The Future of "Work"

[CdnFox]

3 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

Would you worry about it if you were just going into university though?

If i did it would be because i was concerned about the transitional phase.  Inevitably when society takes a leap forward there's a period of transition where you can't quite be sure what will change when and what will suddenly become obsolete. That can impact some people in unexpected and negative ways.  A famous company made 'whizz wheel' circular slide rule manual calculators when i was in pilot's training for calculating fuel and a bunch of other things - guess how well that business is doing in the age of iphones  

But even then.  I've had these talks before.  When the first computers came out i was a bit of a geek and there was much talk about how it would transform and displace elements of society. Paper would be a thing of the past. Likewise we dreamed the internet would allow everyone to work in any country anywhere and there would be no such thing as your 'local office' for many jobs.  

And to a degree it was all true - the 'dictating secretary' has become the 'admin assistant', we use less paper but we still use paper,  SOME jobs are farmed out to other countries, but most are still done relatively local even when they can be done online, etc etc/

There will be change, but AI is not a creative engine. It's a statistical engine. It will remove the need for some jobs, but it will just make it easier for people to do other jobs.  Just like accounting software has made it easy for small businesses to operate without a dedicated accountant and word processors have made it easier for businesses to produce business correspondence and records easier, AI will facilitate but not eliminate. 

I actually tried to get an AI set up to do some of my work.  Hey - why not, the less i have to do the better and some of what i do is just kind of tedious stuff. But after talking to a few people about it who were pros it would be very very difficult.  And not because what i do is terribly hard, but it does require a certain level of nuanced thinking so to speak that AI simply can't replicate. So it didn't pan out. 

I even tried to use commo ai to keep notes of some of my meetings just to try it and it was at best "ok", it struggled with certain elemenets of it and i don't use it now. 

I mean i already use low level AI and probably you do too. Spell checkers these days, many search engines, other predictive stuff.  It would be nice if one day AI meant i could do more of my work in less time, be worth even more money and benefit from the tech but i'm not worried at all about it replacing me. 

 

Sorry for the long response  

[WestCanMan]

52 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

If i did it would be because i was concerned about the transitional phase.  Inevitably when society takes a leap forward there's a period of transition where you can't quite be sure what will change when and what will suddenly become obsolete. That can impact some people in unexpected and negative ways.  A famous company made 'whizz wheel' circular slide rule manual calculators when i was in pilot's training for calculating fuel and a bunch of other things - guess how well that business is doing in the age of iphones  

But even then.  I've had these talks before.  When the first computers came out i was a bit of a geek and there was much talk about how it would transform and displace elements of society. Paper would be a thing of the past. Likewise we dreamed the internet would allow everyone to work in any country anywhere and there would be no such thing as your 'local office' for many jobs.  

And to a degree it was all true - the 'dictating secretary' has become the 'admin assistant', we use less paper but we still use paper,  SOME jobs are farmed out to other countries, but most are still done relatively local even when they can be done online, etc etc/

There will be change, but AI is not a creative engine. It's a statistical engine. It will remove the need for some jobs, but it will just make it easier for people to do other jobs.  Just like accounting software has made it easy for small businesses to operate without a dedicated accountant and word processors have made it easier for businesses to produce business correspondence and records easier, AI will facilitate but not eliminate. 

I actually tried to get an AI set up to do some of my work.  Hey - why not, the less i have to do the better and some of what i do is just kind of tedious stuff. But after talking to a few people about it who were pros it would be very very difficult.  And not because what i do is terribly hard, but it does require a certain level of nuanced thinking so to speak that AI simply can't replicate. So it didn't pan out. 

I even tried to use commo ai to keep notes of some of my meetings just to try it and it was at best "ok", it struggled with certain elemenets of it and i don't use it now. 

I mean i already use low level AI and probably you do too. Spell checkers these days, many search engines, other predictive stuff.  It would be nice if one day AI meant i could do more of my work in less time, be worth even more money and benefit from the tech but i'm not worried at all about it replacing me. 

 

Sorry for the long response  

It was worth reading, so it wasn't too long. I wrote a much longer post earlier today lol. 

I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg here.

I remember seeing a chart showing how each human 'age' gets shorter and shorter as we move along.

Pre-history, aka the stone age, was about 3M years.

The bronze age was 2,000 years, and the iron age was about the same.

Middle age, early modern age and industrial age about 200 years each.

Machine age 65 years.

Nuclear age, space age, information ages about 20 years each.

Now that we're into the AI age, 20 years is looking like a really long time. Once we get a bunch of these AI computers learning exponentially from each other and the internet, I just think things are gonna change faster than humans have ever had to adapt before. 

 

Side bet: How long do you think it will be before a robot baseball team winds up being better than the best all-human team we could possibly field? 

For sure some Japanese and Americans are going to start building ball-bots to compete with each other. 

10 years?

[CdnFox]

2 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

It was worth reading, so it wasn't too long. I wrote a much longer post earlier today lol. 

I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg here.

I remember seeing a chart showing how each human 'age' gets shorter and shorter as we move along.

Pre-history, aka the stone age, was about 3M years.

The bronze age was 2,000 years, and the iron age was about the same.

Middle age, early modern age and industrial age about 200 years each.

Machine age 65 years.

Nuclear age, space age, information ages about 20 years each.

Now that we're into the AI age, 20 years is looking like a really long time. Once we get a bunch of these AI computers learning exponentially from each other and the internet, I just think things are gonna change faster than humans have ever had to adapt before. 

I think that's true and it makes sense. Essentially humans are following a version of Moore's Law Which states that computer computational power will double every X number of years, and for similar reasons.

The more we learn and the more we advance the more our ability to learn in advance improves which means we learn faster in advance faster and the cycle repeats and there's no reason to believe that that has ended any time in the near future.

And it's not just the time. The magnitude of our improvements is also growing exponentially. The technological leap to move from processing bronze to processing steel is not terribly High and as you say widescale adaption of iron and steel from bronze age tech took thousands of years.

 Going from a horse and buggy society at 1900 to a society that had flown to the moon, broken the sound barrier two times, and had transitioned to a car in every garage and the telephone in every hand by 2000 is an unbelievably insane leap forward, and we did it in 100 years. 

Quote

 

Side bet: How long do you think it will be before a robot baseball team winds up being better than the best all-human team we could possibly field? 

For sure some Japanese and Americans are going to start building ball-bots to compete with each other. 

10 years?

 

It will never happen. And the reason it will never happen is as soon as we develop robots that are that sophisticated we will reinvent the robot wars tv show and it will be a modern day version of the roman coliseum and we will not be interested in baseball in the slightest    It's human nature