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Even if all progress in AI stopped today, the impact on society will still be profound as the tech proliferates to every sector of the economy. Which it's alrea

Even if all progress in AI stopped today, the impact on society will still be profound as the tech proliferates to every sector of the economy. Which it's already doing at a rate we've never seen before. Just mixing and matching what's already out there - speech, text, image, code and video generation, object recognition, translation, complex plain language instructions, internet access, etc. - will result in tons of new innovations and wholesale destruction of certain job categories. Just look at AutoGPT - take what's nominally an AI for text generation and use it to complete multiple real world tasks. But we're just getting started in terms of how good the AI, specifically LLMs, will be. We don't need AGI - simply being able to accurately process language is enough. Language is everything - anything humans can do is described using language, from driving a vehicle to medicine to physics. It's how we understand and communicate the world around us and is the basis of intelligence itself. By predicting the best words to use, you predict the best information to give and best actions to take. Whether a computer "understands" the words it's using is secondary. We're not anywhere near the trough of disillusionment, and if anything, our expectations are too low.

JohnFen 3y ago
> our expectations are too low. I hope not, because of this: > wholesale destruction of certain job categories If proponents are correct, then those "certain job categories" will be "most job categories". If that happens quickly (say, in a single generation), the result of it will be widespread economic and civic unrest as incomes are eliminated. It will make the world worse for most people. I wish people would stop fearing a mythical "AGI" and start talking about what we're going to do to prevent widespread suffering due to economics.
crote 3y ago
> anything humans can do is described using language But this just isn't true. Humans can't learn how to drive a car or perform surgery solely by reading a book. Language is at best a rough approximation of the real world, and the saying "an image is worth a thousand words" exists for a reason. There simply aren't words for everything, and words do not have unambiguous meaning. LLMs are rapidly running into some fundamental issues, and it is not at all clear how those are going to be solved - or if it is even possible at all. Even the tech giant are having serious trouble coming up with decent prompts, and hallucinations are really throwing a wrench in the works of any serious application. As it turns out, being able to communicate doesn't mean you are automatically able to say something sensible.

JohnFen 3y ago

> our expectations are too low. I hope not, because of this: > wholesale destruction of certain job categories If proponents are correct, then those "certain job categories" will be "most job categories". If that happens quickly (say, in a single generation), the result of it will be widespread economic and civic unrest as incomes are eliminated. It will make the world worse for most people. I wish people would stop fearing a mythical "AGI" and start talking about what we're going to do to prevent widespread suffering due to economics.

crote 3y ago

> anything humans can do is described using language But this just isn't true. Humans can't learn how to drive a car or perform surgery solely by reading a book. Language is at best a rough approximation of the real world, and the saying "an image is worth a thousand words" exists for a reason. There simply aren't words for everything, and words do not have unambiguous meaning. LLMs are rapidly running into some fundamental issues, and it is not at all clear how those are going to be solved - or if it is even possible at all. Even the tech giant are having serious trouble coming up with decent prompts, and hallucinations are really throwing a wrench in the works of any serious application. As it turns out, being able to communicate doesn't mean you are automatically able to say something sensible.