billionaires will fuck it up because they can’t control their insatiable fucking greed.
AI does improve our lives. Saying it doesn’t is borderline delusional.
Can you give some examples that I unknowingly use and improves my life?
Translations apps would be the main one for LLM tech, LLMs largely came out of google’s research into machine translation.
Every technology shift creates winners and losers.
There’s already documented harm from algorithms making callous biased decisions that ruin people’s lives - an example is automated insurance claim rejections.
We know that AI is going to bring algorithmic decisions into many new places where it can do harm. AI adoption is currently on track to get to those places well before the most important harm reduction solutions are mature.
We should take care that we do not gaslight people who will be harmed by this trend, by telling them they are better off.
So far AI has only aggravated me by interrupting my own online activities.
First thing I do is disable it
I wish it was optional. When I do a search, the AI response is right at the top. If I want AI advice, I’ll go ask AI. I don’t use a search engine to get answers from AI!
I imagine you could filter it with uBlock right?
Or switch search engines.
I use it at work side-by-side with searches for debugging app issues.
