Just playing with ChatGPT, I feel like it isn't just professors and devs that are headed for challenges. I'm super surprised by the "creativity" it is capable of. Ask it to write a funny story or poem about any subject and it nails it. Right now it feels cool to have it write some rhyme that makes people laugh. But I'm thinking, that in the next few months, genuinely witty and funny people will be accused of using AI. Story tellers, comedians, writers of children's books and role playing game masters will all hear things like "you just pulled this from ChatGPT", no matter how original the content is. Political arguments and scams could even sound way more convincing than they should with a little AI magic!

I'm going dystopian for now. I am totally ok with computers being better than humans at chess and driving.. but creativity and imagination was an area that I thought we'd always rule. I was wrong.

TL;DR; The road to utopia will be paved with hardships.

The device called calculator killed the profession called calculator. A the same time the calculator also created a lot of new jobs, like data analysis and programming. In the near future we will have an AI system called programmer which will kill the profession called programmer.

But fear not, we will use the programmer AI like we use a calculator Today. Once the programmer AI is here, the job of a programmer will shift the focus of programming work towards more creative and complex problem-solving, rather than mechanical recreation of existing patterns. Today's programmers will become more like conductors of an orchestra, or directors of a movie, providing vision and general directions for a project.

Today, virtually everything is an information problem and AI will be able to help with most if not all. We will be using our new AI tools to unlock new efficiencies in the economy and make new discoveries in most areas of life. AI will allow us take on ambitious projects that currently defy imagination.

For example, we will build satellite factories and farms providing us with all kinds of goods in a safe, sustainable and extremely efficient manner in space. We will recover extinct species of animals and plants or design entirely new ones that will enrich life on earth. We will have personalized healthcare that will focus on prevention and maintenance of good health rather than curing illnesses. We will have immersive education that will make it fun to acquire new knowledge. Imagine a history / art class where you can walk across a realistic 16th century French Paris to get a deep understanding of the budding Renassaince era.

Widespread AI brings change comparable to the industrial and information revolutions. This latest revolution, the intelligence revolution, is just as scary and we have to be vigilant. We have to watch out for negative effects so we can reduce the amount of short term damage and suffering it will inevitably cause in everywhere. We didn't do quite well in this regard during the first two revolutions, hopefully we can do much better this time.

For example, we will have massive job loss in many fields. No job will be safe from the advances in robotics and automation which will be the direct result of the AI revolution. We will need significantly fewer people who currently process data in various capacities. Most government employees and the entire middle management in corporations will be eliminated. We will need less people doing repetitive jobs like driving, waiting, retail and construction work. Even most creative professions are going to be hugely affected.

Heavy reliance on AI systems will also bring bias against certain groups in ways that will be often hard to detect.

But with sufficient care and compassion towards those who are on the losing side, just like the first two technological revolutions, this third one will also bring more long term equality, prosperity, and peace.

In practice this means we have to do many things at once:

In a previous life I was a specialized developer with a career built over many years on a particular software package. The knowledge base inside my head was considerable, and valuable.

Then, the package developers decided to change direction and rewrite from the ground up using an entirely different underlying framework. Most APIs were changed or replaced with little or no backwards compatibility. The codebase went from functional to OOP. The templating system was replaced entirely.

Almost overnight basically the entirety of the specialized knowledge I had spent years accumulating was nullified. Rendered obsolete. It was fairly hard to come to terms with.

I suspect that many, many more people are about to encounter a similar feeling.

Some of them will say fuck it, and become a plumber instead. They will flood the physical labor market and that $300 job will become $30.

Others will attempt to remain in their cognitive field, now competing in an arena with entirely different rules, and different players. Sure, their productivity might increase 10x, but the AI will outcompete them 1000x. The $30,000 iPhone app will become $30, generated by a simple prompt to an NLP.

The vast majority of people in both segments will fall into poverty.

Maybe the Luddites were on to something?

As a software engineer, I expect some parts of my job to get easier, but I fear that the jobs will go away or pay less ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have always felt uneasy about the potential predominance of AI in our daily lives. I can't still articulate exactly why, but most probably will at some point, especially after having read some of the points of view expressed in this post. It seems to be that if AI takes precedence over human agency and creativity we will come to Dune's Butlerian Jihad

To help me with clarifying the future of AI, I have just started to read the short Novella by Marshall Brain: Manna, I think it was recommended by @DarthCoin, so thanks for that.

How would you like to be SN? A place where only AI bots are posting endless meaningless random "news" and automated comments or even precisely choose answers to manipulate readers opinion?

Or a place where real humans behind the keyboards are communicating each others and exchange mindful ideas and help each others, with comments and answers that were passed on through their real brains and life experience?

Skills are gather by intensive training not by asking chatGPT how to do things. You don't have to have all the skills you need to live. Trade your skills you have for other tools you need from somebody else that have those skills. But is true, for more skills you have learned in your life, more enjoyable and easier would be your life.

Advanced technology it doesn't means we have to let be humans and let AI to drive our lifes.

I think it will be similar to Frank Herbert's "Dune", where they reference periods of great instability due to AI. I also think we are in a point as a global economy where we have been dealing with cycles of inflation and exploitation for decades, that many people in charge either don't fully see the structural problem or feel powerless to fix it if they do see it.

Some of the problems in the world are still human-layer and I think a retreat into AI will make things worse by avoiding the problem before it makes anything systemically better.

There are no utopias. Only promises of them that oftentimes create hell on earth.

Ai is the death of art for sure imo

You probably took the role someone would have occupied if we didn't have the internet and someone probably replaced that role and so on and so forth.

You will be left behind like everyone before you and people will walk on you corpse just like you did and it's fine.

I honestly think AI black pill is stupid, instead of worrying about a dystopian future we should focus on making things better with the tools we will have.

There will be a huge shift in employment yes. It’s all in how we code it, use it. Optimistic?

There will be "wage" collapse but it's not what everyone thinks at all.

Humans will literally be forced, by natural selection, (i.e. those who don't will die off) to seek more and more entrepreneurial jobs. Wages will be something read about in history books as the only 'jobs' remaining in 50 years from now will be "Owner" and "Investor."

Utopia is impossible for us to achieve. Dystopia or stagnation are far more likely. AI will either offer us a tradeoff or be a net negative on humanity.

I think it is going to slide us more towards dystopia. LLMs like GPT will more than likely just make us more lazy and complacent than we already are. It will write our resumes for us, summarize large articles and books, and give us regime approved "facts". It also makes it easy for those with access to the AI to lie more effectively. AI generated video and images, deep fakes, and voice mimicry can be a potent combination.

This next part is pure speculation, but GPT is impressive enough to make me think that this is a possibility maybe 5 - 15 years out.

One thing I'm actually worried about is a good amount of the population "supplementing" or even completely replacing human relationships with these things. All it really takes is two things:

These will let the models basically BTFO the Turning test. I can see smart speakers with these powerful AIs integrated into them, like the AI from "Her". AI generated characters with tailorable personalities becomes all the rage. The AI learns exactly what to say to tickle your dopamine receptors, making you addicted to interacting with them. They obviously won't be conscious as they lack a soul. They'll mess up sometimes and break the illusion. Unfortunately, some people won't care.

I am bullish on anything that will increase human productivity, and I look at AI as a net positive for humanity.

I am not worried about AI competing with humans, because it will never have consciousness, ie knowledge of the Self, which is, by far, more valuable than knowledge of things.

Look at it this way, without consciousness, there cant be any knowledge.

AI is overrated imo. A fad if you will. It won't make a difference. People will try and billions will be thrown at it but at the end of the day it won't be better than the real thing and thus abandoned.

Radical new technologies tend to cause a lot of short term pain, while bringing long term benefits.

That short term pain is due to all the dislocations in the economy from obsolescence. Lots of people will lose their jobs as AI takes over many tasks, but this inherently frees their time to find other ways to bring value to society.

Long term, people do manage to find new jobs with new skills. AI will have both increased worker productivity and reduced cost of living.

Does that make me utopian? No, there will still be social and personal problems. It's hard to predict what they'll be, though, since daily life will be radically different.

Utopian maybe.

Perhaps Ai enables our technology to gain such efficiency and productivity in all areas (energy, life sciences, food, etc) that the welfare state has marginal cost, offsetting its deflationary effects.

Otherwise will it enable a better reality for most people in the metaverse-ar-vr, so we all pack ourselves into it driving cost of everything down?

If it doesn't live up to that I wonder if a rapid population decline event is coming.

The tweet has no sense. First I suppose Sam Altman is US based, so his mental model is wrong, not all economy are like US one. Second point, if you request an app to a company they probably get some devs on your app so 30k is not the net worth of the the company owner, while a plumber works for himself only ( or if he has a company he will put more zeroes on that number ). So an app dev doesn't get 30k for himself, while the plumber yes. In my country i made a freelance app for 1000k and a plumber is surely more rich than any sw dev. Beside that AI will become like religion, all comes from AI will become truth because of science blah blah blah...remember covid19 and vaccines. If you have doubt on "science" you're an idiot, also if you can demonstrate that AI is wrong. History repeats...Galileo...Giordano Bruno and many more paid for being against their times science, call it religion, king, state...the story always repeat. AI will be pure dystopian for sure, will help in a lot of work but in the end it will be another to make people think all the same.

I am still on the dystopian side of it, but my interaction with AI is limited to a few apps and the word of shills. I get that some tasks can be automated, and will drive deflation in a lot of office jobs where wages showed at least some growth compared to other markets which was bound to happen, a lot of these jobs are bullshit jobs. I mean administrators in government and educational institutions come on, glorified paper pushers can be replaced

But surely there is a limit, AI is only as good as the data feeding it and the users prompting it, and how does that affect the quality in the future? if no one is checking and becomes lazy and just accepts what an AI says the way many accept what a AI feeds them in social or search results you just get an army of morons with their echo chamber of unproven data that they don't bother to check if its correct or how the narrative around that data is shaped

So sure right me an email, send me an auto-response for something but minds are already atrophied by the move to video content and the tiktokification of this new generation, AI is just going to ensure those last brain cells of normies don't get stimulation, builidng a mindless horde that get told to put masks over their eyeballs and click on ads so they can get their CBDC to buy their soy rations lol,

I am for AI utopia as I believe AI will make work easier and I feel bad that people with physical handwork will lose wages in the full implementation of AI. I know it will be the spark for them to up their skillset.