AI & Humans
How are we going to adapt to a world run by humans and machines together? Professions are going to change or become obsolete. There’s a reddit post by a 3D artist who claimed that their job was taken over by AI overnight:
I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night. : r/blender
I am not an artist anymore, nor a 3D artist. Rn all I do is prompting, photoshopping and implementing good looking pictures. The reason I went to be a 3D artist in the first place is gone.
There are jobs that people deeply love and find meaning in.
I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content, from artists, that were not asked. However its hard to see, results are better than my work.
Artists care about the quality of the final artifact. And they spend hours, days, months or even years perfecting the same piece. But knowing that AI can instead do all of that and produce a piece that might be of much higher quality that you could ever do is unsettling.
Our industries have to balance speed of development with quality. So the demand for AI generated content will go up in the foreseeable future. During this time humans will lose this race. In most areas we optimize for speed and efficiency and robots are much better than us humans at them. But this will cause a saturation of the internet with AI generated content. And over time I think that there will be general preference for human created content and we’ll see a rise in the demand for original human content.
I don’t yet know how much time it’ll take.
Ref: The apocalypse isn’t coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI - Stephen Marche
The most important thing to remember about tech doomerism in general is that it’s a form of advertising, a species of hype. Remember when WeWork was going to end commercial real estate? Remember when crypto was going to lead to the abolition of central banks? Remember when the metaverse was going to end meeting people in real life? Silicon Valley uses apocalypse for marketing purposes: they tell you their tech is going to end the world to show you how important they are.
The examples aren’t good here. And it is different this time.
The main reason is that for the first time any individual on the planet with an internet connection can immediately start harnessing the power of LLMs. And they can use it to augment many of their existing workflows/routines.
This wasn’t the case in any of the examples above:
Scale + Utility withing existing systems
Bitcoin could be operated with at scale. But it was something extremely new. And its success would have required a massive overhaul of our existing financial systems. The thing with LLMs is that nothing has to be overthrown/overhauled to use them. It seamlessly helps you with your existing tasks: writing essays, scripts, poems, code, reading legal doc, summarizing long form deal documents, and what not.
It has already encroached many facets of different fields together. Many of my peers say that they will give up on a programming career if their AI Co-pilot is taken away from them. The same is happening with entrepreneurs, business owners, tech-preneurs .. they can now get so much done and not have to hire individuals to do redundant tasks.
That’s why I think it is different this time.