If everyone in the West has powerful AI and Agents to automate everything. Simply because we can afford it, but the rest of the world doesn't have access to it.
What will that mean for everyone left behind?
I speak to kids that use LLMs all the time to assist them with their school work, and others who simply have no knowledge that this tech exists.
I work with UK learners by the way.
Basically they had to adapt a novel to a comic book form — by using AI to generate pencil drawings, they achieved the goal of the assignment (demonstrating understanding of the story) without having the computer just do their homework.
The point is, AI is here, and it can be a net positive if schools can use it like a calculator vs a black market. It’s a private school with access to some alumni money for development work - they used this to justify investing in designing assignments that make AI a complement to learning.
For example, I read a philosopher saying "truth is a relation between thought and reality". Asking ChatGPT to knock it revealed that statement is an expression of the "correspondence theory" of truth, but that there is also the "coherence theory" of truth that is different, and that there is a laundry list of other takes too.
Now, whether the labor provided by the AI will be as high-quality as that provided by a human when placed in an actual business environment will be up in the air. Probably not, but adoption will be pushed by the sunk cost fallacy.
The decreased employment case is when your competitors get the productivity and you don't, because you go out of business.
I’ve seen it be a minor productivity boost, and not much more.
it's turning 5 positions into 7: 5 people to do what currently needs to get done, 2 to try to replace those 5 with AI and failing for several years.
The situation now is kinda like back when it was possible to be “good at Google” and lots of people, including in tech, weren’t. It’s possible to be good at LLMs, and not a lot of people are.
They’re ok for Tom the Section Manager to hack together a department newsletter nobody reads, though, even if Tom is bad at using LLMs. They’re decent at things that don’t need to be any good because they didn’t need to exist in the first place, lol.
Nah, if the last 10-20 years demonstrated something, it's that nothing needs to be any good, because a shitty simulacrum achieves almost the same effect but costs much less time and money to produce.
(Ironically, SOTA LLMs are already way better at writing than typical person writing stuff for money.)
I’m aware of multiple companies that would love to know about these, because they’re currently flailing around trying to replace writers with editors + LLMs and it’s not going great. The closest to success are the ones that are only aiming to turn out stuff one step better than outright book-spam, and even they aren’t quite where they want to be, hardly a productivity bump at all from the LLM use and increased demand on their few talented humans.
It's from Alibaba, which is Chinese, so it seems likely.
We don't have a post-cold war era response akin to the kind of US led investment in a global pact to provide protection, security, and access to innovation founded in the United States. We really need to prioritize a model akin to the Bretton Woods Accord
If the models are closed, the West will become a digital serfdom to anointed AI corporations, which will be able to gouge prices, inject ads, and influence politics with ease.
I can imagine the headlines now: "AI promised unlimited productivity, 10 years later, we're still waiting for the rapture"
The rich west will be in the lead for awhile and then get tiktok-ed.
The lead is just not really worth that much in the long run.
There is probably an advantage gained at some point in all this of being a developing country too that doesn't need to bother automating all these middle management and bullshit jobs they don't have.
China is notoriously middle management heavy, by definition that’s what communism is.