[Technology] In six years will AI have completely re-engineered society?

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The Clamp

Well-known member
NSC Patron
Jan 11, 2016
26,185
West is BEST
I see a bright future ahead

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The Clamp

Well-known member
NSC Patron
Jan 11, 2016
26,185
West is BEST
I have a number of friends in the e-learning field.

Departments are being cut down to a third of their staff .

All replaced by AI.
 




Milano

Well-known member
Aug 15, 2012
3,924
Sussex but not by the sea
I'm circa 10 years from retiring if everything goes to plan (assuming my pension isn't then worth zero!!). I've been 30 years in IT, it's been a great career.
However, I've been actively putting off my teenage kids going anywhere near IT for a while now as I can see a big downturn coming.
Hopefully I see it out, but I'd feel a bit concerned for someone 30/40 who needs another 25 years out of it.
 


Happy Exile

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Apr 19, 2018
2,135
I think Trump will accelerate the uptake of AI in probably dangerous ways. Musk is going to be working in an environment with minimal regulation and likely large government funding that'll see major breakthroughs we may not want and will have zero say or control over.

A phrase I hear a lot at work is "the pace of change has never been this fast...and it'll never be this slow again" - for context, at the current rate of development almost all new content created on the internet within 5 years is likely to be AI generated and we won't be able to tell. Another thing I've heard recently is that the AI LLMs like ChatGPT are already trained on the entirety of the internet so all they can keep doing is refining...and get access to new data. The only new data available is us: all that stuff we give away just going about daily life largely because we don't have a choice. We also don't have a choice how that'll be used.

I'm genuinely concerned by what it means on an existential level for societies. Not so much the human race as I think we'll keep going, but global society is being reshaped by a handful of billionaires in the US and China. There are ways in which AI will make things better, like medical diagnosis, but there are so many more where it'll make it worse. The US with Trump at the helm and Musk with free reign to create exceptionalism-driven technology to "make America great again" doesn't feel like it's a story that's going to have a happy ending for anybody.
 








sparkie

Well-known member
Jul 17, 2003
13,268
Hove
Artificial General Intelligence ( average human level ) is supposedly 2-3 years away.

If Artificial General Intelligence is then targeted at developing Artificial Super Intelligence the rapid intelligence acceleration could be fairly soon.

Although we don't know if machine Intelligence will get better on an exponential graph or an s-shape graph ???

It'll all require a lot of power though. Maybe the hardware won't be up to it. Maybe the power of multiple suns will be required for the real top god-level AI.

As for my job.... I am 10 years away from retirement and it is a race between whether retirement or AI replacement will end my career. I think AI will win that race but if 5-6 years becomes 10 it'll be close.
 


Badger

NOT the Honey Badger
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May 8, 2007
13,104
Toronto
I'm circa 10 years from retiring if everything goes to plan (assuming my pension isn't then worth zero!!). I've been 30 years in IT, it's been a great career.
However, I've been actively putting off my teenage kids going anywhere near IT for a while now as I can see a big downturn coming.
Hopefully I see it out, but I'd feel a bit concerned for someone 30/40 who needs another 25 years out of it.

I appreciate your concern.
 




Harry Wilson's tackle

Harry Wilson's Tackle
NSC Patron
Oct 8, 2003
56,119
Faversham
The human race really is determined to make itself extinct / obsolete.
I don't think that's how it works.

We humans seem to find chaos and turbulence a stimulus for invention.

I am determined to not become a grumpy old man so I'm going to embrace this, strap myself in and enjoy the ride as best I can.
 




Mustafa II

Well-known member
Oct 14, 2022
1,821
Hove
How do you know, how soon I think that might be possible?

I'm going to get AI to reply to this:

"Fair question! I can’t know exactly what you think, but with the rapid advances in robotics and AI, it seems like these types of tasks might be within reach sooner than we’d expect. Robotics companies are already testing prototypes for various repair and maintenance tasks, and they’re improving every year. While fully autonomous solutions might take a while for complex jobs like roof repairs or plumbing, there’s a big push toward AI-assisted tools that could eventually handle these tasks more efficiently. Do you think certain aspects of these jobs will stay out of reach for robots, or could tech surprise us?"

This reply acknowledges their perspective while adding context about the current progress in AI and robotics for manual tasks.
 




Harry Wilson's tackle

Harry Wilson's Tackle
NSC Patron
Oct 8, 2003
56,119
Faversham
I don’t think AI will replace people’s actual roles while it hallucinates.

I do believe people will use it an an excuse to sack people but I don’t think you can rely on it.

I don’t think that will change in six years.
I have found that students are using AI to create short answer questions (SAQs) but not essays, at least not t levels 6 and 7 (final year BSc and MSc/MSci levels).The time it takes to sift and weave the material is better spent using web of science to do actual literature research. And AI makes egregious errors even inventing literature, which is weird (I guess that will disappear soon).

When I was a kid we used to read about and ponder 'the future'. By 1984 we will all have personalized one man flying vehicles. Robots would do all our menial jobs like cooking and cleaning. We will have cured all known diseases. Nobody would go hungry.

(We didn't even consider obviously impossible conundrums, such as people being unpleasant, bullying, exploitative, violent.....).

I don't see technology becoming the organ grinder, ever. It will always be the monkey. Even though the organ grinder is, and is likely to remain, a twat.
 
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Harry Wilson's tackle

Harry Wilson's Tackle
NSC Patron
Oct 8, 2003
56,119
Faversham
I'm going to get AI to reply to this:

"Fair question! I can’t know exactly what you think, but with the rapid advances in robotics and AI, it seems like these types of tasks might be within reach sooner than we’d expect. Robotics companies are already testing prototypes for various repair and maintenance tasks, and they’re improving every year. While fully autonomous solutions might take a while for complex jobs like roof repairs or plumbing, there’s a big push toward AI-assisted tools that could eventually handle these tasks more efficiently. Do you think certain aspects of these jobs will stay out of reach for robots, or could tech surprise us?"

This reply acknowledges their perspective while adding context about the current progress in AI and robotics for manual tasks.
I think you would be surprised. All sorts of possibilities are possibly possible. Fact.#

AKA: "A piece of trite pap that any idiot could have speculated"
 




raymondo

Well-known member
Apr 26, 2017
7,355
Wiltshire
Whilst everyone is reflecting on US elections and whether its the end of the world as we know it, I came across this the other day and it shocked me how aggressively he is expecting AI to fundamentally transform our society and reduce the value of money to zero.

In six years he expects AI to be far far more intelligent than Humans in every aspect, and once connected to all key data sets ultimately making anything anyone is paid for that depends on their intelligence in almost any topic completely redundant. He also expects renewable energy programmes to result in free energy. This means the drivers of the economy as we know become totally redundant as money and energy will no longer have value and humans would only be required for manual tasks that Robots cant perform. Deflation would be epic in scale.

I work in Digital and have to say the AI solutions we are being shown now for release in the next two years are light years ahead of what were seeing today. Whilst six years feels too soon, I personally think who the president of the US is, is going to be the least of our worries.


Er, No.
 




Sorrel

Well-known member
Jul 5, 2003
2,941
Back in East Sussex
My experience is with code, AI is really handy if you can't remember how to do something fairly normal. Once you want to do something a bit more complex it is mostly useless, or at least needs a decent-time refactoring. We're a long way from AI that works when it doesn't start with "Build me a website that..."

With writing: I know a lot of people that use it to turn bullet points into longer form documents. Which no-one reads and then uses AI to turn back into bullet points again. It won't be long before we just specify the bullet points and don't have longer-form text unless each line is actually useful and not full of waffle. At that point AI isn't much use again - unless it knows in advance what you want to say.

AI controlling work by generating other AIs with simplistic commands is probably more likely in the medium future.
 


Mustafa II

Well-known member
Oct 14, 2022
1,821
Hove
My experience is with code, AI is really handy if you can't remember how to do something fairly normal. Once you want to do something a bit more complex it is mostly useless, or at least needs a decent-time refactoring. We're a long way from AI that works when it doesn't start with "Build me a website that..."

With writing: I know a lot of people that use it to turn bullet points into longer form documents. Which no-one reads and then uses AI to turn back into bullet points again. It won't be long before we just specify the bullet points and don't have longer-form text unless each line is actually useful and not full of waffle. At that point AI isn't much use again - unless it knows in advance what you want to say.

AI controlling work by generating other AIs with simplistic commands is probably more likely in the medium future.

Don't you think you could be underestimating the exponential development of the technology, coupled with the massive amounts of new data it has access to every day.

It just seems as if because it is so responsible for its own evolution, it is evolving quicker than any other technology has in history.

I don't doubt your comment is completely true and relevant today, but it seems like only tomorrow (figuratively) it will be capable of the very things you say it is not currently capable of.
 


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