I wouldn’t worry about AI replacing us, being as we’re full-speed-ahead toward the part where it just kills us all:
Happy Valentines Day!
But could an AI write such a clever parody?
Producing bland plausible BS text on demand is a godsend for anyone suffering under the thumb of extreme bureaucratic idiocy.
My wife manages a few college graduate programs and the QA people keep coming up with all kinds of time consuming, useless and out of touch requirements and metrics. This takes time from actually managing the programs so they are any good. And her will to live too.
Last week they suddenly wanted a paragraph for each subject in those programs justifying that the professors that have been teaching each one for years are competent. Due next day.
I suggested she could paste the intro from their CVs and the subject names into ChatGPT and ask it to produce the justification. The result was exactly the kind of plausible, useless self-ovbious drivel the QA people wanted to file and forget forever. She could paste it without editing a comma.
And a probable all-nighter was turned into some glorious 30 minutes…
My wife was brainstorming about a potential coaching class she might be leading. English is her 2nd language (she’s from Japan) and was struggling a bit creating an elegant and succinct course summary. She asked Chat GPT to create a few summary statements based on her unfocused thoughts, and it was amazingly helpful.
I’m not too worried about my job. I’m pretty sure any AI’s response to my users asking things like “So I was trying to download a file from that place where everyone shares the files and I was going to send it to Becky’s place where she keeps her project files and I clicked on the blue thing and then a box popped up and I’m not sure what it said but I clicked YES and stuff happened in the window but then it froze, but then it unfroze so I thought it was done and I closed the one window and now I can’t access email and it just beeps every time I type anything or click the mouse thing and the file has disappeared. Can you fix it while I run to the meeting?” is going to be…
…EXTERMINATE!.
When people invented the photographic camera, people said that it would be the end of artists.
Well, it was definitely the end of portrait paintings, except in very rare cases. Much like wagon wheels and specialty blacksmithing tools, the more industrialized option replaced most of the demand for that particular thing. You can still buy a wooden wagon wheel. You just can’t jot down to the local wheelwright and get one though.
In this case, we’re talking about generic office/admin work and not a specific manufactured item, and instead of a gradual phase out as consumers slowly adopted horseless carriages or photography, AI doing office work seems to be coming rather quickly.
We’ll see. It’s a lot of hype right now, and much of it could just be hot air and speculation.
Remember around five years ago when we were sure that self-driving cars were imminent because suddenly everyone was talking about it?
Eh. A lot of folks said self-driving cars being “right around the corner” was a pipe dream due to the judgment calls an AI car needs to make on a typical city/highway commute. That final 10% of AI driving has turned out to be the crucial bottleneck.
AI replacing common office/admin work tasks seems a heck of a lot easier. Like AI art we’ve got examples in this thread of folks using it already!
I didn’t see this one
Yup, it literally was the end of a huge swath of artistic work.
I asked ChatGPT if it was a parody and it recited the lyrics to Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me.
I’d be interested in some data on this. My quick search seemed less certain:
But portrait painting actually experienced a resurgence around 1900. In 1910, painter Jan Veth indicated that he was behind on paintings he had agreed to produce. “I still find it very hard to bring myself to cancel things,” he wrote. “But sometimes it’s impossible to cram everything into my already packed program.” Some artists did describe a lack of work—but Rooseboom easily found similar complaints going back to the time before photography.
And it was the creation of another huge swath of artistic work.
Sure, but the wheelwright can also make barrels or cabinetry. The portrait painter can work for Madison Avenue painting movie posters.
The folks reconciling spreadsheets, submitting TPS reports, and creating endless Visio/PowerPoint presentations aren’t going to find much demand for mid-level office work when AI takes all those tasks on at around the same time, and they’re probably ill-suited to becoming plumbers or carpenters.
I find it hard to believe that some large swath of humanity is somehow uniquely suited to filling out spreadsheets and tps reports.
The economy will change, just as it always has.
Yep! We’ll just have a whole layer of unemployable office grunts that we need to finance with welfare. But yeah, capitalism will find a way and trickle down economics will benefit everyone!
They can all go work in Amazon warehouses. Win/win!
But seriously, the economy moves on. We can’t get hung up on this just like we can’t decide to keep coal mines open just because closing them will put a bunch of people out of work.
Reminds me of people who blow off climate change. “The climate has changed plenty of times in the past, life will adapt like it always has”. I mean, sure, it has but that’s kind of glossing over the mass extinctions. Why get worked up over hundreds of millions or more humans dying anyway?