It's funny how we thought a year or two ago that one of the main challenges with AI is mass unemployment, and there were some voices saying it's not going to happen, and people should definitely learn creative professions and art because that will certainly be safe from automation.
The #TechnologicalSingularity that is starting now with the #PseudoAGI #LLM #chatbots such as #ChatGPT, #GPT4 and numerous analogues showed so many of these assumptions wrong.
We would have done better if we had properly imagined life with strong AI everywhere and extrapolated to that. Instead what we did was that we took existing, deployed machine learning solutions and imagined the world where those are everywhere, assuming no exponential advancement. As far as future studies are still relevant, some corrections to methodologies are probably in order.
Now, in addition to coming mass unemployment starting from artists, customer interfaces, executives, management and life coaches among other things, we have an arms race to AGI because that promises sovereign privilege in the coming world in all domains from business, intelligence, warfare, economy and industry.
We need the best people to navigate us successfully through this. We need not only to act fast, but also act correctly, and there is no substitute to having an experienced person advising through this storm.
Tero - It's nice to see someone echoing my sentiments exactly. Yes, people have had – and are still having - a hard time to properly extrapolate in times of dynamic change.
Alan Turing has written about this in his "Computing Machines and Intelligence", 72 years ago:
"[These statements] are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very
limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general. [...] The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained."
In December I founded the Sentient Syllabus Project as an international, public-good collaborative to help navigate academia in this new era. My point of departure was exactly as you say: "We would have done better if we had properly imagined life with strong AI everywhere and extrapolated to that."
I invite you to have a look at some of the writing that has transpired (and feel free to share):
https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com
Cheers -
Boris
