I can’t say anything about the spiritualist/materialist thing, but there are two things that are clear:
First: Same as you won’t be able to ever get a Shakespeare work by randomly stringing letters together in any reasonable time frame, you won’t be able to do the same with conciousnes. If it’s possible, the number of incorrect permutations are so massive, that just random trying will not ever be enough in any realistic amount of time.
Second: Transformer networks and all other generative AI concepts we have today aren’t even trying to create a conciousnes. They are not the path to general AI.
The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.
That is totally true but that’s a different direction than the danger in the marketing as discussed above.
The media is full of “AI is so amazingly great, we are all going to lose our jobs and it will take over the world.”
That’s a quite different message than what’s really the case, which is “AI is so shitty, that it will literaly kill people with bad advice when given the chance. And business leaders are so shit that they willingly trust AI, just because it’s cheaper.”
This is my biggest concern. I’m in a position where (potentially in the near future) I see AI being used as an excuse to do work quicker so we can focus on other things more but still have to review the AI response before agreeing/signing off. Reviewing for accuracy takes just as long as doing it yourself when it’s strongly regulated and it comes down to revisions and document numbers. Much less making a sound argument that actually is up to date with that documentation. So either I trust the AI short cut and open myself up to errors, or redo all the work for them. No gain in time efficiency with shorter timelines. I’d rather make something and have it flag things that I can check so I’m more sure of my own work. What I do shouldn’t be faster, but it can be more error free. It would take a lot of training and updating of training with each iteration of documentation change. I could be the slave of change, with more expectations, with no actual improvement of the tools I have (in fact more risk of issues with the tools being used).
Sorry this is months after, but it’s cool to see it worked. I use a software called XXX Agile and it’s not the worst I work with but when ported to my company has some flaws. There’s a long project to switch somewhere else for document control and people who should know much better than me are worried it will fill some gaps but open us up to way more.
Isn’t that a part of the ai marketing though? That whole “this thing could destroy us” stuff?
Totally is. Because it makes the AI look and feel much better than the smoke-and-mirrors it actually is.
We thought we were getting Skynet but, instead we got Super Clippy and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Art Theft
Do you see any reason to think enough iterations of random nodes in a large enough network could result in emergent conscious intelligence?
Or are you more of a spiritualist than a materialist when it comes to the mind?
I can’t say anything about the spiritualist/materialist thing, but there are two things that are clear:
First: Same as you won’t be able to ever get a Shakespeare work by randomly stringing letters together in any reasonable time frame, you won’t be able to do the same with conciousnes. If it’s possible, the number of incorrect permutations are so massive, that just random trying will not ever be enough in any realistic amount of time.
Second: Transformer networks and all other generative AI concepts we have today aren’t even trying to create a conciousnes. They are not the path to general AI.
The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.
That is totally true but that’s a different direction than the danger in the marketing as discussed above.
The media is full of “AI is so amazingly great, we are all going to lose our jobs and it will take over the world.”
That’s a quite different message than what’s really the case, which is “AI is so shitty, that it will literaly kill people with bad advice when given the chance. And business leaders are so shit that they willingly trust AI, just because it’s cheaper.”
This is my biggest concern. I’m in a position where (potentially in the near future) I see AI being used as an excuse to do work quicker so we can focus on other things more but still have to review the AI response before agreeing/signing off. Reviewing for accuracy takes just as long as doing it yourself when it’s strongly regulated and it comes down to revisions and document numbers. Much less making a sound argument that actually is up to date with that documentation. So either I trust the AI short cut and open myself up to errors, or redo all the work for them. No gain in time efficiency with shorter timelines. I’d rather make something and have it flag things that I can check so I’m more sure of my own work. What I do shouldn’t be faster, but it can be more error free. It would take a lot of training and updating of training with each iteration of documentation change. I could be the slave of change, with more expectations, with no actual improvement of the tools I have (in fact more risk of issues with the tools being used).
I’m in agile development, in a reasonably safe-from-AI position (scrum master).
There has already been a trial of software development by AI, with different generative AIs in each agile role; and it worked.
Bard claims to be able to write unit tests
I can imagine many IT jobs becoming less skilled
Sorry this is months after, but it’s cool to see it worked. I use a software called XXX Agile and it’s not the worst I work with but when ported to my company has some flaws. There’s a long project to switch somewhere else for document control and people who should know much better than me are worried it will fill some gaps but open us up to way more.
My favorite are the developers who are developing AI to do development.
Well, yeah. If you can get a machine to do the job for you, then you should.
You dont see how developers developing AI to do development might be a bad thing?
Not if it saves time and effort. The less time I have to spend writing and debugging code, the better.
That’s what machines are for, after all. To make work easier.