Yup im going to believe a woman who can barely turn a computer on... sad thing is there are many like here in "charge" of things when they should be working in macdonalds.

She's warning of businesses using AI as replacements for those warm fleshy things that you need to pay every week, thereby showing the world that people don't count - only quarterlies and Wall Street.

If her prediction does come to pass, hard, then I would hope that discussion on Basic Income will be taken seriously. If you are creating systems where people will find difficulty in holding reasonable employment for the sake of business goals, yet making said hard-to-gain employment the assumed source of survival, then said society has a fundamental responsibility to assure that the actual human right of survival in such a cut-throat society exists in the first place.

"Because artificial intelligence can weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers, and college professors."

He has clearly never read any of the Register's articles on AI, or the comments pertaining thereto. Neither has he ever actually used an AI to do anything on which his freedom, safety, health or wealth relied.

Also who thinks that college professors are an elite who are allowed to make higher stakes decisions?

There are a tiny number of truly elite profs who are trusted by governments to do reports into stuff or are put on advisory committees. Although they mostly report to politicians for the final decision. And there are a few more fake ones in the USA, who are really senior civil servants whose party lost the last election - so have to camp out in either academia or think-tank land until their guys can win an election again, and then they go back to their deputy-secretaryships.

From plumbers, electricians, plasterers, joiners, decorators, bricklayers etc. who will be little affected.

Politicians & similar (IMF head falls into that) are one of the few roles able to be replaced by "AI" in its current (dismal) state.

My experience of current "AI", has been that output is full of confidence & at first glance may sound good but inspection reveals it's high on confabulation and based on little underlying hard facts (indeed if often gives massively incorrect data with 100% confidence). So indistinguishable from many a politician.

Maybe that's what this is at root: projection. Human bullshitters are nervous about their own jobs because we've built a reliable automatic bullshitter.

It’s not intelligence, it’s predictive texting on steroids. Predictive texting has been around for years and I only just got to stop being forced into using the word “ducking” when texting about the ducking idiots that have fallen for this garbage,

Just for shits and giggles I asked an LLM the other day what the LLMNR service was to get a concise description for a presentation…It came back with a detailed explanation which looked great. Sadly, it told lies, thought that LLMNR was part of VPN technology (???) but it LOOKED like it knew what it was talking about. Maybe that’s the common denominator between the technology and the supporters - neither of them have a clue what they are talking about, but they both put a lot of effort into polishing their turds?

Trouble is, businesses want to believe it. So they'll start culling their herds in a vain effort to save short term costs. After a few months or years, when they finally accept the fact it doesn't work for their use cases, they will be forced to rehire, or go under. So they'll rehire at worse terms then before, because there will be so many candidates chasing fewer positions.

sarc.

Either way the businesses win (apparent cost savings), so who cares if the minions are out of work for a while, loose their homes, go broke etc. That will make them all the more willing to accept crap conditions in the future.

/sarc.

No, that will never happen! Imagine someone masquerading as a tech guru running - say - a sowshall meeja company called Twatter or an EV company called Twizzler laying off tech teams and then realising they were actually needed. Honestly, could you EVER see someone doing something so stupid? I mean, these guys know what they are talking about, they are into Crapto Currencies, they must be clever.....Oh dear.....

Of course you are right, it is indeed predictive texting on steroids.

NOW.

How about 20 years from now?? What then? Entire sub-classes of society without employment at a level where they can sustain themselves, because Profit is All and it was cheaper to make a machine to do the work.

We've been here before, you remember the 1800's. We do indeed need to start thinking about what will change, how it will change, and figure it out before we end up with poor houses again.

Snake,

None of us here remember the 1800s. Unless there's a greybeard hiding on here with the secret to immortality and some original manuals to Babbage's Difference Engine banging on about how these young whipper-snappers with their COBOL don't know they've been born! And we 'ad it tough in our day!

But one of the features of the industrial revolution was that vast numbers of jobs got replaced or mechanised, and yet the economies boomed, due to this new productivity, and everyone got richer - at least as a collective. There were some skilled trades that suffered, like weavers for example, who lost both status and income. But many new higher status / higher income trades were also created - in vastly more numbers than those that became obsolete.

if machine learning is really capable of all this wonderful stuff, it's still going to need people to wrangle it, prompt it, program it, coddle its massive requirements in servers, cooling and power and then those companies that make a success of it will have capital to invest in doing other things that will require staff. Genuine AI may be either a threat, or an opportunity to live in a post-scarcity Utopia (like the Culture or Star Trek) - but machine learning is just another tool.

"everyone got richer - at least as a collective"

There were a lot of very poor people too. In 1850 the infant mortality rate (death before 5th birthday) in British cities was 50%. Yes, that is half of all babies born in British cities in 1850 died before their 5th birthday. These were the days of Dickens' crusades against poverty, with books like 'Hard Times'* and 'Nicholas Nickleby'** showing the wealthy middle class how the poor people 'lived'. The UK economy might have boomed, but it was mostly the already rich and powerful who benefitted. The poor still lived (and died) in slums and poverty. In 1870 Doctor Barnardo founded his first children's home for orphans. The history of revolutionary changes to industry is one of increased disparity in personal wealth, health and privilege. The mean per capita wealth of the UK might have gone up, but it was concentrated in few individuals. (Sorry)

* Pub August 1854

** Pub October 1839

Doesn't matter how shit it is, the board has been sold on the idea that if they get in AI it'll replace some of theose expensive meatbags on the helpdesk, development, HR, legal etc.

They don't give a crap if it works or not as long as they look like they have saved money on the payroll.

Shareholders can sniff extra money coming their through this 'efficiency' for a couple of years which is enough. After that when everyone realises that these tools were smoke and mirrors and they've just made everything shittier than ever they'll just do a financial twist and spin down the company for a few more coppers.

The AI that actually works is pretty dull and isn't generative but isn't controversial either

I can get things done with ~25% of effort now. Cloud management, Github Actions, software creation...currently using the remaining 75% to stay on top of the developments. Screaming "it is #hit" won't end well...similar to all the folks shouting "Bitcoin is a ponzi". I'd suggest you spend more time with these computer science breakthroughs...and working out how you can apply them to your advantage.

Any serious software creation using these tools needs more time to review whatever's been generated to make sure it's accurate, efficient, and secure. That hasn't reduced the work load, just shifted it from creation to code review. And spending your time crafting the copilot queries instead of just writing the damn code. People will forget how to actually code.

Sure, it'll help with boilerplate (class skeletons, function description headers etc., but there are plenty of existing tools to help there already that don't need AI to do it).

Summarising existing code to help new devs understand what's going on... might work in cases where the code is doing common, run of the mill things like sorting. Get it to accurately summarise the coded equivlent of a differential equation solver, explaining what it's solving, and more importantly why, and I'll be more impressed. But I don't see how it can do that, because it won't have contextual understanding. Any understanding, really.

Out of curiosity, how long have you been doing this kind of work? And note that I'm asking for a duration, not asking for your job title or pay grade, not when a "senior" developer can have all of three years of experience.

This seems like the outsourcing trend all over again.

Management has been saying "Who will rid me of these turbulent programmers" at least since the 1982 publication of _Application Development Without Programmers_.

I have no doubt that many unfortunate IT staff will lose their jobs, and those that remain will be told they have no excuse for not taking up the slack because they have been provided with Copilot or some other such tool. Time will pass, there will be turnover, and eventually there will be another hiring wave.

Kind of like insourcing after the outsourcing.

So far I haven't seen useful impact except replacing tedious work (breast cancer X-rays).

But I do believe that AI will progress much more swiftly than say, quantum computers or nuclear fusion, and will therefore have more influence in the short to medium term.

"tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers, and college professors."

Expert systems, in fact. Remind me what happened to those last time round.