Re:A handwritten letter from Dijkstra to an aspiring teenage...
by CamperBob2 on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @10:37AM
(#34082036)
Eh, they're not wrong. Given another 20-30 years of progress at this rate, it's coming for almost every knowledge worker's job.
Which is pretty freaking cool.
Re:A handwritten letter from Dijkstra to an aspiring teenage...
by qsort on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:07AM
(#34082488)
It's been 20-30 years in the future for several decades now.
Re:A handwritten letter from Dijkstra to an aspiring teenage...
by CamperBob2 on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:28AM
(#34082763)
Yes, and something finally happened. A hell of a lot happened, actually, starting with AlphaGo and progressing to a credible Turing-test contestant only a couple of years later.
But yes, your deeper point is hard to dispute; this business has always run on punctuated equilibrium. We may be in for another 50+ years of "AI winter." I doubt it, though. It feels different this time.
Re:A handwritten letter from Dijkstra to an aspiring teenage...
by ryloric on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:50AM
(#34083072)
> Nobody thinks that, nobody has even said that
Some said it though, I remember a prominent AI professor talking about radiologists losing their jobs on twitter and the ensuing mess surrounding it.
Except that, I agree strongly with everything else you pointed out.
I don't think anybody seriously believes that -- but setting reasonable public expectations from emerging technologies is at least in part the responsibility of the "technically literate class" broadly defined, research scientists, practitioners, even developers in ML/AI-adjacent fields such as myself.
Stuff like "GPT3 is coming for your job" is already out to the press. Nobody thinks that, nobody has even said that, but nobody has done anything to set expectations straight either.
We ought to be more responsible in this respect.