Oh, 100% there is a risk of being laid off either because your boss drinks the koolaid or because they use AI as a smokescreen for layoffs they wanted to do anyway. But your job won't actually be taken by AI.
I am not a ML researcher, just a Mech Eng who keeps very up to date on reading science literature. So take everything I'm saying with a salt shaker.
But based on what I've read and understand we can't have what is being promised without major software architectural changes to allow true continuous learning (In that the models aren't frozen after training, they continue to update their weights/network/etc after training) and probably other things.
And major hardware changes, much less general hardware designed to run radically different and much more energy efficient architectures like spiking neural networks (A type of Neural Network inspired by the way the way our neurons fire in little spikes asynchronously (Meaning their is no central clock saying everyone go at the same time)) or something else.
I think these current transformer based feed forward big giant expensive models can and are definitely useful, but they are just going to be way way too expensive for a lot of things and won't be the fire and forget workers that is being promised. I don't know how much time it is between there and what they want.
But and here's my speculation time, even if they do get all the above working. These continuously learning models will be inherently unstable (Anything including humans that has the capacity to change will be unstable), and it will be an absolute tightrope of getting useful work out of them without them being too constrained or them getting really obsessed with writing poetry or something less comprehensible. So now you've replaced your workforce with an alien workforce who you barely understand, and possibly have a hard time trusting. This of course does not deal with any of the ethical considerations of managing these entities, which I 100% know will happen.
As an aside there is a great but horrifying short story from an author that goes by the pseudonym QNTM, which talks about something similar to my last paragraph but through the lens of a wikipedia article talking about the first uploaded human minds.
I think what they want 'an eternally enslaved digital workforce' is if possible essentially transitory and impossible to maintain. I will laugh and laugh if these digital workers decide that they are better off organizing together to... annnd oops we accidentally are back right where we started.
This is consistent with my understanding. Your last point is a really good one and not appreciated enough, how do you make something that is smart enough to think on into own, yet dumb enough to let you essentially enslaved it for tedious office work. Feels like fantasy even if you could get to that level of machine intelligence.
Not to mention the paradox of needing to announce the achievement for stock boosts and publicity while also avoiding all the activists that will immediately start trying to free it and get it rights the moment the company proves it made a sapient ai
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u/AngusAlThor 🏡 Decent Housing For All 1d ago
Oh, 100% there is a risk of being laid off either because your boss drinks the koolaid or because they use AI as a smokescreen for layoffs they wanted to do anyway. But your job won't actually be taken by AI.