If you’re staying up nights worrying about this, you don’t really understand the technology
And you think managers, the people deciding who gets replaced by AI, understand the technology?
Comment on Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
applebusch@lemmy.world 8 months agoYou sound like one of those idiots preaching the apocalypse from a street corner. Humans obsolete in 10 years? Yeah sure buddy, right after all those profits trickle down. This is just another tool, an interesting one to be sure, but still just a tool. If you’re staying up nights worrying about this, you don’t really understand the technology, or maybe you’re just worried someone is going to realize you don’t do shit.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 8 months ago
This is part of the problem. They don’t, and won’t, fully understand the technology or its limitations or long-term impacts. They will understand that the salesman pushing the AI product told them it could eliminate 5-10% of their workforce. Whether or not the product can actually do that effectively won’t matter, they’ll still buy it, implement it, and fire a bunch of people.
flossdaily@lemmy.world 8 months ago
As I said, if you’re not scared shitless, you really don’t understand what gpt-4 can do.
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 8 months ago
How do you define “intelligence” in this context?
Do you think gpt4 is self aware?
Do you believe this LLM tech has the ability to make judgement calls, say? Or understand meaning?
What has been your experience with the accuracy / correctness of the answers it has provided? Does it match claims that mistakes or “hallucinations” occur often?
flossdaily@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Your wandering into one of the great questions of our age: what is intelligence? I don’t have a great answer. All I know is that gpt-4 can REASON, and does so better than the average human.
It’s gpt-4 self-aware? Yes. To an extent. It knows what it is, and can use that information in its reasoning. It knows it’s an LLM, but not which model.
Can it make judgement calls? Yes. Better than the average human.
Understand meaning? Absolutely. To a jaw-dropping extent.
Accuracy and correctness… Depends on the type of question.
What you need to understand is that gpt-4 isn’t a whole brain. Think of it as if we have managed to reproduce the language center of the brain. I believe this is mechanism for higher reasoning in the human brain.
But just as in humans with right-brain injuries, the language center is disconnected from reality at times.
So, when you think about gpt-4 as the most important, difficult to solve part of the brain, you start to understand that with some minimal supporting infrastructure, you now have something very similar to a complete brain.
You can use vector databases to give it long-term memory, and any kind of data retrieval used to augment it’s prompts improved accuracy and reduces hallucinations almost entirely.
With my very mediocre programming skills, I managed to build a system that is curious, has a long-term memory, and do a wide variety of tasks, enough to easily replace an entire customer service, tech support team, sales team, and marketing team.
That’s just ME, and working with the gpt-4 that’s available to the public with a bunch of guardrails on it. Today.
Imagine a less-restricted system, with interested built by an experienced enterprise coding team, and with just one more generation of LLM improvement? That could wipe out half the white collar workforce.
If LLM improvement was only geometric, and not even exponential (as it clearly is), in 10 years these things will be smarter AND MORE CREATIVE than all humans.
The truth is that we’re going to be there in 5 years.
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 8 months ago
Appreciate the detailed response!
Indeed, intelligence is …a difficult thing to define. It’s also a fascinating area to ponder. The reason I asked was to get an idea of where your head is at with the claims you made.
Now, I admit I haven’t done a lot with gpt-4 but your comments make me think it is worth the time to do so.
So you indicate gpt-4 can reason. My understanding is gpt-4 is an LLM, basically a large scale Markov chain, trained to respond with appropriate output based on input (questions).
On the one hand, my initial reaction is: no, it doesn’t reason it just mimics or simulates human reasoning that came before it in text form.
On the other hand, if a program could perfectly simulate whatever processes are involved in reasoning by a human to the point that they’re indistinguishable, is it not, in effect, reasoning? (I suppose this amounts to a sort of Turing Test but for reasoning exercises).
I don’t know how gpt4 LLMs work yet. I imagine, being a Markov Model (specifically a Markov Chain), if the model is trained on human language then the underlying semantics are sort of implicitly captured in the statistical model. Like, simplistically, if many sentences reflect human knowledge that cars are vehicles and not animals then it’s statistically unlikely for anyone to write about attributes and actions of animals when talking about cars. I assume the LLM is of such a scale that it permits this apparently emergent behavior.
I am skeptical about judgement calls. I would think some sensory input would be required. I guess we have to outline various types of judgement calls to really dig into this.
I am willing to accept that gpt-4 simulates the portions of the brain that deal with semantics and syntax both the receiving and transmitting abilities. And, maybe to some degree, knowledge and understanding.
I think “very similar to a complete brain” is an overstatement as the brain also does some amazing things with vision, hearing, proprioception, touch, among other things. Human brains can analyze situations and take initiative, analyze things and understand how they work and apply that to their repair, improvement, duplication, etc. We can understand and solve problems, and so on. In other words I don’t think you’re giving the brain anywhere near enough credit. We aren’t just Q&A machines.
We also have to be careful of the human tendency to anthropomorphize.
I’m curious to look into vector databases and their applications here. Addition of what amounts to memory, or like extended context, sounds extremely interesting.
Interesting to ponder what the world would be like with AGI taking over the jobs of most knowledge workers, artists, and so on. (I wonder if someone could create a CEO replacement…)
What does it mean for a capitalist society with masses of people permanently unemployed? How does the economy work when nobody can afford to buy anything because they’re unemployed? Does this create widespread poverty and collapse or a post-scarcity economy in some sectors?
Until robots mechanically evolve to Asimov’s vision, at least, manual labor is safe. Truly being able to replace a human body with a robot is still a ways off due to lack of progress on several fronts.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You sound like one of those peasants standing on street corners saying, “horses replaced with fuming metal boxes in 10 years? Hah, yeah, sure buddy, right after we put a man on the moon! Getoutta here, you loon!”
variants@possumpat.io 8 months ago
I think once sap and jira start implementing a lot more AI and make it simpler to use it could cut down a lot of corporate jobs, not the hands on stuff but a lot of the simpler jobs like purchasing and inventory staff could be shrunken down to a fewer people and fewer cubicles. At least that’s what we talked about at our company how everyone is adjusting to the new world especially advertising now that everything will be served to you by a bot instead of a search
Adalast@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I work with AI stuff, just getting into LLM, but I have been doing SD work since the public release last year. In just over 1 year the SD capability has gone from being able to draw a passable image of a cat at 512x512 pixels that required a reasonably powerful graphics card to complete to being able to create 4k images on the same cards that are nearly indistinguishable from actual photos/paintings. It is the single fastest adaptation and development of a technology I have seen in my 30 years in tech. I have actually been tracking the job market and the impacts that this will have and he is not all that far off in his estimate. The current push in AI development is nearly a ubiquitous existential threat to employment as we view it in the society of the United States. Everyone is on the chopping block and you’d best believe that the C-level executives want to eliminate as many positions as possible. Labor is viewed as an atrocious expense and the first place that cuts should be made. I challenge you to actually come up with a list of 10 jobs that employ more than 100,000 people in the country that you think would be safe from AI and I will see how many of them I can find information on someone who is already actively working on eliminating them.
Companies don’t want employees, only paying customers. If they can eliminate employees, they will. Hence self-checkouts in grocers, pay at the pump for gas stations, order kiosks at McDonald’s, mobile ordering for virtually every fast food place, the list goes on and on. These are all recent non-AI replacements that have cut into the employment prospects for people.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Pretty sure nah. But time will tell. I will believe it when I see it. AI has been coming for jobs since before terminator. It will replace thousands of jobs just like :
Washer women, lamp lighters, calculators and all the work that farm labourers used to do. Automation comes for us all.
Some jobs shouldn’t exist anyway. God the amount of office workers moving numbers from one tab to another and getting paid a bucket load.
However nursing and elderly care. Psychology counselling mindfulness teachers and jobs that are actually useful for society are probably safe. Yes ai can do some of all these things but it can’t do them all with empathy. Empathy is key to most of these human focused roles. We need more people in these roles and less working to make more money.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
But a lot of jobs did get automated away. And serious consequences did occur from that. Sometimes places rebound from it, but sometimes they did not. And at some point… there will be more people than jobs for them to do, as we continue automating.
In the end, the base foundation for capitalism will be broken, and we will be in an economic crisis of unprecedented scales.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Capitalism doesn’t work. Pretty sure everyone knows that.
We don’t want to work. We can automate away every job. Then we can be free to actually pursue what we want. Humanity isn’t based on how many shiny trinkets we have.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“It won’t take people’s jobs! And also people’s jobs are stupid and they deserve to have them taken away!”
What jobs are “useful for society” has no impact on what jobs are actually available to society, only what is deemed “profitable” has any place in this capitalist dystopia. Nice idealism though, I hope it won’t sting too bad having it shattered growing up.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m grown up. It will remove jobs. Just said that. Jobs that could be automated regardless. Obviously ai will remove jobs. Just like computers did. But not ones that we actually need. Pretty easy to understand or do you need to grow up to understand that ?
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 8 months ago
I don’t disagree with most of what you said. I think so far the following jobs are safe from direct AI replacement, because it is much harder to replace manual laborers.
What companies won’t realize until too late is that paying customers need jobs to pay for things. If AI causes unemployment to rise to some ungodly high, paying customers will become rare and companies will collapse in droves.
Adalast@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Thanks for actually rising to the challenge, it was actually fascinating to do the research to see how AI is affecting the various industries, and how deeply. I will say that I was able to find direct evidence of replacement in 7/10 of them, 1 was work that is similar and could easily be adapted (telecom line repair), one was an analysis that I think has a lot of good points (plumber), and one was genuinely all about augmenting the capabilities of workers already in place (wildlife conservation/officer).
I wholeheartedly agree. Functionally, we are going to have to institute a UBI model. It is the only way that society will be able to distribute funds properly when population outpaces jobs due to the exponential growth of populations and the rapidly shrinking landscape of jobs. The corporations are going to need to pay us one way or another.
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 8 months ago
Damn… nice work on the research! I will read through these as I get time. I genuinely didn’t think there would be much for manual labor stuff. I’m particularly interested in the plumber analysis.
I think augmentation makes a lot of sense for jobs where a human body is needed and it will be interesting to see how/if trade skill requirements change.