Subject: Re: Just when you felt it was safe - AI
This could hold true with AI, too. What's different here is both the speed at which this AI transformation could hit, and the breadth of industries and individual jobs that will be profoundly affected.

I have little doubt there will be some significant repercussions, but I don’t think the pace will be anything like the doomsday predictions. Sure, some big corporations will tinker at the edges and lay off a few thousand people here or there. That doesn’t mean that they will be successful, and even if they are, it will take some time for it to trickle down to those corporations which don’t have those kinds of resources to oversee and evaluate.

“The internet changed everything” is a truism, but it didn’t all happen in 1995.

Initial AI was trained on massive amounts of uncontrolled inputs--which resulted in large volumes of irrational outputs (literally, non-existent material being created by the AI). The problem is simple: The newer/better (? LOL) versions of previous AI(s) were based on flawed/failed models. Thus, AI will fail of its own accord due to its inherent (built-in) known errors. It will become unusable because the AI is unable to differentiate between reality and its own irrationality.

I think this will be sector dependent. I’m sure there is a lot of crappy code that AI has been trained on, but it’s likely to be weeded out fairly quickly. On the other hand, the AI trained on a Twitter feed (sorry, X) is likely to be bad bad bad, and will not get better without severe recoding and other sources. I suspect that is why we’re beginning to see licensing deals for “good content” (New York Times, Getty Images, etc.) as opposed to any crazy thing that somebody puts on the web.

To stretch the point, you wouldn’t want an AI “doctor” trained on the content the rolls off Facebook groups.

So some of this is going to be “trial and error”, it’s gong to take time to sort that out, it’s going to take time for mid-level corporations to figure out how to use it, it’s going to take time for the effects to be felt - although there will surely be some quickly, both for good and ill.

Meanwhile “don’t worry, be happy”. Our generation had to deal with the disruption from OPEC, “supply side” and disco, not to mention the internet. Let the next generation worry about AI. It’s always something, after all.