It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.
That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.
> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.
Sometimes I don’t wonder if this wouldn’t still be a good way to educate people. Part of the problem is education has to sort of optimize to try to educate like passive people. If you’re a curious and pragmatic person, you can understand how to use what you learned in a liberal arts degree to be better at almost any job.
As I look forward to the second half of my career. Certainly I use AI in healthy doses.
But people talk about the division between practice and performance, and most of my practice is old school. Reading books. Writing my thoughts down. Memorizing quotes and passages.
I think more important than what you learn is the way you use it to train and evolve your brain, with the caveat that - I know this is more useful to me because I have a marketable skill. This is the balance universities have to stick, there are tons of people with liberal arts degrees in middling jobs.
But at least half if not more of education should be on building practical skills in the three r’s.(maybe the third r should be ‘rgumentation instead of ‘rithmatic, but I digress)
It’s interesting - people decry memorization in education, and I’m not entirely naive as to why - if you were to show up to the first day of work and say “I don’t know any of what you just said but I can recite log tables! It might be your last day - and yet one of the most underrated skills, especially late in your career is the ability to ingest and operate in large quantities of information.
> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point
Do you have evidence that it ever was part of being a competent mathematician? AIUI the trope of mathematicians who can't even do arithmetic was common already before the pocket calculator was introduced last century.
My grandpa was upset that I never bothered to memorize trig tables. Tried to argue that I am not useful when there isn't a calculator around. I can think of several rebuttles to this, but didn't care to use any. He'd already been retired for some time so I didn't expect him to understand why even a pocket calculator is useless in modern engineering analysis, so memorizing trig was no more than a boring party trick performed by the out of touch nerd.
"It was said that when doing astronomical calculations that required logarithms, which are typically 10 digit numbers in log tables, [C. F. Gauss] would often just recall the logarithms instead of bothering to look them up."
Go read the story that Richard Feynman tells of betting an abacus user. He used his knowledge of some strange numbers. It's in _Surely You Must Be Joking_.
I suspect his facility with numbers and his knowledge of tables like this really helped him do physics research.
“a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.”
Reminds me of a year where a teacher of mine (high school) gave everyone in class an A. He got called on it, and fought back. He literally called out the weakest kids in the class and had them do the work in front of the admins complaining and said, "tell me that's not A work, I ["fucking" strongly implied] dare you."
To say that artificial intelligence isn't conscious (I don't have a subscription and did not click the bypass links) ignores the simple fact that if it acts like it is conscious, in ways that align with meaningful ways to influence its output, then it makes sense to treat it as conscious, even if you have your fingers crossed behind your back while you do it.
Telling models to "think hard" or "go step by step" has at times had an impact on the quality of the output. To deny that is silly. But that is treating it like it's conscious, and to deny that "consciousness" even if correct, does nothing but place an unnecessary burden on the person interacting with it.
I understand that LLMs are "just next word machines" but to constantly maintain that concept in my head while I'm typing "act as a financial expert and think carefully" is a waste of my mental energy.
I invite you to consider the Seinfeld finale, where Elaine uses a cell phone to call a friend to ask about her ill father. The call has technical issues, and Jerry lectures Elaine about mistreating her friend that way, when she should have waited to call from home.
That was less than 30 years ago. Cell service is more reliable today than then, but it's not perfect, and not only don't we think twice about making <whatever> calls on a cell phone, many/most of us don't even have land lines anymore.
Sending the prompt is the difference between showing up with flowers, and saying, "I feel strongly enough about you to bring flowers."
Everyone saying AI is an excuse: <whatever> is always an excuse. Companies build up marginal people over time: people who aren’t overtly fire-worthy, but who aren’t core contributors either. The pressure builds up, like the conditions for an avalanche, over time. When it’s at a critical point an inciting event can be relatively minor. And then the list gets made, and if there’s no one who says, “We really need Bob,” Bob goes on the list.
It can be about the proximal cause, but it doesn’t have to be at all.
All of that said, AI is going to directly cause job loss, I’m calling it now. Not as much as the doomsayers predict, but more than most people expect.
> All of that said, AI is going to directly cause job loss, I’m calling it now. Not as much as the doomsayers predict, but more than most people expect.
Unless there is some limit to model development we can't currently foresee, plain economics will see to it that white collar job losses will be close to total. Likewise blue collar if we don't find a limit to spatial AI and robotics development.
The problem with all these discussions is that no-one rubbishing the job-apocalypse forecasts can say why or how progress will peter out - beyond pointing to economic limits ("it's a bubble") which won't apply over longer terms. Given the pace of progress the last few years, and this inability to say why job losses won't scale with the tech, anyone ruling them out is either wish thinking, or showing a staggering failure of imagination.
If there's a reason the losses will be "Not as much as the doomsayers predict", say what it is.
The limit to job loss is completely unrelated to AI capabilities. Rather it is social.
There is a breaking point where if enough people end up jobless it will lead to genuine bloody uprisings. I won't pretend to know where exactly that point is, but I am more than happy to state that it is before "nobody has a job anymore" is reached.
I'm sure someone is thinking that job loss needs to be gradual enough that they can get technology to the point of having killer drones ready to take out any individual instantly, before any uprising threshold is crossed. If the abundance of drones keeps rising and surveillance continues toward "total", then we are headed toward this possibility.
Who wants to uprise if it means instant death for the uprisers and everyone they care about?
And if things move gradually enough we are like frogs in boiling water. Think about how if many of the things openly happening today were to happen 50-100 years ago how much resistance there would have been.
The thing about the whole “frogs in boiling water” thing is that it doesn’t work. They’ll jump when it gets too hot.
To counter it with another idiom, consider the concept of having nothing to lose. Remember I’m not claiming it’ll be fun, easy, or anything like that. What I’m saying is that when push comes to shove and enough people genuinely have nothing to lose, it will not be pretty, and I’m not willing to bet on the rich and powerful coming out on top, regardless of how slowly and gradually they try to make it happen.
I think it’ll suck a lot for everyone, and specifically I’d be willing to put money on the rich and powerful wishing they’d had a little more empathy and foresight.
I was thinking this months ago and asked AI what would be done.
IT quickly spit out a half dozen things it expected to be issues and the counter measures that would be deployed instantly and likely proactively.
It showed me videos of things like these 24/7 drones for people detected and less lethal things like soundwaves as deterrents.
It showed me videos of cables hardening and other systems being used to prevent cutting cables and stealing electricity.
Discussed the size of the jails that will be built, an expected number of people that move into a few groups of cybercrime (and which would continue to thrive with that) -
Had numbers of number of people that will be eating mealworms for lunch, the political and cult shifts that will occur, all sorts of interesting things.
I'll be putting out a movie about all this that AI already knows and expects to happen. And this is all with currently known and in use technologies.
Millions will be leaving many cities, and direct to needy from farms systems may keep people alive. Office buildings being converted to mealworm and similar farming may happen.
I do not see the millions of people who make a living via call centers to be able to find similar paying jobs. Most of them, and the people who currently make a living supporting them (sandwich shops, cleaning, etc) - will be competing for delivery jobs, which will depress wages, and they will be competing with robots and x-tunnels, etc.
I need to get a working title for all this info I gathered and come back and edit.
> If there's a reason the losses will be "Not as much as the doomsayers predict", say what it is.
OK, I'll make an attempt:
1. AI capabilities have obviously exploded at an amazing rate over the past few years, but I think most people in the field view a lot of the "Bobby grew a ton by age 13, he'll obviously be 100 feet tall in a few years"-type analysis of a few years ago to be wrong. Or, at least, people see limits to current AI tech, and that completely new/unknown approaches will eventually be needed. Of course, AI never really gets worse, and I can easily see a lot of problems (e.g. hallucination rates) being greatly improved even with just existing tech.
2. I think tons of jobs will get obliterated. I think you'd have to be insane to go into radiology as a med student right now. Tons of people currently make their living driving, and robots can already do a lot of that. More broadly, there are already lots of jobs that are basically "data in, one unambiguously correct answer out" that AI will excel at. Creative jobs will also be affected. I read a report recently about how AI dramas are all the rage in China, and they're already displacing jobs for actors.
3. But I disagree that losses will be "close to total". There will still be a strong desire for humans to actually decide on the "what do we make?", even if it's mostly made by the AI/robots. For a particular depressing and macabre analogy, think of the American South during slavery. Even though most of the actual labor was done by slaves (in the analogous case AI/robots), there were still jobs directing the work to be done.
So I guess I'm in the "it will be a shit show of epic proportions" camp, but that's still not as bad as some of the worst doomsaying I've seen.
3 seems the strongest of these arguments. The 'other techs plateaued' argument ignores that this is the first tech ever to convert electricity into thought and agency. There isn't a precedent for AI, and until intelligence stops scaling with compute, any assumption of a limit - that may not even exist - being reached in the few years left before jobs are wiped out is arbitrary faith.
I agree though, that business leadership roles will still survive - with some industries, wherever some principle or vision needs to be maintained - with the normal little adjustments humans might prefer to feel out for themselves. Perhaps also politicians, sportsmen, escorts, priests, anyone involved in spiritual and new age therapy. But this is still close to total. And aside from ownership/leadership which can earn in power and influence, it isn't clear how any of these jobs would be paid.
Hinton was probably right, even in 2016. When a med student chooses their residency, they want to choose a career that will be around in 40 years. The tech obviously wasn't there in 2016, but it is tantalizingly close today. I have a family member who is a radiologist who works for a group that deploys AI tools as an adjunct, and is was pretty eye opening the first time that tool caught a critical finding he missed.
Interestingly, there is currently a huge shortage of radiologists because the tech (but, more importantly, the regulatory framework) isn't quite there yet, but again people choosing a medical specialty aren't looking at today or a year or two out, they want a career that will sustain them into old age after investing years and hundreds of thousands in training. People are worried at what the landscape will look like in 5 years, let alone 20, 30 or 40.
Job loss can only be measured in relation to time. If it's gradual enough, it's not job "loss" it's job transition.
My point isn't so much about how many jobs will be replaced by AI, but how quickly. In my mind the doomsayers are predicting 30-70% job loss in the next 3-5 years. I'm not saying the job loss won't be that high; I'm saying it won't be that soon. If I had to guess, I'd predict 5-15 years, which won't be a party for anyone, but it's not immediate devastation.
And of course previous job loss situations were supported by other jobs people could migrate to. If this situation doesn't -- if AI swallows a substantial portion of the entire job market -- then eventually it will come down to whether we have an acceptable way to share the abundance that results.
I also think there will be significant displacement and change, but the size of the pie will grow tremendously, and there will be many, many jobs people haven't thought of to address the bottlenecks.
The pace of progress is precisely why many people qualitatively assume the curve will flatten soon: J curves are generally (obviously not always) unsustainable.
You're arguing that the limits will appear because they usually do. (Correct my paraphrase if this is unfair.) Apart from being blind faith, this argument is oblivious to the fact that capability so far has scaled directly with compute and that the experts developing the models expect that to continue.
That is the lowest effort of lame responses. Look at the actual authors on the paper then. Or, I don't know, actually make a substantive comment about the research in the paper beyond your 8th grade redditor "Ha ha Siri sucks" response.
AI will certainly cause job loss. It already has (regardless of to what degree it was an excuse for something else in many cases). I agree with what you say, though.
The big question to me is whether the people who lost those jobs will have better opportunities in the future. That's kind of up to all of us.
That is fun! As an aside, it took me four times clicking into that before I realized there was an expandable-but-collapsed product detail section that included the rotation information I was looking for.
1. They desperately want to end all immigration.
2. They are too stupid to enact reasonable policies to achieve that end.
3. Therefore they resort to the blunt force tool of cruelty.
Either that or they're racist sadists, one of the two.
HA! I thought this headline meant that neutron scattering was the underlying cause of gluten-free pasta falling apart, rather than the tool used to understand the issue.
reply