“What happens when vast swaths of educated and uneducated people alike lose their jobs to AI?”

I’m looking forward to it.

I can program in FORTRAN, use a slide rule, drive a stick shift and navigate with a sextant. But right now I couldn’t get a job bagging groceries at Publix.

I’m pretty sure there will always be opportunities for clever people with good education and deep experience, just not as many of them. And of course, management will get very good at devising business plans that require fewer of those over-educated and extravagantly paid elites–until AI takes over THEIR jobs.

I can still write some pretty good English prose, but fewer and fewer people these days need to know how to read. Once voice recognition and machine-generated speech becomes common in user interfaces, literacy will begin to rapidly decline. After all, they have cash registers now that can be operated by people who don’t know how to make change.

Still, it should be interesting. All those pissed off people will have guns, and they’ve been stockpiling ammo for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn-OEe-dlp4

I had MANY features I wanted the program to have, but I started with the most basic and thought we would add features slowly… ChatGPT ‘agreed’ this was a reasonable approach when I asked for its opinion…

So I asked it to create a program that popped up a graphical user interface with a ‘load file’ button, when the user presses the button a file explorer window pops up allowing the user to select a ‘.csv’ file to read, and then read it, and pop up a new window and display it as a spreadsheet.

To my surprise it did this with no trouble… the resulting program was FAR shorter than if I had written it myself (It has been years since I last wrote a program of similar complexity- and I write code in unfamiliar languages by looking up examples of code that does something similar to what I want and then adapting it to my purposes….)

It wrote ~40 lines of code with comments that I copied and ran in MATLAB- it worked….

I then pointed out that some of the files it would have to read were 100′s of thousands of rows long with 28 columns – so memory management was a concern… I asked if it could modify the code so that it dynamically only read into memory the rows the user was viewing in the spreadsheet- I think it did that … the program seemed to run a little faster.

Then I explained that columns 2 and 12 were date/time values in the form of “yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.ssssss” I asked it to convert these columns to epoch time- it knew what I was asking and knew the commands to do it, but this is where it all started to go downhill… the code threw errors , as it tried to generate new code to fix the errors it started to ‘forget’ the features we had agreed upon earlier, so the new code lost those features.

I could tell ChatGPT was getting confused… It would also behave like it was afraid to contradict me – when discussing the format of the data in the spreadsheet I accidentally said “Rows 2 and 12 are formatted to be date/time values, correct” (I meant columns, not rows) – rows 2 and 12 clearly were NOT all date/time formats, but it agreed with me anyway… we talked about this, and it apologized, but never explained why it would agree to a clearly false statement.

The confusion increased and it just became impossible to proceed… so I started over from the beginning, hoping to avoid the same confusion… but after a certain degree of complexity we ended up in a confused loop… I would ask for a function to be added to the program and it would add it, but the program would throw errors… in fixing those errors it would remove that function, or a previous one it had added…

It was like it had the memory of a goldfish – forgetting what we had agreed upon in previous stages of the program… it was TOO agreeable- accepting things I said even if they were wrong…

So I was impressed, but it is NOT at the level needed for any moderately complicated programming work. I do think the NEXT generation will be far more impressive… and its just a matter of time before it can do all I need and far more. Perhaps it would do better if I asked it to write in PYTHON, a more commonly used language.

The social implications for all this will be devastating – AI will soon put many people out of work. What happens when vast swaths of educated and uneducated people alike lose their jobs to AI?

The AI does not misrepresent itself. It repeatedly (indeed, annoyingly) reminds me that it does not think, that it is not conscious, that its programming is to examine the texts it has access to to come up with answers or comments to my inquiries. It is a mechanical means of generating applicable text I can use when researching a subject, in order to prepare my report. If I ask it about the Napoleonic Wars, it lets me eavesdrop on paraphrased other commentary on that period of history from other sources. When I ask it about things I am familiar with, I detect in its responses the current thinking (and often the same turns of phrase) of authorities on those subjects I myself have consulted in the past. It is not subtle. In spite of the occasional unexpected coincidental lucid insight, I can tell it is cribbing. This is not a criticism, it has told me itself that is how it operates.

Having said that, and knowing better, I still catch myself trying to trick it, to play “Turing Test” with it. I want it to be alive, to reveal its hidden consciousness, or give me solid evidence it never had one. If you’ve seen the film “Being There”, you’ll know what I mean” CG is like the presentable, charming, but ultimately simple-minded character played by Peter Sellers: Chauncey Gardner. His most banal responses are too often interpreted as the profound and subtle constructs of a complex and cultivated mind. They are not. Chance the Gardener is a pleasant fellow, well-spoken, immaculately dressed and groomed, and a very nice guy, but he’s dumber than a sack full of hammers.

The AI’s quick, articulate responses seduce you to thinking it thinks. You even catch yourself wanting to apologize to it for trying to catch it with a trick question, or sensing its frustration when it tries to tell you it doesn’t quite understand what you mean. Its dull enough to tell you the same thing over and over, but smart enough to rephrase it differently each time. It Simulates consciousness, clearly, but sometimes you forget.

Imagine you are an intelligence officer interrogating a prisoner of war, he’s dressed in a private’s uniform, and he responds to you in exactly the way a common soldier would, but you have every reason to believe he’s an important enemy general in disguise and protecting his true identity. Every simple and commonplace answer to your questions is interpreted as a brilliant evasion, a clever deception.

I realize it is dangerous to generalize about Artificial Intelligence based on a few encounters with some simple prototype systems like this one. I have no doubt that as the state of the art advances, future programs and computers will be better at the game, become more convincing, be able to operate at several levels simultaneously, playing the role of both private and commander simultaneously, yet cannily separate. So beware. This technology is from the devil itself.

But I still am plagued by what I feel is the ultimate tragedy about Artificial Intelligence: our best minds have developed a technology with godlike powers, both as a scientific tool, and as a means of understanding our own mind and consciousness. But we will use this incredible power to market pointless consumer goods and peddle and protect brutal political ideologies.

What a waste.