What will we do ten years from now, when complex versions of the synthetic intelligence program ChatGPT have leaked into the fabric of life?
According to some experts, you may be out of a job. Two existing disputes over hard work involving autoworkers and screenwriters address, at least in part, the long-term risk of AI.
When AI shows up for jobs, writers may be among the first to jump into it, warn two renowned technology experts writing in Foreign Affairs magazine. And they are not the only ones who share this opinion. Even existing versions of the ChatGPT AI comics program may have clearer prose than most humans, they say. And those systems are improving.
By 2035, when “administrative staff will lose their jobs en masse,” say Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman, AI will manage hospitals, airlines and courts. “A year ago, this situation would have been purely fictitious; Today it turns out to be almost inevitable. “
For Bremmer and Suleyman, task loss is a relatively mundane result of the AI revolution. Their main fear is nothing less than the usurpation of government force through intelligent machines and those who control them.
But will large numbers of writers, lawyers, stockbrokers, coders and staff be sent home to do silly things in just over 10 years?Many considered skeptics argue that there are very clever reasons why this would possibly not happen. And at the same time the center of it all, they say, is our exclusive humanity.
A look at the 10-year long-term extends into the realm of science fiction, and those who believe in the long-term (though rarely provide helpful warnings) may be wrong. Watching the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a clever reminder.
“Anyone who says they can say they expect what’s going to happen is deluding themselves or lying,” said Canadian science fiction scientist Karl Schroeder, who wrote about AI in his novel Flying Worlds and in the short story The Suicide of Our Troubles.
There is a certain irony in this comment, as Schroeder is also a profuturist who helps corporations prepare for what’s coming.
He believes it’s useful to use the mental eye to outline the imaginable scope of AI’s challenge as it gets better at human tasks.
“It’s just the question of what to do with the jackhammer when the guy with the beak,” Schroeder said.
The lack of certainty about how AI will expand (and how quickly) means its eventual impact is open to endless speculation, he said. As governments around the world struggle over how to regulate it, the unknowable nature of what AI will become is just one of many complications.
But unless intelligent machines become evil geniuses who overwhelm us like insects, said Schroeder and everyone I’ve talked to, in the long run there’s one certainty between humans and machines: It’s humanity.
“A lot of what we do as human beings, even if we have our official task titles, goes beyond official task descriptions,” said AJung Moon, a professor of computer engineering at McGill University in Montreal.
While experts in synthetic intelligence and robotics find that amounts of jobs are being stolen through intelligent software, when that happens, he said, humans will do more things where AI is rarely as smart.
In her own paintings as a university professor, she sees AI as the boring, bureaucratic, and redundant parts of the job, leaving her more time for the kind of human interaction that leads to student success.
“How is your learning adventure?Luna said. I can connect more with my students. “
As someone who has been at the forefront of robotics for more than a decade, Moon said many of the paintings made by humans are not threatened by AI. Practical human delicacy, the “haptic feedback” of human touch, fine motor skills, the ability to move from light care and caresses to heavy tasks, or figuring out how to fix old pipes in an old space: “that’s very unlikely right now. “
Despite the imminent arrival of devices like Elon Musk’s Optimus robot, Moon said he doesn’t see AI turning that any time soon, the many jobs that require human judgment, instant decisions and human dexterity will still need humans.
In a hospital, for example, synthetic intelligence can count pills, handle paperwork and help the effectiveness of treatments. The merit is that it leaves more time for responsibilities in which humanity remains indispensable.
This humanity, which encompasses not only what we do and how we do it, but also why we do it, is summed up in a concept called “humanocentrism. “It is a technique that is at the center of anthropologist Paul Hartley’s paintings. , executive director of Toronto-based Human Futures Studio, a type of control consulting firm that has helped tech corporations derail.
“It’s about articulating how to keep other people at the center,” he said.
Hartley, of the e-book Radical Human Centricity, said the concept predates recent thinking about AI, which stems from notions of “user experience” or “UX” in the tech sector, where tech experts might be tempted to step into a never-before-seen world. Never the land of generation for the sake of generation.
In a science fiction future, AI could eventually think for itself and locate its own motivations that are incomprehensible to us. But until then, no matter how advanced, AI will remain a tool used by humans for human purposes, Hartley said. .
The key lesson of human-centric technique is that technological and software tools, coupled with AI, are so if they fail to meet human needs.
The demands of humanity, insists Vurain Tabvuma, a professor at the Sobey School of Business at the University of St. John’s Mary’s in Halifax, which collaborated with Hartley, are at the center of why human labor will never be supplanted by AI.
Even after it becomes ubiquitous within a decade, Tabvuma said he anticipates AI will be similar to technological advances of the past that, in theory, have wiped out jobs. Human librarians brought him books and articles. Now he’s putting them online.
Machines are replacing weavers. Typing rooms and calculators have been replaced by email and spreadsheet software. Robots have been replacing humans on assembly lines and in warehouses for years. But none of those adjustments have reduced the number of paintings other people make. Unemployment is at all – Time is low and many of us seem busier than ever.
Recalling economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction in his 1930 essay Economic Opportunity for Our Grandchildren that we would now paint 15 hours a week, Tabvuma believes we probably won’t get a chance to get up this time either.
Some have warned that the capitalist economy will use AI instead of human workers, but said history shows that the capitalist flexible market will guarantee hard work in the long run while continuing to find new tactics to utilize skill and human resources. Tabvuma’s research echoes a tech entrepreneur Jack O’Holleran in an essay this month.
“If AI can do ten times more work than a coder, most corporations probably wouldn’t lay off nine of their ten software engineers,” O’Holleran wrote. “They’re just going to [expand] a hundred times more production than they can produce with their current 10 equipment. “
Tabvuma said that it is in the nature of the capitalist economy – the constant renewal known as “creative destruction” or “abandonment”, driven by the pursuit of profit – to continually regularize work and use the resources stored in this procedure to create new work. “AI would probably not prevent this procedure,” he said.
“Over time, corporations will identify an opportunity, and over time, they will start running to make the most of that opportunity,” Tabvuma said.
And the process doesn’t just take place within a company. Tabvuma talks to his students about the history of art and artisans dating back to Greek and Roman times. At first glance, it turns out that the techniques of posters and paintings, printing and photography, and then computers, gradually repositioned the skills of human craftsmen.
“He’s moving away from other people and he’s definitely in the realm of technology,” Tabvuma said. But that wasn’t so for the artists, he said: “See the current scenario in the story?We’ve never had so many artists in the world. “
Tabvuma also rejects the idea that a single company would take synthetic intelligence and use it to concentrate wealth and strength and dominate humanity. On the one hand, although it is now new and expensive, AI will be reasonable and widely available to a new generation that understands how to use it. He said it would be difficult for a company or sector to corner the market.
“Some of those concepts are held through other people who believe that the world we live in is consistent and that the corporations we see are consistent, but in capitalist economies, the corporations we interact with now would not possibly exist 10 years from now. , or in 20 or 30 years,” Tabvuma said. At some point, corporations like Facebook, Amazon and Apple are going bankrupt, he said.
“There will be other corporations that will emerge and, if they come along, they will employ other people and strengthen their workforce, their generation and gain market share. “
And what about paintings by writers that give you everything you need to read?Tabvuma said that in addition to manual dexterity, humans have another big advantage.
“Think about the interaction that you and I are having right now, the fact that we’ve been thinking, ‘How am I going to write this new article?I’m going to communicate with those other people, interview them, and then come. “I’m going to write this article,” Tabvuma said.
“And that’s not physical prowess, that’s intellectual prowess. “
Economic columnist
Toronto-based Don Pittis is a business columnist and senior manufacturer for CBC News. Previously, he was a wildland firefighter and ranger on Canada’s High Arctic islands. After turning to journalism, he was a lead economic reporter at Hong Kong Radio Television prior to delivery. He has produced and directed reports for the CBC in Saskatchewan and Toronto and for the BBC in London.
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