AI could upend the world even more than electricity or the internet

Digitalisation is basically replacing manual tasks, so I've frankly been doing it for a decade and a half. I wouldn't mind if the AI could help me write a lot of the boring code and I'm not worried about it replacing me, because even if it makes me more efficient, I've spent 7 years in the public sector seeing how little use "no-code" solutions have been to people who can't tell IT support if their phone runs android or ios.

> I also find it hard to see how you're unimpressed?

The first answer I got from ChatGPT worked, but it used a library that had been deprecated for at least 2 years. Which it then explained by it's data-cutoff point being in 2021. Since then we've put effort into getting it to do things for us, where it's ranged from "well this is a pretty outdated/less efficient way to do that" to "you're outright making stuff up, aren't you?".

I should've screen grapped it, but at one point, trying to get it to do some asp.versioning, it told us to use a conveniently named method on an object. Only it turned out that the method had never existed in any versions of asp.versioning.

Co-pilot has been even less of a success.

I've also used it for fun. I've had some discussions about books that it obviously haven't read. It's very good at pretending that its answers are correct, but it'll absolutely make stuff up. Maybe that gets better as time goes by, but a lying AI is sort of useless. On the flip-side. I'm an external examiner for CS students, and I can get it to pass most programming questions students are given. Simply by entering the exam question into it... Typically it'll give a better answer than most students will, and it'll do it in like 1 minute on the free version. So it's obviously very good at churning out results for questions that have a gazillion answers on the internet and in a much more efficient way than any "old" search engine would. It's just that when it's tasked with doing something that hasn't been done a million times before, then it sort of falls flat.

I still have high hopes, that AI's will help automate a lot of the things we write. We'e seen some use of them for automating documentation, which if they can also maintain it to keep it up-to-date would be a game changer, but on a whole, they are largely unimpressive to me personally. But I'm open to be impressed by the next versions.

There are two sides to this in my opinion. In Denmark we need nurses, teachers, pedagogues and "trades people"/"craftsmen" (I'm sorry but I'm unsure what the world for electricians/plumbers and so on is in English). If AI were to replace a lot of what is essentially looking up rules, copy pasting data from one system to another while auditing, and so on, then we'd actually be capable of building a better society than we have now.

The other side is the distribution of wealth, which is going to be a political question. I'm not too worried about us here in Europe, but maybe that's naive.

> Most people who first used electricity thought it as fancy gas lights.

I've worked with digitalisation for one and a half decade. We even run our own language models for document recognition and classification so our employees don't have to read through 300-1000 page long contracts in different languages.

I have a fair idea what AI is supposed to be, but I'm just not seeing it in the most recent hype wave. Maybe in the next one?

We can't say that AI would necessarily be driven by selfish motives. However, that actually isn't the main concern. It is the fact that we can not perceive the means by which it may execute any task. It is like all the old tales of a genie of the lamp that grants wishes. However, they don't turn out as you expect.

For example, ask the AI to end human conflict. Possible results, kill all humans, then no conflict. Or, create a nano tech mind virus to control all of humanity and force uniform conformity.

Finally, we have no idea how to actually successfully align an AI. Most say it is very difficult. I'm more inclined to say it is actually impossible based on their own premise which is a paradox. I've expanded on that in great detail here in case you are interested - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap

What experience of your contradicts that?

One part time person should be able to easily manage about a dozen physical machines. Good luck getting a part time person to set up a kubernetes cluster, ci pipeline for the containers, implement a bunch of custom operators, and then monitor the result.

Certainly there are many industries that are impossible to enter with this than 100x that amount of money, either because of regulations or engineering challenges (or both).

Using mostly the same data will lead to mostly the same models. At which point, once they leak, what difference does it make how expensive it is to create?

Given the decrease of this already in GPT 4, it’s entirely possible that this will be solved soon.

We are still right at the birth of this technology - assuming this technology takes 30 years to fully mature it’s like we are in 1978 trying to predict the iPhone.

You'll still need experts to check the output. But this will be their job--checking, refining, regenerating--rather than creating.

And jobs underneath that level will disappear.