Every few years something comes along that will take all of our jobs. I’ve lost mine to computers, the internet, outsourcing and offshoring. Except actually I haven’t.
AI is a term so wide as to be useless. It’s also being hyped like nothing else ever by the people who are currently losing many billions of dollars coming up with, thus far, zero products or ideas that actually have mass appeal and/or a path to economic sustainability.
There are loads of ideas being developed, and used, that sit under the AI umbrella and will have real impact. But it’s mostly iteration, not revolution.
Recently another team at our place demod the amazing new AI powered tool to answer routine questions about company policies. It was a search engine. It’s better than the existing search tools that were available but, nonetheless, it was just search.
There’s a lot of that. Things that are just automations or algorithms are now called AI. LLM’s main everyday use case is as an iteration on spelling and grammar checks. They are not intelligence.. they are guessing engines.
I know that there are good applications for things like writing code (aka operating within a set of clear paramaters) and my experience of other people using LLM’s to summarise stuff is that they do ok (assuming the stakes are low enough that the the gaps and hallucinations don’t matter). LLM’s for creating writing are absolute dogshit and as they are trained on a universe of bad writing, it’s hard to see how they get better at that… but time will tell.
Jobs will change as they always do as technology evolves. I predict, with confidence, that all these apocalyptical/utopian predictions will prove to be far off the mark and the change will, at most, look a bit like the change that came from the internet.
