"Now, you can typeset everything in your office" - early Macintosh ad.
One can adapt to needing to learn new technology, but one cannot adapt to an algorithm out performing you
Sure a part of the population is slow to adapt and therefore at a disadvantage. But the others, like his wife, adapted.
The idea is that this wave of automation will be no different than other times this has happened to us in the past.
I've never totally understood this binary moment when AGI does "everything" better. How can one even define everything?
Our AI partner could be the most intelligent mathematician or researcher. That's great then we can bounce ideas off of them and they can help us realize our professional / creative ambitions.
Sure if our goal is to maximize profit then maybe we can outsource the decisions to an AI agent.
You can get a computer to create infinite remixes of songs. I haven't seen that replacing music producers doing the same.
That's the easy stuff! That's the stuff ML has been successful doing for a decade or more.
When everyone can just press a button and have better music automatically generated, based on their exact preferences inferred from their DNA or an fMRI brain scan, what are your creative ambitions?
I'm obviously not talking about today's limited (public) AI, but far into the future, like in 5 years.
* whether or not that is actually the case is irrelevant
So much about music appreciation is about knowing the artist and for example knowing that what they sing about is shaped by their personal history allowing you to identify with it.
A lot about the appreciation of art is the process and the intention behind the artwork. The final image or sond is just one part.
I find it very difficult to define "better" when we're talking about art.
needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society
Sure you have big data centers full of them but that's already happening with other hardware in other businesses too.
- It emits 30% of climate emissions
- 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste
- People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between)
- Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land
- Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity
- We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations
- Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too
- The soils are being destroyed or depleted
- The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged)
I could go on. It is well documented.
I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite.
Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).
1) My wife trained as a typesetter on a photo typesetting machine. That was already replacing typesetters working with lead, and the people sorting the used lead, and working with inks etc. They still needed a past-up artist and more. Eventually the GUI based computer arrived, with PageMaker, Quark, Indesign etc. These days she is super productive with a massive online icon library available, full printing and distribution capabilities. Able to do a job that could have involved half a dozen or more people previously.
Are those people unemployed now? Not really (we are talking 1.5 generation now, so not the same people). Unemployment levels are low, and the workforce is significantly larger, with men and women working. The working (outside of the home) part of the population has gone up significantly over a few generations, despite all the new enabling productive tech.
What I see is a lot of visually higher quality work being delivered, but often with the same core content. So productivity has increased, but you get a glossy new shiny report in a PDF, instead of a photocopy of a typewritten page. (Yes, I do simplify. But I think you get the gist.)
2) I started as a system admin, the a systems analyst, worked through project manager, etc. until I was leading startups. In the space where I work now, circular economy and food production, there is so much work to do, that any AI support we can get is welcome. But as the work is innovative, new and not done before, most often the AI tools aren’t that useful, yet. That may change, but with a society that needs to replace a significant part of the infrastructure and processes to achieve a long term sustainable society, I actually don’t worry the AI tools will take my job or any of my colleagues job away. There is plenty to do. I have enough new things in front of me that I could probably keep a whole big venture fund occupied for a long time.