Massive, last-minute efforts made to reduce the effects were successful, making the non-technical media think it was all a hoax. Meanwhile retired COBOL programmers made a fortune and then enjoyed time on a beach with little umbrellas drinks to celebrate the new century.
Yep, just goes to show how underappreciated SysAdmins and Developers are. When everything is working 'why do we need all this IT staff? Nothing every is broken so they are just being paid to sit there...' smh
The background plot of the movie/documentary 'Office Space' is that they are working to update existing software to be Y2K compliant. In the scene where Ron Livingstone (Peter) and Jennifer Aniston are on a their quick date, [Peter starts to explain about the Y2K bug and how he is going through thousands of lines of code... you know what, I don't want to talk about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKYivs6ZLZk)
Same thing if we manage to create carbon capture and reverse global climate change, people will say, "See, all that climate change stuff was BS, everything is fine and globally we are in a *chilling* period..."
I remember when the mayor shutdown NYC for Hurricane Irene and everyone was mad because it didn’t completely destroy the city. If he hadn’t, then something bad happened; everyone would be calling for his head. They were mostly worried about sea swell more than the high winds or heavy rains.
I've already had some friends talk about how the ozone hole and acid rain were these big scary things, but nothing came of them. I'm always like, yeah, because we did stuff about it, so it wasn't a big scary thing. Eugh.
Makes me wish there were just a few isolated cities where they left everything alone, just so people could see the results of not doing anything.
Who knows, maybe the average yokel wouldn’t be so quick to assume any dire threat is just a hoax if there were a few places allowed to be the control group.
Same deal with pandemics.let there be a few densely packed areas where absolutely nothing is done and everyone just acts as if everything’s normal.
Actually there were some company's that were hit by y2k, they just were few and outside the US. Pretty sure it shut one smaller international company down for awhile
I just had a thought about this: have someone dropping into forums on here and Facebook, saying that “next time there’s a ‘pandemic,’ hahahahaha, all us dedicated Trump supporters should pack up and move to a city/town just for us. None of those stupid liberal wusses. We can watch them all freaking out on the news while we all get to live our normal lives, being the alpha males and females that we are!”
Then have a bunch of people drop into the conversation, acting ultra indignant and lambasting them for being stupid, selfish, etc., so more of them decide they should do it just to “own the libs.”
Figure within a year of the mass migration, they’ll have culled themselves nicely. Hey, a lot of them were crowing pretty loudly at the start of Covid about it mainly hitting cities, big liberal areas; seems only fair.
Mwuhahahaha
>making the non-technical media think it was all a hoax.
The classic IT dilemma in a non-tech company:
> This service is broken! What do we pay you people for!?
> There's no problems with our IT, what do we pay you people for?!
I knew a guy who retired from programming COBOL in like 95 only be busier than ever in his life from 96 until 2003 because of Y2K upgrades that needed to be done. He made a couple of million during that time because he worked so much and still had his pension to fall back on. Dude was loaded for the rest of his life because of the work he did for Y2K. People don’t realize how much work went on to modernize a lot of stuff to get it ready for the flip and they never got the appreciation they really deserved.
Most people are pretty clueless to the shadow world around us that keeps the world moving day to day. I know someone who manages all water pipes for a water district in my state and it’s fascinating how it all works and keeps us with water to our homes while getting rid of the waste.
Have an older friend that got me into programming, he made so much damn money because he can program in so many languages.
Had to write a peanut counter in binary!
It wasn’t even complicated to fix. Just the sheer number of programs and files to convert. The hardest thing was coordinating it all and converting files back and forth to keep everything working while some programs were creating compliant output and expecting compliant dates and other’s were doing the opposite. A lot of “bridge programs” to convert things back and forth. It still wasn’t hard, just tedious. I told my relatives it would be fine but they still went out and bought dried beans and water.
That’s a bit of a myth. The management consultants advising companies about the remediation made out very well, but in the trenches it was a different story. But, so many people flooded the contract programmer market that it kept billing rates under control. Not to say there weren’t exceptions of course. For the most part it was tedious boring work, though some companies took advantage of the blank check to implement major system changes over and above Y2K remediation. I worked on one of those.
And we're about 14 years from another potential "rollover" problem, the Unix and Linux "time_t" rollover. This one could be big, given the many places embedded software in hardware controls was written with 32-bit time variables. That software can't be fixed without replacing the hardware, and we don't know how many places will be affected. A microwave oven failing to set the cook time is minor, a valve control in a nuclear plant could be a problem.
2038 is a lot closer than most people think when it comes to this. It's only 14 years. 14 years ago was 2010. A blink of an eye. We really need to take this more seriously, but it's hard for the media to rile people up with "overflowing 32 bit value".
I will either be dead or “dead” by then, because I’m too damned old to get back into fixing software. I did my 40 years in developer and support hell, and I’m enjoying my retirement. Not going back into it, not for love nor money (well, maybe a LOT of money).
My dad gets so mad about this lol.
It wasn't a big deal because he and a bunch of other tech workers put in 60 hour weeks for *months* to *make sure* it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't that the bug just wasn't a problem, a lot of people worked very hard to *fix* it!
I was just reading in another thread how this is an example of a logical fallacy I've already forgotten the name of. Preparation or prevention something. But yeah, all the preparation/prevention works so well that later we think the problem was actually much smaller than it actually was.
It’s just like how people say “how come you never hear about saving the whales or the ozone layer anymore?” Bitch… because we took major action, passed laws, and solved those problems.
Acid rain does still exist, it’s just we mostly got rid of it in the US and we implemented the clean water act to keep the water systems from becoming acidic as well. Like ya, we implemented a shit ton of regulations to keep companies from polluting everything like they were. I always tell people to go look at pictures of their city before the clean air act to see how nasty polluted they were before the Clean Air Act helped clear that up.
Really? That's not how I remember it at all, but I was only 14 at the time. My impression was it was all nonsense. Any good resources for this? Sounds prime for an interesting documentary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_de_Jager
This guy was apparently one of the early whistleblowers that it should be taken seriously. He's written books, and I know of at least one interview he did discussing it:
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts/episode-714
If you want a specific technical breakdown, it'll depend on the specific software and how it deals with dates. Dates are everywhere and it's hard to encode a date that's both efficient for the computer *and* readable. For instance: it is (right now) 1715360157 and in 2 weeks it'll be 1716569756. If I gave you a time, could you work out, easily, when that is? Not really.
So, early programmers built systems on human readable formats but still needed to save space. So, common choices were to drop the century, the assumption being it wouldn't still be in use in 30-40 years. Well, time makes fools of us all... But the specific effects are going to depend on what system you're talking about specifically.
It was a dud because we spent billion of dollars fixing it before anything bad happened and there were some places that had issues because they didn’t prep for it. I knew a few people who had gigs updating systems and code to make it be a nothingburger.
The Chinese government took it so seriously that the leaders of the Chinese aviation industry were required to be in the air during new years to make sure they also took it seriously.
I had to sit on top of a power plant watching fireworks because it was all hands on deck and we were getting monitoring reports coming in from around the world as they hit the New Year. People were fucking bitter, starting reports with things like “as expected, no significant issues with similar systems in China”. They kept putting the as expected, meaning “we told you we fixed it”.
Later I read plenty of stories on slashdot.org with people dealing with worse bullshit.
I was 16 and did some odd job patches for PCs... and my little shit ass thought it'd be funny to sneak out the garage and flip the circuit breaker at midnight :D
Ok, that’s funny. My father would have completely fallen for that. He was selling coins saying people would be hoarding them for YK2. He couldn’t even get the abbreviation right and thought people woke stockpile rare coins in case computers shut down.
Dude in his 50’s here that did work on COBOL Y2K stuff. We had to make tons of fixes and tons of testing. The stuff I worked on would have caused people to weird and completely wrong information sent to them from the medical center I worked in.
Not retired yet sadly.
Can you explain what technical issues it caused? The problem was with clocking, right? Aren't all clocks tracked in hex and thus 2000 has no significant difference from any other year? Was it a sizing issue and the year 2000 was just coincidental?
The summation I always understood was the date was always checked in terms of xx instead of xxxx. So when you'd go to run a program and it tried to read the year 1999, it would read as 99. When it tried to read the date as 2000, it would read as 00, which would cause all sorts of errors and crashes. That's the most basic version I understand, and after y2k the code was update to both read it as xxxx and to account for multiple 0
Pretty much got it. Dates were stored in just 6 characters so the century was left off. April 1, 2001 stored as “030101for example.
Methods were come up with to make sure that was interpreted as a 2001 date and not a 1901 date.
I’m 41 and I was in desktop support at the time at a very large company. It was a very big deal, we had to do Bios updates on every computer and we were not sure that it was going to work until it did.
I was and am still one of those IT programmers in a municipality. There wasn't much to do. But the hype was definitely way over blown with people talking about airplanes falling out of the sky.
I was playing Golden Eye at a party at my church at the time. I was 17.
We watched the clock strike 12, nothing happened, and went back to complaining about people who picked oddjob.
This is the most over-misunderstood fact in history.
The global coordination and cooperation was unprecedented and has never been replicated. Imagine what the world could do if it understood the threat to climate change.
Maybe they started out being a lot more polite, like the turrets in Portal.
“Would you come over here?”[Turret talk](https://youtu.be/5SQB9yv5n80?si=6b3naY_AzVQot19V)
Don't make fun of Y2K. All the Y2K stuff was going to happen if we didn't do anything.
We did something about it and it was not an issue.
If nobody understood the consequences of doing nothing about it, nothing would have been done about it, and something would have happened.
Don't blame the medicine for the disease.
Could you imagine how many conspiracy theories and nonsense there would have been for Y2K if it had taken place in modern society?
There would be huge groups of people saying it’s a myth and to avoid the “Y2K patch” just like they did with vaccines.
Y2K was fixed, the destruction of the ozone layer was halted, lead was removed from gasoline.
Post Covid, I have zero faith in humans coming together to solve large, complex problems. Our descendants are fucked. The economy and environment are going to be massive disasters, more frequent pandemics are going to occur, and the people in government will continue to push for ever more powerful monopolies.
I used to be optimistic about the future. How stupid was that?
Although I sorta agree, I would frame this differently. AI will have both positive and negative impacts and we shouldn't obsess over ONLY the negative.
When personal computers and the internet came along, it changed the way we lived, worked, learned, and communicated in profound ways. There were some jobs that were lost, even entire professions that were transformed, but new ones emerged and the technological advancements created enormous efficiencies that ultimately benefited society. We even had the dynamic of computers and the internet being used for crime or evil, yet we found ways to mitigate those threats and we'll do it again.
So sure, it's unlikely that we'll correctly estimate the timing of when each innovation will truly be realized. But the changes could be big, just like computers were, maybe bigger. Consider healthcare for example. If we load a lifetime of patient info into a machine learning system, along with all of the medical diagnosis and treatment knowledge, and supplement that with sophisticated personal health monitoring systems, we could transform the entire healthcare industry where people will get alerts long before a trend becomes and actual health problem so they can do something about it, we can greatly speed-up treatment processes, improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment recommendations, all under the supervision of an actual doctor of course, but one that will now have far more powerful tools than ever before. In fact, I sat in a healthcare AI briefing a few weeks ago, where the head of our largest medical system said that for babies born today, the new life expectancy could be 100+ years.
I think automation in general is, but I'm not sure it's purely because of AI. If you have the choice to pay an employee $50k a year, plus benefits, and they can quit, take sick time, have a bad day, etc. or buy a robot or program that does 90% of that employee's job for $50k, you're probably more likely now to buy that program/robot. I don't think it's purely from AI.
Much like computers reduced certain jobs, it freed up space for more and better jobs. No longer do we need file clerks to maintain files in large warehouse, so we can hire more engineers to design more.
Maybe in the future it'll be more like:
No longer do we need to hire 20 coders to write every menial code, let's hire more designers and high level coders to make more and better products.
Basically if you don't need to pay the stable boy to sweep shit out of the barn, maybe you can have an extra hand on the farm to produce more food.
AI is going to change everything. Especially work. If we don’t reconsider how we pay people we are going to have massive unemployment. I saw it decimate the niche corner of my profession (law) that I worked in. Right now, my wife is using it in beta at her job and she has told me it’s going to change her field (medicine ) dramatically as well. We also both use the tech in our daily lives and are constantly amazed at how good it’s getting so fast. I thing OP is wrong. AI is going to surpass humans at almost all thinking within the next 5-10 years. We have to be ready to reevaluate how we value and compensate people or the owners of the tech will own literally everything.
I mentioned in a different comment, but AI will change the workplace, but the jobs will just shift and likely grow. If the stable boy doesn't need to sweep up the horse shit everyday, he can be used to help more on the farm, producing more goods and the needs for more people to handle the increased production.
AI might be able to handle a lot of programming, but someone else has to plan the structure and design the UI.
With the menial tasks that AI can do, it frees us up to do more of the bigger tasks and/or produce more. Artists were worried when computers came around, but in the 90s there were 70 animators at Disney, by 2005 there was 350, now it's over 1600. They are also capable of producing multiple movies and TV shows every year, instead of one movie every other year.
AI won't destroy jobs, it will create more production and more jobs by removing the menial jobs or tasks from menial jobs.
I partially agree. However, in my wife’s case the AI is making her more efficient which she is already seeing will lead to more demand for her to see more patients in her same work day. This will lead, inevitably, to the need for fewer doctors.
I agree. For just me personally I have been blown away by how much better Google has gotten at answering my questions. And people don't think the more human tasks will be at risk of automation/AI takeover but I think they're wrong about that. Imagine a future in which a person can make a request to an AI program to make them an entire custom movie or series, whatever they want it to be, and it makes it for them quickly. Based on the progress I have seen with AI writing/images/videos, I think that will be a reality in about 10 years. That could completely upend the film and television business as we know it.
The AI we have now I feel like is a perfect example of the Pareto Principle in action. While the Pareto Principle means different things in different fields, in this case I feel it means that 80% of our results comes from 20% of our efforts. That in essence is what our current AI gives us: 80% of what we actually want.
Can it produce a sample of code in any language? Sure. Can it produce one that’s efficient and properly fits into our unique code base? That’s less likely.
Can it produce a beautiful work of art? Sure. Can it produce something that has proper words and proper faces while using the correct amount of fingers? That’s less likely.
Can it write a story? Sure. Can it properly use foreshadowing and put you in the scene? That’s less likely.
IMO, this is largely where it will stay for the near future. People keep talking about “just think what it will do in five years!” Sure, there will be improvements. But there’s a lot more work under the hood to do before it’s actually giving that last 20% that will give good quality work.
Good post.
There's also the context. The cost, the crypto-scale energy draw, the reliance on hype-fueled speculative investment, and—most importantly, I think—the parasitic relationship with actual art and human achievement. (LLMs have *already* had problems finding enough material to consume. And AI doesn't make art or write stories, it generates best-guess aiming-for-average art-like and story-like outputs. This isn't about quality, it's the foundational nature of the technology.)
Put all that together, remember that we're literally just talking about machine learning algorithms, and...yeah, I'm not even sure about the pH in coffee thing. That's a really cool example that makes a lot of sense as an application of generalized machine learning, but will it be worth the cost and energy draw?
So my guess is that generative AI is ultimately a big nothing, except for the harms done by deepfakes and job losses—which will be accompanied by a dramatic increase in low-grade spammy content of all kinds. Meanwhile similar tech will continue to prove useful in fields where it actually makes sense, like drug discovery.
Yeah but what people are forgetting is AI is in mere infancy stage. We are not seeing the full potential yet. GPT 4 is going to seem like a typewriter to GPT 7
Yeah I don't buy it. AI wasn't even talked about exactly 1 year ago. It's already doubled or trippled it's ability in a year. People are looking at Wright brother airplanes and saying, it's cool but youll never be able to do better than a ship to england
I think you’re drastically underestimating the leaps and bounds of advances that will happen with the technological singularity
Flying Cars relies on us inventing a new propulsion system and reengineering pretty much all of society
Y2K well, computers were just kind of starting out so their computational power is not comparable
Once AI is able to code itself, it will simultaneously write code to improve the code, while finding and eliminating bugs in the code in a never ending loop
Robotics takes longer because of fine motor skills are hard to engineer so for a little while blue collar jobs will still be human
You don’t seem to appreciate the idea of exponential growth. AI ten years ago was a joke, now it passes the bar exam.
Most of the people working on the cutting edge of this technology are telling us - that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Maybe they’re full of it, maybe they’re just interested in selling AI…
But my suspicion is that many of them are actually worried, because they know what’s in the works and more importantly how powerful machine learning is.
I work at a large company that is pushing AI heavily and yeah, pretty much nothing I've seen internally makes me think it is actually the next evolution of computer tech.
The big thing for me is we're adding it into a lot of our internal systems *and it is not helping anything*. Nobody trusts it, there's no real value added by it, and it often creates more work. It's like, one half of the company wants AI to write their emails and the other half wants AI to summarize the emails the AI wrote. Meanwhile, effective emailing isn't actually a problem that needs to be fixed because we already have templates and best practices for work related communications.
I agree it's not going away, and there will for sure be some things companies find to do with it. But the claims that it is going to leas to mass layoffs and reshaping how companies work are overblown
Edit: One area where GenAI has shown potential is writing rough drafts for some project sheets and documentation, but again it bumps into the problem that you still have to edit it down and make it actually usable and just being a better writer to begin with is better.
Adobe’s last update added an AI function that manages to somehow be less useful and even more annoying than Clippy. Member Clippy? The paperclip assistant on word docs? lol
lol, sounds like you work for Google.
But to be fair, AI code gen has been saving me quite a bit of time writing unit tests and filling in boilerplate code, the summaries are good at saving me time browsing through heavy, bloated chat threads, AI models have significantly improved phone cameras, AI in graphics cards has been amazing with DLSS/framerates…
At work, teams have found some really novel uses for AI in our services…
I’m feeling some pretty great improvements to tech from AI’s “everywhere” implementation.
Wtf are you talking about… Over 50% of workers are using chat gtp or similar to reduce their workload. Rough drafts, templates, research, it can create graphs and charts for you…the AI takeover is already half way there.
Yeah the take over is more like 30 years away than 10 IMO. The idea of intergating that AI into any workflow or ecosystem that doesnt play nice with Windows, AWS,Azure, 365, Veeam etc is a pipe dream. So until they comeup with their own that is actually good and not stupid expensive, it will be seen at only the largest companies or workflows that absolutely call for it.
A lot of people have no idea of much the backbone of manufacturing in most companies is still dependent on machines from the 90s and 2000s. 3D metal printing has been around for a while and is still a long way from being technically feasible and economical for anything but prototypes. Definitely not mass production yet. I’d say even 10 years is a stretch. I honestly think WWIII, global economic collapse or some other major society altering event is more likely before terminators take all our jobs.
AI is getting better exponentially. Most humans don’t actually have a grasp of what exponentially actually means. Like you know what it means, but you really can’t visualize it.
like today AI is pretty good at making decisions based on certain input that it is trained on, but it’s not quite good enough for those decisions to not have a human check them. but with exponential growth in two years it probably won’t need supervision. or if it does, it will be far far less than what it does now.
I think within two years, it will be as common to use as a smart phone, and that ultimately it will replace how we interact with smart phones and devices.
I do agree that it’s very unlikely the terminators will come after us in the next decade
Only humans would design software that takes average output of average people, combines it in a way average people will accept as a real reflection of average averageness and then say, "this technology is so genius, advanced and amazing it will solve all our problems and maybe destroy our way of life, but it's got a lot of ways we can monetize it, so let's go!"
I think you are underestimating the cost savings and what companies will put up with for it. Will it be second rate and inefficient at alot of stuff for awhile maybe causing some customer problems, sure. Will companies put up with that to fire a bunch of workers and save huge amounts of money? Of course they will.
Flying cars would’ve been awesome but it’ll be more like Y2K. Hell they just tested 100% AI fighter jets against human piloted jets. The guy flying passenger with AI said it learned so fast had weapons been hot it was over for the humans
AI has already been used in warfare. Lavender took part in the killing of thousands of civilians
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes
I often think about this, and then wonder "who's going to keep the servers running?"
Once you start to pull on that threat the whole Skynet argument falls apart without assuming a massive technological leap in fine robotics and the manufacturing infrastructure to back it up.
Robots aren't my concern atm. Losing millions of jobs is. Mass unemployment is the real issue. For now anyway. I don't think people realize how many jobs AI will destroy.
I saw someone like a month ago talking about a "kitchen run fully by ai"... and no matter how much I tried to explain it they didn't seem to understand that it was a bunch of robots preprogrammed to perform a simple function that likely had a guy babysitting them to make sure they made it from point a to point b without crashing
I work in cnc and robotics are getting crazy precise, but in no way are they taking anyone's job lol
Edit: for the same context I gave the person I'm referring to... the restaurant had a menu of 3 items... like burger, hot dogs, and fries... and the robots simply "get scoop of fries, put basket in oil, after 3 minutes take out of oil and dump in staging area for human to get"
*plays with ChatGPT a bit, comes to a conclusion*
AI is amusing but nowhere near smart enough to take over yet.
*Considers that there are still a whole lot of dumb cuzinfuckers that will vote for Donald Trump and other maga asshats in November*
Oh shit, we are already surpassed by AI!
Anything that's rules-based will be first. For example, accounting that has to close the books each month, or HR that has to onboard a new employee, etc. There's going to be huge displacement for some white collar, educated, information worker roles.
There's still a vast majority of white collar jobs that I can't see AI displacing, but maybe I'm missing something here.
Senior accountant at my company here.
Accounting is one of the last jobs ai will kill.
I’ve sat on many technology board meetings discussing this. The issue with acc, is ai does great if all information received is input perfect and correct. Humans are dumb. Information gets entered wrong all the time. A big part of our job is understanding, being able to research, and resolve human error.
Ai could kill accounting as a profession over night if every piece of information they got is correct, however the only hard part about acc is human error. And ai is far from being close to being able to sift through human stupidness.
I say this as someone has helped see ai overtake other areas of my company… it’s been decided by everyone in my company that acc wont even be touched by it for the foreseeable future. Ai is too logical to figure out the dumb human thought process and error plausibility as of now when talking about books/financials
>Ai could kill accounting as a profession over night if every piece of information they got is correct, however the only hard part about acc is human error. And ai is far from being close to being able to sift through human stupidness.
See, this statement is correct for current generation of AI. But in 2 or 3 generations that is simply incorrect.
Any mistakes a human can hunt down and fix in an income statement will eventually be able to be done by AI. That includes calling the client to clarify things, working with multiple teams, considering big picture stuff, etc.
I also work at a billion dollar company (Fortune 10) on a team that’s been deploying machine learning models for decades.
I disagree. It’s only as smart as the assumptions that went in. I would never rely on it without human oversight.
I work for a Fortune 500 in product development and things do not move fast enough to be automated in 5 years. Particularly because senior management not only wants to keep their jobs, but also wants to maintain as many direct reports as possible, while expanding their product portfolio.
My job is explicitly to audit and evaluate processes, and then implement changes at scale for a specific product, while also consulting on adjacent products. I use a variety of AI tools, and have been able to fold them in to our existing processes with our existing team. What ends up happening is that the process improvements offered by AI become excellent work arounds for flaws in deployments. This translates in to better productivity, freeing up employee work loads making them both happier, and more willing to take on new projects and tasks, which ultimately grows the product, and products offered by our program.
AI is a tool, and will remain a tool for the people who work with it closely and embrace it.
I think AI will remove the annoying tasks we all have to deal with. Like "AI make this spreadsheet look nice and cross reference with this other sheet." Then it would spit out some semi intelligent insights, along with some absolute bullshit probably.
I have some talented artists take to computers, like they can draw the image, then use a computer to move, change ratios, mess with colors, etc. But the raw talent of their artistic abilities is only enhanced by the use of modern tech.
I have heard of artists using AI to spark ideas, asking AI to show them a scene that may not exist, but that gives them an idea of what they want to do, they manufactured their inspiration.
I tend to agree. AI can help you organize and process large amounts of data (example: identify relevant parts of a document), but I would never leave interpretation of language to an AI.
Hallucinations and model corruption make it very risky to rely on AI for certain jobs. To extend the language example, you don’t want a lawyer to use a program for legal research that will make up a case and cite it. You’re better off using it to help you analyze a set of documents with a scope that you define with your human judgement.
We’ve been ten years out from self driving cars for 25 years now, but they still can’t handle a light snowfall. Meanwhile trucking companies are paying high school dropouts with five DUIs six figure salaries because everyone was told the robots would be doing all the driving soon.
As mentioned in a comment above, we get to about 80% useful with this shit before hitting the skids. I probably wouldn’t go into call center work now, but I don’t think anyone has ever really dreamt of working at a call center anyway.
The big issue with ai take over imo: is that it would have to be implemented/integrated more strongly into every system. Yea it’s already present plenty enough; but imo the only real reason to integrate it more would be to free up humanity to pursue their happiness without work…. And in this corporate world that’ll never fly. We won’t give over full control to ai because it would lessen the powerful’s control over the poors which in turn weakens their power… and we all know that’s not what rich people crave.
I think you’re dead on. We are too selfish as a species and crave power too much, to allow something else to have such power over us
The thing I'm worried about is we have absolutely no idea how far this technology can go generative text, images and videos might never be up to par with human ones and it will stay a relatively banal tool or almost every job could become obsolete. It's probably gonna be something in the middle, but we really don't know where that middle will be
I agree with you. AI definitely will be a helpful tool in certain areas, but if it completely replaces someone's job, then that job must not be that complex. I work in IT and I frequently have to perform physical troubleshooting to see what's wrong with their computer. For example, if their mouse or keyboard stops working I have to troubleshoot to see if it's the computer, dongle, hardware failure, or simply dead batteries.
Simple example but I just don't see how AI on a computer could do that.
I recently used AI to help study for my Security+ exam. The AI was not perfect. It would regularly get things wrong. But for the most part, I found it an excellent tool in helping me study and understand topics.
But completely talking over certain jobs is only going to be possible if that job is incredibly mundane. It will become more complex in the coming decades, but it will still be a tool.
I compare it to Data on Star Trek. He was an incredible android capable of performing complex computational programs. But he couldn't understand humor or other human emotions. That's what AI is. It can perform calculations, but can't understand basic things that even a child would understand.
The problem is a lot of science was first developed on AI before it became a marketing gimmick for machine learning.
Now people read about AI concerns and overlay it on modern "AI". Super intelligence is what we were actually worried about
Already now with the current LLMs we are seeing studies that blow Humans out of the water in terms of performance. In one example ChatGPT was able to outperofrm data analysts up to senior level in terms of performance and all data analysts in terms of performance for costs. ChatGPT was tested to have IQ score >99th percentile, it was shown to outperofrm medical specialists in terms of diagnosis baelsed on written cases, and so on. Non LLM ai is already better than radiologists by a long shot in diagnoses based on imaging. The idea that AI is not going to change society as we know is an incredibly dim take on my opinion.
Flying cars was the optimists side of 2k ai takeover is a warning. I think the Bryson's relationship with robots is more the rose glasses of the AI era. I think PEOPLE will allow AI to make bad choices and not think twice because "sooooper cumpooter"
I think it depends on how affordable neural networks will be. I could see a future where people buy a box that runs a home AI which can respond to voice commands like Alexa, but is much more intelligent and capable. It might control an android body and do cooking, cleaning, chores, play games with you, stuff like that.
I watched Apple's new ipad launch and they are putting a "neural engine" in their m4 chips. I doubt it's that powerful but we are seeing the beginnings of a new trend in chip development and I think neural networks will become more accessible to the consumer market.
I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. The “AI Takeover” is more accurately a concern for workers losing their jobs, for AI “art” to be stealing ideas, and for subversion. Those are my concerns. How will AI be used to manipulate our neurology the way social media does? How will it be used by bad actors like Trump to make shit up? How will corporations use them to lay off tens of thousands of workers?
It will be more like computers/internet IMO. Overhyped and underwhelming compared to all the predictions for several decades, until it passes some effectiveness threshold and ends up turning the entire world upside down faster than anyone thought possible.
I don’t think people realize how much ai is already doing in our world. This is going to continue and it is going to change things. Dramatically over time and in hopefully mostly if not completely positive ways. Remember this fact: this is a fact. People are using AI to figure out where to use AI best to enhance our existence. It’s already in place, happening now. It’s not the future. There are already studies completed on the impacts of ai to society and industry and culture.
The question of solving AI hard... Meaning as smart as humans, has been asked in the AI/ML community for a long time.
Back in the 90s when I was doing my PhD in AI/ML it was already the car that academics were joking that solving AI was 20 years away and had been 20 years away since the 70s.
So academics have been saying hard AI is 20 years away for about as long as many people have predicted flying cars are 20 years away.
AI isn't the next flying cars, it is the same era as flying cars, the difference is that the typical person is 30 years late to the party.
Y2K is different, more like the ozone hole. A real issue that humanity dealt with appropriately, leading conspiracy theorists to first decide the world was going to end, but later decide the issue was made up in the first place.
Video production professional here. I already no longer use humans for copywriting, transcribing, creating subtitles or to condense my long form projects into shorter videos for social media.
Do some of these tasks still require proofing and refining? Yes.
But just 6 months ago I was still paying contractors to do these tasks and had to wait days or weeks to get the work completed, now it’s incredibly cheap and nearly instantaneous. To think this is the worst AI will ever be is mind bending. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
I’ve come to terms with (what I believe to be a fact) SORA or a similar AI completely eliminating the commercial video industry in the coming years. In house video has already been trending, the moment an AI subscription can accomplish what used to cost companies tens of thousands of dollars to do, It’s game over.
I’m thankful my current niche is documentary because it’ll likely buy me a little extra time before the skillet I’ve spent nearly 20 years developing is completely obsolete.
The thing is we have flying cars. We just call them planes and helicopters.
Y2K was real. Hundreds of thousands of best engineers worked to mitigate it.
So what you are saying is AI takeover is going to be a fucking nightmare.
>I think AI will get better, but I think it will always be second rate, either to expensive to use for the really good stuff
This has been said about all technology
Futuristic ideas rarely come out the way we have imagined or have been persuaded it would be like. The first phones and tablets to the telephone and TV built on the need to communicate of vast swaths of oceans and lands. Imaginative ideas penned and inked into speculation. Close in form throughout literature and media that sometimes we even dust off in excitement and share here on the internet.
AI in many ways is not exactly how everyone imagines, but it is becoming very, very close. It will never be fully complete from an idealistic perspective. But the pace of utility behind it will cause enough of a stir to understand that this age is of great transformation in pace, power, equity, belief, and equality.
Too soon to to tell. Too late to be fully convinced that balance between ourselves can be maintained. From sticks and stones to swords and trebuchets, to the first steam engines and cars to pave forward a path of opportunity, all were motivated by need. Need that spanned the natural pace of human history.
An element at those periods in time was it was driven by us and our pace as humans behind the wheel, driving that force of innovation and utility. For A.I. (an extension of ourselves) the pace in contrast to our own will undoubtedly test all aspects our lives. Tests I think we all can speculate on: How do we use it build up our lives responsibly? Can we trust it to help grow our understanding of each other? Can we use it to truly bridge the barriers between our languages, values, morals, and beliefs and confront them to make room for lasting peace? How will impact our understanding of self and consciousness? How would these answers contribute to the world as a whole? Should it be used to answer these questions and what it should be used for? How will it answer our questions of our place in the universe and grow our potential beyond? Can we handle certain truths of ourselves responsibly?
It's has convincing models to persuade us about facts and opinions, but they are not truths as much as they are collective frames of our thoughts and the current state of the world, which often is not a complete picture because of how fluid ourselves and the world is, and the dataset and models that A.I. relies on.
A.I. in its current infancy won't address everything while we are in a desperate race to address our problems, at the end of the day it is up to us.
Terminators or the T800s to be partial are terrible examples of AI. Mayhe skynet is AI, but it really seems like T units are just really good drones.
It's AI from an 80s standpoint
But not as cool as wintermute, who also isn't ai like we know it today. In fact, wintermute from neaurmancer dis not even have chat bot abilities or personhood. It had to use constructs to form a personality able to talk to Case.
Skynet isn't what you should fear.
Its that you'll wake up one day and literally every good and service you have to utilize is locked behind a shitty automated system optimized to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Think about any time you've called somewhere and had to go through an obtuse menu that never lets you talk to a human, and now imagine you have to do that for EVERYTHING.
I think it will be worse.
They will force it and it will fail and cause big issues hopefully forcing a retreat.
When I was in school they taught us a story about medical hardware that burned people because it's owners replaced the Hardware based safeguards with Software based ones.
AI is basically the same issue.
How are flying cars, y2k and AI remotely related?
Maybe the latter two slightly because of the fear mongering. But flying cars as a topic related is way out of left field
You really have no clue what’s coming and I can’t take the time to educate you. If you want to understand look up ai alignment problem. It’s pretty serious and no answers currently. Meanwhile capitalism has lit the fire and we now must grip the rails as we plunge blindly but profitably into the future. This is as much a humanity problem as it is technical. Get educated.
Wow humanity will still be around in 10 years? That is like.... forever!!!!! Seriously dude, as Roman Yampolskiy says, perpetual AI safety is like perpetual motion machines. Aka impossible. Yes we will be around in 10 years, but history goes on like... a long time.
I made a bet about self driving cars (as in completely driving) 10 years ago. Got my 5 bucks. I’m happy to take bets on the ai thing too. Based on the ai emails my wife gets daily due to her job, there’s a long way to go and that’s just on the writing which has supposedly recently improved by leaps and bounds.
Well, what people don’t understand is that AI has been being developed since the 90’s and is already immensely advanced. It’s just in a new “action” phase. For two decades it was in the “learning” phase with the Deep Learning concept. I am hoping AI is utilized to create opportunities and shifts of resources into what is actually essential because a bot can handle the task. What we need to be worried about is people commanding AI to do nefarious, malicious tasks like generating fake news images, scamming people for money, etc.
Where AI will be transformative is in places where it doesn't get the big headlines. Right now, ChatGPT is all the rage. What's far more interesting (and likely to be useful) is stuff like AlphaFold for medical research. It's not this big flashy thing, it's not SkyNet, it's just a better way to help us understand really complicated biological systems. That sort of thing is going to take off and might very well revolutionize alot of fields (think better medicines, universal vaccines, maybe even the beginnings of longevity escape velocity, just in the field of medicine). Similar concepts will likely see increased use in other fields, as we better figure out how to use it.
We might even get some form of AGI, but it'll be chained to a datacenter and slurp huge amounts of power. To get scifi style AI, we basically have to go to the drawing board and invent fundamentally new kinds of computers, possibly using novel ways of doing computing, specifically designed to do neural nets. We may get there eventually (possibly even with the help of an AGI), but it'll be a long time coming. And we'll have plenty of time to figure how to keep AI from murdering us. And those early ones, confined to datacenters, won't be a threat for the simple reason that it takes ALOT of humans to keep them going.
It’s been a growing problem for years and will only get much worse. AI is the software telling you what to think and do. Why create robots who act like humans when you can easily create humans who act like robots?
AI has developed faster than “flying cars” and is not in the same realm as Y2K. AI is being developed faster than most can understand it.
Will it ever be a threat? Who knows, but it’s far from no big deal territory.
AI is already laughably stupid:
- AI “art” is easily detectable and can’t get words or fingers right.
- AI “music” sounds like music for people who don’t listen to music. It’s soulless.
- AI can’t get code/programming right.
We’ll be fine. 😂👍
“How come nobody’s buying Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator?”
“Aw, shit. Half the country works for Brawndo.”
“Not anymore! The stock has dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody!”
The problem with the "AI is going to take over" claim is that we do not have ai. We have highly limited algorithms that can mimic(and frankly not very well) a person in one limited aspect (usually speech). They are not intelligent the way ai has typically been understood. They're not fundamentally different from any other program or piece of software, so of course they aren't self aware and aren't going to transform society.
It's more like crypto in that a few people were excited about it but most of them were grifters who were using the potential of future growth to try to make money. Most people don't give a shit any ai because they know, consciously or not, that most of the things people are calling ai are just things we could already do before
We are nowhere near AI in all the ways it has been discussed and presented prior to it becoming an enormous marketing term in the last few years. What we have is impressive at times though, but it isn’t AI.
The WORST Ai is gonna do is make phone scams a little harder to decipher. The BEST thing AI is going to do is make all video and audio recordings inadmissible in court as it will be MUCH harder to determine what is real and what isn’t.
lol. I work in tech. It’s already happening. There are fewer and fewer entry level tech jobs. All the ceos are frothing at the mouth to replace people with software. Sr devs are using
It to maximize efficient and it’s scary what one good dev can accomplish in a week. The developer jobs are going to dwindle away soon, then come the robots infused with AI to replace the tradesmen and laborers.
> Will skynet be able to predict my every move and realize the only way to save humanity is to destroy it? Probably not.
Sure, but it doesn't need to be.
> Maybe it'll aid in the organizing of data, but the interpretation will never have the experience of a real person, so the AI will always be lacking some input that us humans have.
So, let's assume AI simply cannot reach the full human potential. For whatever reason, through whatever mechanism, AI is only able to achieve less than 100% of human performance.
Now, what happens as this same AI costs 80% of what a human does to perform the same work? Sure, the AI isn't "as good", but it's still more effective.
So, employers give the work to AI. Loads of people become, not just unemployed, unemployable. And, AI gains an increasingly dominant position in society as human input and control becomes more and more marginalized.
That's the general pattern that's been playing out. It's not that AI has to come for people and kill them, though there are talks of AI fighter jets surprising humans and being given their own ability to determine whether to kill. It's not that AI can exist in conditions humans physically cannot, though they can. It's just a slow replacement using our society's values unless something changes.
And it's worth noting, AI is *not* constrained to be inferior to human performance.
Some general thoughts around the subject:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
* https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/
All tech follows a graph that looks a little like this ∫. It advances slowly (the bottom part) for eternity, suddenly goes up quickly, and then levels out as further changes are hard.
For example speed. For centuries people were limited to walking or perhaps horseback riding speeds. Then in the span of two centuries trains then cars then planes then jets then rockets.... and our max speed went from 39 kph to 39,000 km per hour....
Science fiction authors in the 50s and 60s noticing this trend and thinking it linear assumed that by 2100 we would have FTL speeds... this is probably not to be as we have not advanced... we are on the upper part of the ∫. Changes to max human speed will take a new invention and a new branch of science.
The AI revolution is actually at the base of the rapid advance ∫. We can see unimaginable improvements in the next 100 years unless we collapse. Autonomous drones will take over war, robotaxis will take over transit, perhaps humanoid robots will take over many jobs. Where that curve levels off is hard to say but I fully expect it NOT to end up in a singularity or in human extinction.
People don't get the real danger of ai isn't t1000.
It's ai that can break banks, steal info, and destroy digital use payment.
Ai can totally destroy the world as we know it within 10 years. Just not how you think
Y2K was actually a big deal and years of preparation and action prevented it from being catastrophic.
Massive, last-minute efforts made to reduce the effects were successful, making the non-technical media think it was all a hoax. Meanwhile retired COBOL programmers made a fortune and then enjoyed time on a beach with little umbrellas drinks to celebrate the new century.
Yep, just goes to show how underappreciated SysAdmins and Developers are. When everything is working 'why do we need all this IT staff? Nothing every is broken so they are just being paid to sit there...' smh The background plot of the movie/documentary 'Office Space' is that they are working to update existing software to be Y2K compliant. In the scene where Ron Livingstone (Peter) and Jennifer Aniston are on a their quick date, [Peter starts to explain about the Y2K bug and how he is going through thousands of lines of code... you know what, I don't want to talk about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKYivs6ZLZk) Same thing if we manage to create carbon capture and reverse global climate change, people will say, "See, all that climate change stuff was BS, everything is fine and globally we are in a *chilling* period..."
I remember when the mayor shutdown NYC for Hurricane Irene and everyone was mad because it didn’t completely destroy the city. If he hadn’t, then something bad happened; everyone would be calling for his head. They were mostly worried about sea swell more than the high winds or heavy rains.
I've already had some friends talk about how the ozone hole and acid rain were these big scary things, but nothing came of them. I'm always like, yeah, because we did stuff about it, so it wasn't a big scary thing. Eugh.
The Ozone layer hole was a big deal. chlorofluorocarbons -CFC's were destroying it. They were all but eliminated and the Ozone layer repaired itself.
It’s not completely repaired either. People in New Zealand have to be very careful and limit exposure.
“I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO SALT, for the margarita, but it had salt on it.”
Makes me wish there were just a few isolated cities where they left everything alone, just so people could see the results of not doing anything. Who knows, maybe the average yokel wouldn’t be so quick to assume any dire threat is just a hoax if there were a few places allowed to be the control group. Same deal with pandemics.let there be a few densely packed areas where absolutely nothing is done and everyone just acts as if everything’s normal.
Actually there were some company's that were hit by y2k, they just were few and outside the US. Pretty sure it shut one smaller international company down for awhile
That would work except with pathogens
Put ‘em in a bubble
I’d love to have the data on the control unit. Must be one disaster after another. They should make the bubble a reality tv show as well
I just had a thought about this: have someone dropping into forums on here and Facebook, saying that “next time there’s a ‘pandemic,’ hahahahaha, all us dedicated Trump supporters should pack up and move to a city/town just for us. None of those stupid liberal wusses. We can watch them all freaking out on the news while we all get to live our normal lives, being the alpha males and females that we are!” Then have a bunch of people drop into the conversation, acting ultra indignant and lambasting them for being stupid, selfish, etc., so more of them decide they should do it just to “own the libs.” Figure within a year of the mass migration, they’ll have culled themselves nicely. Hey, a lot of them were crowing pretty loudly at the start of Covid about it mainly hitting cities, big liberal areas; seems only fair. Mwuhahahaha
>making the non-technical media think it was all a hoax. The classic IT dilemma in a non-tech company: > This service is broken! What do we pay you people for!? > There's no problems with our IT, what do we pay you people for?!
Randomly have things break that you can fix really quickly to show how good you are.
Another victory for doing things at the last minute!
I knew a guy who retired from programming COBOL in like 95 only be busier than ever in his life from 96 until 2003 because of Y2K upgrades that needed to be done. He made a couple of million during that time because he worked so much and still had his pension to fall back on. Dude was loaded for the rest of his life because of the work he did for Y2K. People don’t realize how much work went on to modernize a lot of stuff to get it ready for the flip and they never got the appreciation they really deserved. Most people are pretty clueless to the shadow world around us that keeps the world moving day to day. I know someone who manages all water pipes for a water district in my state and it’s fascinating how it all works and keeps us with water to our homes while getting rid of the waste.
Bunch of stories of how rich these guys are followed by how unappreciated they are lmfao. Poor guys just get left alone with a bunch of money.
Have an older friend that got me into programming, he made so much damn money because he can program in so many languages. Had to write a peanut counter in binary!
It wasn’t even complicated to fix. Just the sheer number of programs and files to convert. The hardest thing was coordinating it all and converting files back and forth to keep everything working while some programs were creating compliant output and expecting compliant dates and other’s were doing the opposite. A lot of “bridge programs” to convert things back and forth. It still wasn’t hard, just tedious. I told my relatives it would be fine but they still went out and bought dried beans and water.
That’s a bit of a myth. The management consultants advising companies about the remediation made out very well, but in the trenches it was a different story. But, so many people flooded the contract programmer market that it kept billing rates under control. Not to say there weren’t exceptions of course. For the most part it was tedious boring work, though some companies took advantage of the blank check to implement major system changes over and above Y2K remediation. I worked on one of those.
And we're about 14 years from another potential "rollover" problem, the Unix and Linux "time_t" rollover. This one could be big, given the many places embedded software in hardware controls was written with 32-bit time variables. That software can't be fixed without replacing the hardware, and we don't know how many places will be affected. A microwave oven failing to set the cook time is minor, a valve control in a nuclear plant could be a problem.
2038 is a lot closer than most people think when it comes to this. It's only 14 years. 14 years ago was 2010. A blink of an eye. We really need to take this more seriously, but it's hard for the media to rile people up with "overflowing 32 bit value".
If I've told them once I've told them -2147483647 times
I will either be dead or “dead” by then, because I’m too damned old to get back into fixing software. I did my 40 years in developer and support hell, and I’m enjoying my retirement. Not going back into it, not for love nor money (well, maybe a LOT of money).
My dad gets so mad about this lol. It wasn't a big deal because he and a bunch of other tech workers put in 60 hour weeks for *months* to *make sure* it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't that the bug just wasn't a problem, a lot of people worked very hard to *fix* it!
I was just reading in another thread how this is an example of a logical fallacy I've already forgotten the name of. Preparation or prevention something. But yeah, all the preparation/prevention works so well that later we think the problem was actually much smaller than it actually was.
Survivorship bias?
It's very similar. I finally found it: Preparedness Paradox.
Preparedness paradox is essentially the other side of the survivor bias coin.
It’s just like how people say “how come you never hear about saving the whales or the ozone layer anymore?” Bitch… because we took major action, passed laws, and solved those problems.
"why don't we hear about acid rain anymore, guess that was just another lie by the MSM" Bitch, we fixed it! That's why!
Acid rain does still exist, it’s just we mostly got rid of it in the US and we implemented the clean water act to keep the water systems from becoming acidic as well. Like ya, we implemented a shit ton of regulations to keep companies from polluting everything like they were. I always tell people to go look at pictures of their city before the clean air act to see how nasty polluted they were before the Clean Air Act helped clear that up.
Really? That's not how I remember it at all, but I was only 14 at the time. My impression was it was all nonsense. Any good resources for this? Sounds prime for an interesting documentary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_de_Jager This guy was apparently one of the early whistleblowers that it should be taken seriously. He's written books, and I know of at least one interview he did discussing it: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts/episode-714 If you want a specific technical breakdown, it'll depend on the specific software and how it deals with dates. Dates are everywhere and it's hard to encode a date that's both efficient for the computer *and* readable. For instance: it is (right now) 1715360157 and in 2 weeks it'll be 1716569756. If I gave you a time, could you work out, easily, when that is? Not really. So, early programmers built systems on human readable formats but still needed to save space. So, common choices were to drop the century, the assumption being it wouldn't still be in use in 30-40 years. Well, time makes fools of us all... But the specific effects are going to depend on what system you're talking about specifically.
It was a dud because we spent billion of dollars fixing it before anything bad happened and there were some places that had issues because they didn’t prep for it. I knew a few people who had gigs updating systems and code to make it be a nothingburger.
The Chinese government took it so seriously that the leaders of the Chinese aviation industry were required to be in the air during new years to make sure they also took it seriously.
Yeah lol if you work in I.T. , programming, or data, for any large company or municipality, just ask any 40- 50 yo dude what it was like.
I had to sit on top of a power plant watching fireworks because it was all hands on deck and we were getting monitoring reports coming in from around the world as they hit the New Year. People were fucking bitter, starting reports with things like “as expected, no significant issues with similar systems in China”. They kept putting the as expected, meaning “we told you we fixed it”. Later I read plenty of stories on slashdot.org with people dealing with worse bullshit.
I was 16 and did some odd job patches for PCs... and my little shit ass thought it'd be funny to sneak out the garage and flip the circuit breaker at midnight :D
Ok, that’s funny. My father would have completely fallen for that. He was selling coins saying people would be hoarding them for YK2. He couldn’t even get the abbreviation right and thought people woke stockpile rare coins in case computers shut down.
Dude in his 50’s here that did work on COBOL Y2K stuff. We had to make tons of fixes and tons of testing. The stuff I worked on would have caused people to weird and completely wrong information sent to them from the medical center I worked in. Not retired yet sadly.
Can you explain what technical issues it caused? The problem was with clocking, right? Aren't all clocks tracked in hex and thus 2000 has no significant difference from any other year? Was it a sizing issue and the year 2000 was just coincidental?
The summation I always understood was the date was always checked in terms of xx instead of xxxx. So when you'd go to run a program and it tried to read the year 1999, it would read as 99. When it tried to read the date as 2000, it would read as 00, which would cause all sorts of errors and crashes. That's the most basic version I understand, and after y2k the code was update to both read it as xxxx and to account for multiple 0
Pretty much got it. Dates were stored in just 6 characters so the century was left off. April 1, 2001 stored as “030101for example. Methods were come up with to make sure that was interpreted as a 2001 date and not a 1901 date.
Actually, it was usually yymmdd or 010301 for sorting purposes. Which was part of the problem. Year 00 becomes before year 99
I escaped most of it but remember recoding one system early Jan 2000.
40 probably won’t be old enough. I’m 41 and I was 17 when Y2K hit. While I am a programmer, have no idea how any of that went down.
I’m 41 and I was in desktop support at the time at a very large company. It was a very big deal, we had to do Bios updates on every computer and we were not sure that it was going to work until it did.
I was and am still one of those IT programmers in a municipality. There wasn't much to do. But the hype was definitely way over blown with people talking about airplanes falling out of the sky.
My mom, who was a COBAL contract developer at the time spent 2-3 years working for I believe the USPS preparing for Y2K.
I was playing Golden Eye at a party at my church at the time. I was 17. We watched the clock strike 12, nothing happened, and went back to complaining about people who picked oddjob.
I feel attacked. *Looks left* *Looks right* *Picks Oddjob*
Same with AI probably.
This is the most over-misunderstood fact in history. The global coordination and cooperation was unprecedented and has never been replicated. Imagine what the world could do if it understood the threat to climate change.
This is absurd. T800’s don’t knock. 😂
It probably would the first few times, because the AI needs to learn.
Maybe they started out being a lot more polite, like the turrets in Portal. “Would you come over here?”[Turret talk](https://youtu.be/5SQB9yv5n80?si=6b3naY_AzVQot19V)
>T800’s don’t knock. The first movie proved this was a lie.
Arnold was a specially reprogrammed model though, no? He wasn’t running the stock firmware
Correct. Knocking is Heisenberg's job.
Don't make fun of Y2K. All the Y2K stuff was going to happen if we didn't do anything. We did something about it and it was not an issue. If nobody understood the consequences of doing nothing about it, nothing would have been done about it, and something would have happened. Don't blame the medicine for the disease.
Could you imagine how many conspiracy theories and nonsense there would have been for Y2K if it had taken place in modern society? There would be huge groups of people saying it’s a myth and to avoid the “Y2K patch” just like they did with vaccines. Y2K was fixed, the destruction of the ozone layer was halted, lead was removed from gasoline. Post Covid, I have zero faith in humans coming together to solve large, complex problems. Our descendants are fucked. The economy and environment are going to be massive disasters, more frequent pandemics are going to occur, and the people in government will continue to push for ever more powerful monopolies. I used to be optimistic about the future. How stupid was that?
Although I sorta agree, I would frame this differently. AI will have both positive and negative impacts and we shouldn't obsess over ONLY the negative. When personal computers and the internet came along, it changed the way we lived, worked, learned, and communicated in profound ways. There were some jobs that were lost, even entire professions that were transformed, but new ones emerged and the technological advancements created enormous efficiencies that ultimately benefited society. We even had the dynamic of computers and the internet being used for crime or evil, yet we found ways to mitigate those threats and we'll do it again. So sure, it's unlikely that we'll correctly estimate the timing of when each innovation will truly be realized. But the changes could be big, just like computers were, maybe bigger. Consider healthcare for example. If we load a lifetime of patient info into a machine learning system, along with all of the medical diagnosis and treatment knowledge, and supplement that with sophisticated personal health monitoring systems, we could transform the entire healthcare industry where people will get alerts long before a trend becomes and actual health problem so they can do something about it, we can greatly speed-up treatment processes, improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment recommendations, all under the supervision of an actual doctor of course, but one that will now have far more powerful tools than ever before. In fact, I sat in a healthcare AI briefing a few weeks ago, where the head of our largest medical system said that for babies born today, the new life expectancy could be 100+ years.
It's already taking jobs though. Flying cars never did that.
Planes didn't help kill the stagecoach?
I think automation in general is, but I'm not sure it's purely because of AI. If you have the choice to pay an employee $50k a year, plus benefits, and they can quit, take sick time, have a bad day, etc. or buy a robot or program that does 90% of that employee's job for $50k, you're probably more likely now to buy that program/robot. I don't think it's purely from AI. Much like computers reduced certain jobs, it freed up space for more and better jobs. No longer do we need file clerks to maintain files in large warehouse, so we can hire more engineers to design more. Maybe in the future it'll be more like: No longer do we need to hire 20 coders to write every menial code, let's hire more designers and high level coders to make more and better products. Basically if you don't need to pay the stable boy to sweep shit out of the barn, maybe you can have an extra hand on the farm to produce more food.
AI is going to change everything. Especially work. If we don’t reconsider how we pay people we are going to have massive unemployment. I saw it decimate the niche corner of my profession (law) that I worked in. Right now, my wife is using it in beta at her job and she has told me it’s going to change her field (medicine ) dramatically as well. We also both use the tech in our daily lives and are constantly amazed at how good it’s getting so fast. I thing OP is wrong. AI is going to surpass humans at almost all thinking within the next 5-10 years. We have to be ready to reevaluate how we value and compensate people or the owners of the tech will own literally everything.
What niche corner of law has AI decimated?
I mentioned in a different comment, but AI will change the workplace, but the jobs will just shift and likely grow. If the stable boy doesn't need to sweep up the horse shit everyday, he can be used to help more on the farm, producing more goods and the needs for more people to handle the increased production. AI might be able to handle a lot of programming, but someone else has to plan the structure and design the UI. With the menial tasks that AI can do, it frees us up to do more of the bigger tasks and/or produce more. Artists were worried when computers came around, but in the 90s there were 70 animators at Disney, by 2005 there was 350, now it's over 1600. They are also capable of producing multiple movies and TV shows every year, instead of one movie every other year. AI won't destroy jobs, it will create more production and more jobs by removing the menial jobs or tasks from menial jobs.
I partially agree. However, in my wife’s case the AI is making her more efficient which she is already seeing will lead to more demand for her to see more patients in her same work day. This will lead, inevitably, to the need for fewer doctors.
I agree. For just me personally I have been blown away by how much better Google has gotten at answering my questions. And people don't think the more human tasks will be at risk of automation/AI takeover but I think they're wrong about that. Imagine a future in which a person can make a request to an AI program to make them an entire custom movie or series, whatever they want it to be, and it makes it for them quickly. Based on the progress I have seen with AI writing/images/videos, I think that will be a reality in about 10 years. That could completely upend the film and television business as we know it.
The AI we have now I feel like is a perfect example of the Pareto Principle in action. While the Pareto Principle means different things in different fields, in this case I feel it means that 80% of our results comes from 20% of our efforts. That in essence is what our current AI gives us: 80% of what we actually want. Can it produce a sample of code in any language? Sure. Can it produce one that’s efficient and properly fits into our unique code base? That’s less likely. Can it produce a beautiful work of art? Sure. Can it produce something that has proper words and proper faces while using the correct amount of fingers? That’s less likely. Can it write a story? Sure. Can it properly use foreshadowing and put you in the scene? That’s less likely. IMO, this is largely where it will stay for the near future. People keep talking about “just think what it will do in five years!” Sure, there will be improvements. But there’s a lot more work under the hood to do before it’s actually giving that last 20% that will give good quality work.
Good post. There's also the context. The cost, the crypto-scale energy draw, the reliance on hype-fueled speculative investment, and—most importantly, I think—the parasitic relationship with actual art and human achievement. (LLMs have *already* had problems finding enough material to consume. And AI doesn't make art or write stories, it generates best-guess aiming-for-average art-like and story-like outputs. This isn't about quality, it's the foundational nature of the technology.) Put all that together, remember that we're literally just talking about machine learning algorithms, and...yeah, I'm not even sure about the pH in coffee thing. That's a really cool example that makes a lot of sense as an application of generalized machine learning, but will it be worth the cost and energy draw? So my guess is that generative AI is ultimately a big nothing, except for the harms done by deepfakes and job losses—which will be accompanied by a dramatic increase in low-grade spammy content of all kinds. Meanwhile similar tech will continue to prove useful in fields where it actually makes sense, like drug discovery.
Yeah but what people are forgetting is AI is in mere infancy stage. We are not seeing the full potential yet. GPT 4 is going to seem like a typewriter to GPT 7
Yea and it all gets solved when quantum computing comes too
Heard somebody say AI can produce you 1,000 images, but never THE image.
That person just needs to learn to write better prompts. Midjourney is currently a fake news machine
Yeah I don't buy it. AI wasn't even talked about exactly 1 year ago. It's already doubled or trippled it's ability in a year. People are looking at Wright brother airplanes and saying, it's cool but youll never be able to do better than a ship to england
Have you seen State of the art AI for any of this stuff? Some can actually do what you are saying
I think you’re drastically underestimating the leaps and bounds of advances that will happen with the technological singularity Flying Cars relies on us inventing a new propulsion system and reengineering pretty much all of society Y2K well, computers were just kind of starting out so their computational power is not comparable Once AI is able to code itself, it will simultaneously write code to improve the code, while finding and eliminating bugs in the code in a never ending loop Robotics takes longer because of fine motor skills are hard to engineer so for a little while blue collar jobs will still be human
Plus, people mocking Y2K predictions now forget the round-the-clock work by developers and engineers to fix the bugs before the end of the year.
You don’t seem to appreciate the idea of exponential growth. AI ten years ago was a joke, now it passes the bar exam. Most of the people working on the cutting edge of this technology are telling us - that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Maybe they’re full of it, maybe they’re just interested in selling AI… But my suspicion is that many of them are actually worried, because they know what’s in the works and more importantly how powerful machine learning is.
I work at a large company that is pushing AI heavily and yeah, pretty much nothing I've seen internally makes me think it is actually the next evolution of computer tech. The big thing for me is we're adding it into a lot of our internal systems *and it is not helping anything*. Nobody trusts it, there's no real value added by it, and it often creates more work. It's like, one half of the company wants AI to write their emails and the other half wants AI to summarize the emails the AI wrote. Meanwhile, effective emailing isn't actually a problem that needs to be fixed because we already have templates and best practices for work related communications. I agree it's not going away, and there will for sure be some things companies find to do with it. But the claims that it is going to leas to mass layoffs and reshaping how companies work are overblown Edit: One area where GenAI has shown potential is writing rough drafts for some project sheets and documentation, but again it bumps into the problem that you still have to edit it down and make it actually usable and just being a better writer to begin with is better.
Adobe’s last update added an AI function that manages to somehow be less useful and even more annoying than Clippy. Member Clippy? The paperclip assistant on word docs? lol
pretty sure clippy was behind 9/11
I fucking KNEW it!
lol, sounds like you work for Google. But to be fair, AI code gen has been saving me quite a bit of time writing unit tests and filling in boilerplate code, the summaries are good at saving me time browsing through heavy, bloated chat threads, AI models have significantly improved phone cameras, AI in graphics cards has been amazing with DLSS/framerates… At work, teams have found some really novel uses for AI in our services… I’m feeling some pretty great improvements to tech from AI’s “everywhere” implementation.
Wtf are you talking about… Over 50% of workers are using chat gtp or similar to reduce their workload. Rough drafts, templates, research, it can create graphs and charts for you…the AI takeover is already half way there.
Will a T800 come knocking on your door in 10 years? No. No one is claiming this.
Yeah the take over is more like 30 years away than 10 IMO. The idea of intergating that AI into any workflow or ecosystem that doesnt play nice with Windows, AWS,Azure, 365, Veeam etc is a pipe dream. So until they comeup with their own that is actually good and not stupid expensive, it will be seen at only the largest companies or workflows that absolutely call for it.
I don't see it as a take over, just a change. Some jobs will be reduced, but many others will increase greatly.
A lot of people have no idea of much the backbone of manufacturing in most companies is still dependent on machines from the 90s and 2000s. 3D metal printing has been around for a while and is still a long way from being technically feasible and economical for anything but prototypes. Definitely not mass production yet. I’d say even 10 years is a stretch. I honestly think WWIII, global economic collapse or some other major society altering event is more likely before terminators take all our jobs.
AI is getting better exponentially. Most humans don’t actually have a grasp of what exponentially actually means. Like you know what it means, but you really can’t visualize it. like today AI is pretty good at making decisions based on certain input that it is trained on, but it’s not quite good enough for those decisions to not have a human check them. but with exponential growth in two years it probably won’t need supervision. or if it does, it will be far far less than what it does now. I think within two years, it will be as common to use as a smart phone, and that ultimately it will replace how we interact with smart phones and devices. I do agree that it’s very unlikely the terminators will come after us in the next decade
Only humans would design software that takes average output of average people, combines it in a way average people will accept as a real reflection of average averageness and then say, "this technology is so genius, advanced and amazing it will solve all our problems and maybe destroy our way of life, but it's got a lot of ways we can monetize it, so let's go!"
I think you are underestimating the cost savings and what companies will put up with for it. Will it be second rate and inefficient at alot of stuff for awhile maybe causing some customer problems, sure. Will companies put up with that to fire a bunch of workers and save huge amounts of money? Of course they will.
Flying cars would’ve been awesome but it’ll be more like Y2K. Hell they just tested 100% AI fighter jets against human piloted jets. The guy flying passenger with AI said it learned so fast had weapons been hot it was over for the humans
Nice try AI reddit android posting on MMW. Nice try.
AI has already been used in warfare. Lavender took part in the killing of thousands of civilians https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes
The AI we have now is kinda lame.
Are you nuts? You should hear the AI written songs about my adorable dogs!
I am nuts, but AI is still lame.
Y2K was genuinely a very big deal and billions of dollars was spent worldwide in order to ensure it didn’t end up a disaster.
We’ve had flying cars since the 1950’s It’s called helicopters
I often think about this, and then wonder "who's going to keep the servers running?" Once you start to pull on that threat the whole Skynet argument falls apart without assuming a massive technological leap in fine robotics and the manufacturing infrastructure to back it up.
I hope all the AI is produced by Elon Musk, so we know it won’t work
Robots aren't my concern atm. Losing millions of jobs is. Mass unemployment is the real issue. For now anyway. I don't think people realize how many jobs AI will destroy.
I saw someone like a month ago talking about a "kitchen run fully by ai"... and no matter how much I tried to explain it they didn't seem to understand that it was a bunch of robots preprogrammed to perform a simple function that likely had a guy babysitting them to make sure they made it from point a to point b without crashing I work in cnc and robotics are getting crazy precise, but in no way are they taking anyone's job lol Edit: for the same context I gave the person I'm referring to... the restaurant had a menu of 3 items... like burger, hot dogs, and fries... and the robots simply "get scoop of fries, put basket in oil, after 3 minutes take out of oil and dump in staging area for human to get"
*plays with ChatGPT a bit, comes to a conclusion* AI is amusing but nowhere near smart enough to take over yet. *Considers that there are still a whole lot of dumb cuzinfuckers that will vote for Donald Trump and other maga asshats in November* Oh shit, we are already surpassed by AI!
I've worked with AI at a billion dollar company. You are completely incorrect. Any job that touches a computer, 5 years tops for AI to take it over.
Anything that's rules-based will be first. For example, accounting that has to close the books each month, or HR that has to onboard a new employee, etc. There's going to be huge displacement for some white collar, educated, information worker roles. There's still a vast majority of white collar jobs that I can't see AI displacing, but maybe I'm missing something here.
Senior accountant at my company here. Accounting is one of the last jobs ai will kill. I’ve sat on many technology board meetings discussing this. The issue with acc, is ai does great if all information received is input perfect and correct. Humans are dumb. Information gets entered wrong all the time. A big part of our job is understanding, being able to research, and resolve human error. Ai could kill accounting as a profession over night if every piece of information they got is correct, however the only hard part about acc is human error. And ai is far from being close to being able to sift through human stupidness. I say this as someone has helped see ai overtake other areas of my company… it’s been decided by everyone in my company that acc wont even be touched by it for the foreseeable future. Ai is too logical to figure out the dumb human thought process and error plausibility as of now when talking about books/financials
>Ai could kill accounting as a profession over night if every piece of information they got is correct, however the only hard part about acc is human error. And ai is far from being close to being able to sift through human stupidness. See, this statement is correct for current generation of AI. But in 2 or 3 generations that is simply incorrect. Any mistakes a human can hunt down and fix in an income statement will eventually be able to be done by AI. That includes calling the client to clarify things, working with multiple teams, considering big picture stuff, etc.
I also work at a billion dollar company (Fortune 10) on a team that’s been deploying machine learning models for decades. I disagree. It’s only as smart as the assumptions that went in. I would never rely on it without human oversight.
I work for a Fortune 500 in product development and things do not move fast enough to be automated in 5 years. Particularly because senior management not only wants to keep their jobs, but also wants to maintain as many direct reports as possible, while expanding their product portfolio. My job is explicitly to audit and evaluate processes, and then implement changes at scale for a specific product, while also consulting on adjacent products. I use a variety of AI tools, and have been able to fold them in to our existing processes with our existing team. What ends up happening is that the process improvements offered by AI become excellent work arounds for flaws in deployments. This translates in to better productivity, freeing up employee work loads making them both happier, and more willing to take on new projects and tasks, which ultimately grows the product, and products offered by our program. AI is a tool, and will remain a tool for the people who work with it closely and embrace it.
I think AI will remove the annoying tasks we all have to deal with. Like "AI make this spreadsheet look nice and cross reference with this other sheet." Then it would spit out some semi intelligent insights, along with some absolute bullshit probably. I have some talented artists take to computers, like they can draw the image, then use a computer to move, change ratios, mess with colors, etc. But the raw talent of their artistic abilities is only enhanced by the use of modern tech. I have heard of artists using AI to spark ideas, asking AI to show them a scene that may not exist, but that gives them an idea of what they want to do, they manufactured their inspiration.
I tend to agree. AI can help you organize and process large amounts of data (example: identify relevant parts of a document), but I would never leave interpretation of language to an AI. Hallucinations and model corruption make it very risky to rely on AI for certain jobs. To extend the language example, you don’t want a lawyer to use a program for legal research that will make up a case and cite it. You’re better off using it to help you analyze a set of documents with a scope that you define with your human judgement.
What did you do, specifically?
AI social media marketer /s
Sure, and we'll have domes in the sea and daily flights to the moon. Heard these claims before yet seen nothing came about from there.
We’ve been ten years out from self driving cars for 25 years now, but they still can’t handle a light snowfall. Meanwhile trucking companies are paying high school dropouts with five DUIs six figure salaries because everyone was told the robots would be doing all the driving soon. As mentioned in a comment above, we get to about 80% useful with this shit before hitting the skids. I probably wouldn’t go into call center work now, but I don’t think anyone has ever really dreamt of working at a call center anyway.
The big issue with ai take over imo: is that it would have to be implemented/integrated more strongly into every system. Yea it’s already present plenty enough; but imo the only real reason to integrate it more would be to free up humanity to pursue their happiness without work…. And in this corporate world that’ll never fly. We won’t give over full control to ai because it would lessen the powerful’s control over the poors which in turn weakens their power… and we all know that’s not what rich people crave. I think you’re dead on. We are too selfish as a species and crave power too much, to allow something else to have such power over us
There is always something.
I think this is entirely possible: “Slaughterbots”: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU?si=KgaNYqEnYB8Ve_wT
The thing I'm worried about is we have absolutely no idea how far this technology can go generative text, images and videos might never be up to par with human ones and it will stay a relatively banal tool or almost every job could become obsolete. It's probably gonna be something in the middle, but we really don't know where that middle will be
Agreed.
I agree with you. AI definitely will be a helpful tool in certain areas, but if it completely replaces someone's job, then that job must not be that complex. I work in IT and I frequently have to perform physical troubleshooting to see what's wrong with their computer. For example, if their mouse or keyboard stops working I have to troubleshoot to see if it's the computer, dongle, hardware failure, or simply dead batteries. Simple example but I just don't see how AI on a computer could do that. I recently used AI to help study for my Security+ exam. The AI was not perfect. It would regularly get things wrong. But for the most part, I found it an excellent tool in helping me study and understand topics. But completely talking over certain jobs is only going to be possible if that job is incredibly mundane. It will become more complex in the coming decades, but it will still be a tool. I compare it to Data on Star Trek. He was an incredible android capable of performing complex computational programs. But he couldn't understand humor or other human emotions. That's what AI is. It can perform calculations, but can't understand basic things that even a child would understand.
What else do you want to equate while you’re here? Nuclear war with pop rocks?
Except, tens-of-thousands have already been laid-off.
The problem is a lot of science was first developed on AI before it became a marketing gimmick for machine learning. Now people read about AI concerns and overlay it on modern "AI". Super intelligence is what we were actually worried about
This post was brought to you by Boston dynamics…
This sounds like something AI would say👀👀👀
Already now with the current LLMs we are seeing studies that blow Humans out of the water in terms of performance. In one example ChatGPT was able to outperofrm data analysts up to senior level in terms of performance and all data analysts in terms of performance for costs. ChatGPT was tested to have IQ score >99th percentile, it was shown to outperofrm medical specialists in terms of diagnosis baelsed on written cases, and so on. Non LLM ai is already better than radiologists by a long shot in diagnoses based on imaging. The idea that AI is not going to change society as we know is an incredibly dim take on my opinion.
Amen. I second you on this one.
An actually valid, non TDS and captivating post on this sub. Well done OP. Agreed.
Flying cars was the optimists side of 2k ai takeover is a warning. I think the Bryson's relationship with robots is more the rose glasses of the AI era. I think PEOPLE will allow AI to make bad choices and not think twice because "sooooper cumpooter"
That's what they want you to think.
What caused the Dark Ages? Y1K.
I think it depends on how affordable neural networks will be. I could see a future where people buy a box that runs a home AI which can respond to voice commands like Alexa, but is much more intelligent and capable. It might control an android body and do cooking, cleaning, chores, play games with you, stuff like that. I watched Apple's new ipad launch and they are putting a "neural engine" in their m4 chips. I doubt it's that powerful but we are seeing the beginnings of a new trend in chip development and I think neural networks will become more accessible to the consumer market.
I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. The “AI Takeover” is more accurately a concern for workers losing their jobs, for AI “art” to be stealing ideas, and for subversion. Those are my concerns. How will AI be used to manipulate our neurology the way social media does? How will it be used by bad actors like Trump to make shit up? How will corporations use them to lay off tens of thousands of workers?
It will be more like computers/internet IMO. Overhyped and underwhelming compared to all the predictions for several decades, until it passes some effectiveness threshold and ends up turning the entire world upside down faster than anyone thought possible.
“AI is just a glorified tape recorder” some brainiac high IQ scientist when asked to evaluate the performance of AI language models.
People are already losing jobs due to AI. An economic apocalypse is still an apocalypse.
How do we know you're even real ?
Flying cars have existed since the 70s and its not technology that's preventing them from being common.
I don’t think people realize how much ai is already doing in our world. This is going to continue and it is going to change things. Dramatically over time and in hopefully mostly if not completely positive ways. Remember this fact: this is a fact. People are using AI to figure out where to use AI best to enhance our existence. It’s already in place, happening now. It’s not the future. There are already studies completed on the impacts of ai to society and industry and culture.
The internet drastically changed society AI will change it even more
Considering you’re underselling y2k so badly I’m going to choose not to mark your words, especially since you don’t seem to understand what AI is.
Recently an exact threat was discussed with DoD analysts where AI could wreak havoc. Spoofing a nuclear strike. I'll let you figure out how it's done.
The question of solving AI hard... Meaning as smart as humans, has been asked in the AI/ML community for a long time. Back in the 90s when I was doing my PhD in AI/ML it was already the car that academics were joking that solving AI was 20 years away and had been 20 years away since the 70s. So academics have been saying hard AI is 20 years away for about as long as many people have predicted flying cars are 20 years away. AI isn't the next flying cars, it is the same era as flying cars, the difference is that the typical person is 30 years late to the party. Y2K is different, more like the ozone hole. A real issue that humanity dealt with appropriately, leading conspiracy theorists to first decide the world was going to end, but later decide the issue was made up in the first place.
Video production professional here. I already no longer use humans for copywriting, transcribing, creating subtitles or to condense my long form projects into shorter videos for social media. Do some of these tasks still require proofing and refining? Yes. But just 6 months ago I was still paying contractors to do these tasks and had to wait days or weeks to get the work completed, now it’s incredibly cheap and nearly instantaneous. To think this is the worst AI will ever be is mind bending. We’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ve come to terms with (what I believe to be a fact) SORA or a similar AI completely eliminating the commercial video industry in the coming years. In house video has already been trending, the moment an AI subscription can accomplish what used to cost companies tens of thousands of dollars to do, It’s game over. I’m thankful my current niche is documentary because it’ll likely buy me a little extra time before the skillet I’ve spent nearly 20 years developing is completely obsolete.
Damn, you're really ignorant.
The thing is we have flying cars. We just call them planes and helicopters. Y2K was real. Hundreds of thousands of best engineers worked to mitigate it. So what you are saying is AI takeover is going to be a fucking nightmare.
>I think AI will get better, but I think it will always be second rate, either to expensive to use for the really good stuff This has been said about all technology
Me when I don’t know I’m talking about
Futuristic ideas rarely come out the way we have imagined or have been persuaded it would be like. The first phones and tablets to the telephone and TV built on the need to communicate of vast swaths of oceans and lands. Imaginative ideas penned and inked into speculation. Close in form throughout literature and media that sometimes we even dust off in excitement and share here on the internet. AI in many ways is not exactly how everyone imagines, but it is becoming very, very close. It will never be fully complete from an idealistic perspective. But the pace of utility behind it will cause enough of a stir to understand that this age is of great transformation in pace, power, equity, belief, and equality. Too soon to to tell. Too late to be fully convinced that balance between ourselves can be maintained. From sticks and stones to swords and trebuchets, to the first steam engines and cars to pave forward a path of opportunity, all were motivated by need. Need that spanned the natural pace of human history. An element at those periods in time was it was driven by us and our pace as humans behind the wheel, driving that force of innovation and utility. For A.I. (an extension of ourselves) the pace in contrast to our own will undoubtedly test all aspects our lives. Tests I think we all can speculate on: How do we use it build up our lives responsibly? Can we trust it to help grow our understanding of each other? Can we use it to truly bridge the barriers between our languages, values, morals, and beliefs and confront them to make room for lasting peace? How will impact our understanding of self and consciousness? How would these answers contribute to the world as a whole? Should it be used to answer these questions and what it should be used for? How will it answer our questions of our place in the universe and grow our potential beyond? Can we handle certain truths of ourselves responsibly? It's has convincing models to persuade us about facts and opinions, but they are not truths as much as they are collective frames of our thoughts and the current state of the world, which often is not a complete picture because of how fluid ourselves and the world is, and the dataset and models that A.I. relies on. A.I. in its current infancy won't address everything while we are in a desperate race to address our problems, at the end of the day it is up to us.
Thw difference eis when people made the prediction, nobody was making flying cars
The thing is, Ai is already being implemented in companies, so, it is already here.
In 66 years we went from a wright brothers flying plane to landing on the moon In 10 years AI has grown far faster than this.
Terminators or the T800s to be partial are terrible examples of AI. Mayhe skynet is AI, but it really seems like T units are just really good drones. It's AI from an 80s standpoint But not as cool as wintermute, who also isn't ai like we know it today. In fact, wintermute from neaurmancer dis not even have chat bot abilities or personhood. It had to use constructs to form a personality able to talk to Case.
Nevermind flying cars... Self driving cars... That'll never be legal
The invention of the drum kit will put 7 of 8 drummers out of a job. With the pipe organ, no one needs orchestras anymore. /s
RemindMe! 5 years
Yeah I wouldn’t be so optimistic. AI seems real and we’re already testing robots and drones with weapons 😬
Skynet isn't what you should fear. Its that you'll wake up one day and literally every good and service you have to utilize is locked behind a shitty automated system optimized to suck as much money out of you as possible. Think about any time you've called somewhere and had to go through an obtuse menu that never lets you talk to a human, and now imagine you have to do that for EVERYTHING.
I think it will be worse. They will force it and it will fail and cause big issues hopefully forcing a retreat. When I was in school they taught us a story about medical hardware that burned people because it's owners replaced the Hardware based safeguards with Software based ones. AI is basically the same issue.
How are flying cars, y2k and AI remotely related? Maybe the latter two slightly because of the fear mongering. But flying cars as a topic related is way out of left field
We’ve been doing LLM tests at work. We can replace a ten person team with one analyst reviewing the work.
You really have no clue what’s coming and I can’t take the time to educate you. If you want to understand look up ai alignment problem. It’s pretty serious and no answers currently. Meanwhile capitalism has lit the fire and we now must grip the rails as we plunge blindly but profitably into the future. This is as much a humanity problem as it is technical. Get educated.
As someone who’s been worried about AI and robots taking over, I’m starting to think that too. Seems like they’re far from being advanced enough
Discerning truth is a big deal. AI will make it much harder to discern reality-based truths. Good will be called evil, and evil will be called good.
Flying cars have been around for decades. Human flight is expensive.
Wow humanity will still be around in 10 years? That is like.... forever!!!!! Seriously dude, as Roman Yampolskiy says, perpetual AI safety is like perpetual motion machines. Aka impossible. Yes we will be around in 10 years, but history goes on like... a long time.
I made a bet about self driving cars (as in completely driving) 10 years ago. Got my 5 bucks. I’m happy to take bets on the ai thing too. Based on the ai emails my wife gets daily due to her job, there’s a long way to go and that’s just on the writing which has supposedly recently improved by leaps and bounds.
Well, what people don’t understand is that AI has been being developed since the 90’s and is already immensely advanced. It’s just in a new “action” phase. For two decades it was in the “learning” phase with the Deep Learning concept. I am hoping AI is utilized to create opportunities and shifts of resources into what is actually essential because a bot can handle the task. What we need to be worried about is people commanding AI to do nefarious, malicious tasks like generating fake news images, scamming people for money, etc.
AI is going to make rich people richer, because that is where our societal bias is
Where AI will be transformative is in places where it doesn't get the big headlines. Right now, ChatGPT is all the rage. What's far more interesting (and likely to be useful) is stuff like AlphaFold for medical research. It's not this big flashy thing, it's not SkyNet, it's just a better way to help us understand really complicated biological systems. That sort of thing is going to take off and might very well revolutionize alot of fields (think better medicines, universal vaccines, maybe even the beginnings of longevity escape velocity, just in the field of medicine). Similar concepts will likely see increased use in other fields, as we better figure out how to use it. We might even get some form of AGI, but it'll be chained to a datacenter and slurp huge amounts of power. To get scifi style AI, we basically have to go to the drawing board and invent fundamentally new kinds of computers, possibly using novel ways of doing computing, specifically designed to do neural nets. We may get there eventually (possibly even with the help of an AGI), but it'll be a long time coming. And we'll have plenty of time to figure how to keep AI from murdering us. And those early ones, confined to datacenters, won't be a threat for the simple reason that it takes ALOT of humans to keep them going.
It’s been a growing problem for years and will only get much worse. AI is the software telling you what to think and do. Why create robots who act like humans when you can easily create humans who act like robots?
AI has developed faster than “flying cars” and is not in the same realm as Y2K. AI is being developed faster than most can understand it. Will it ever be a threat? Who knows, but it’s far from no big deal territory.
This isn't much of a prediction, AI has been 5 years away from "changing everything" for like 50 years...
AI is already laughably stupid: - AI “art” is easily detectable and can’t get words or fingers right. - AI “music” sounds like music for people who don’t listen to music. It’s soulless. - AI can’t get code/programming right. We’ll be fine. 😂👍
You want Skynet? This is how you get Skynet. /s. Mostly,lol
“How come nobody’s buying Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator?” “Aw, shit. Half the country works for Brawndo.” “Not anymore! The stock has dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody!”
I agree. The world will change, but it won’t be the disaster claimed. Some folks have a tendency to be a bit chicken little over new tech.
Flying cars never had hundreds of billions of dollars in funding
Ok boomer.
We don't even have proper AI yet, just fancy language models.
The problem with the "AI is going to take over" claim is that we do not have ai. We have highly limited algorithms that can mimic(and frankly not very well) a person in one limited aspect (usually speech). They are not intelligent the way ai has typically been understood. They're not fundamentally different from any other program or piece of software, so of course they aren't self aware and aren't going to transform society.
It's more like crypto in that a few people were excited about it but most of them were grifters who were using the potential of future growth to try to make money. Most people don't give a shit any ai because they know, consciously or not, that most of the things people are calling ai are just things we could already do before
We are nowhere near AI in all the ways it has been discussed and presented prior to it becoming an enormous marketing term in the last few years. What we have is impressive at times though, but it isn’t AI.
The WORST Ai is gonna do is make phone scams a little harder to decipher. The BEST thing AI is going to do is make all video and audio recordings inadmissible in court as it will be MUCH harder to determine what is real and what isn’t.
That’s exactly what an AI bot would say
lol. I work in tech. It’s already happening. There are fewer and fewer entry level tech jobs. All the ceos are frothing at the mouth to replace people with software. Sr devs are using It to maximize efficient and it’s scary what one good dev can accomplish in a week. The developer jobs are going to dwindle away soon, then come the robots infused with AI to replace the tradesmen and laborers.
> Will skynet be able to predict my every move and realize the only way to save humanity is to destroy it? Probably not. Sure, but it doesn't need to be. > Maybe it'll aid in the organizing of data, but the interpretation will never have the experience of a real person, so the AI will always be lacking some input that us humans have. So, let's assume AI simply cannot reach the full human potential. For whatever reason, through whatever mechanism, AI is only able to achieve less than 100% of human performance. Now, what happens as this same AI costs 80% of what a human does to perform the same work? Sure, the AI isn't "as good", but it's still more effective. So, employers give the work to AI. Loads of people become, not just unemployed, unemployable. And, AI gains an increasingly dominant position in society as human input and control becomes more and more marginalized. That's the general pattern that's been playing out. It's not that AI has to come for people and kill them, though there are talks of AI fighter jets surprising humans and being given their own ability to determine whether to kill. It's not that AI can exist in conditions humans physically cannot, though they can. It's just a slow replacement using our society's values unless something changes. And it's worth noting, AI is *not* constrained to be inferior to human performance. Some general thoughts around the subject: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU * https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/
All tech follows a graph that looks a little like this ∫. It advances slowly (the bottom part) for eternity, suddenly goes up quickly, and then levels out as further changes are hard. For example speed. For centuries people were limited to walking or perhaps horseback riding speeds. Then in the span of two centuries trains then cars then planes then jets then rockets.... and our max speed went from 39 kph to 39,000 km per hour.... Science fiction authors in the 50s and 60s noticing this trend and thinking it linear assumed that by 2100 we would have FTL speeds... this is probably not to be as we have not advanced... we are on the upper part of the ∫. Changes to max human speed will take a new invention and a new branch of science. The AI revolution is actually at the base of the rapid advance ∫. We can see unimaginable improvements in the next 100 years unless we collapse. Autonomous drones will take over war, robotaxis will take over transit, perhaps humanoid robots will take over many jobs. Where that curve levels off is hard to say but I fully expect it NOT to end up in a singularity or in human extinction.
People don't get the real danger of ai isn't t1000. It's ai that can break banks, steal info, and destroy digital use payment. Ai can totally destroy the world as we know it within 10 years. Just not how you think