Artificial Intelligence is all over the news and there is tremendous concern about its use and impact on the future. These concerns are well founded. ChatGPT is just one AI tool that has become extremely popular and the abilities it has is truly impressive. If you want a recipe on how to make cornbread – simply ask it to write out a recipe for traditional cornbread with as few ingredients as possible and it’ll do so. AI can be a fantastic tool to improve time management and efficiency in numerous ways. It’s also a technology that is going to completely change the future.
Historically someone would go to school and learn engineering. They would graduate and begin their career learning a trade, honing their skills and knowledge – and becoming a specialist in a certain industry. With AI, people are not necessarily going to need to know engineering to the degree tradition has dictated. No – someone will simply need to know how to ask AI the right questions to get the right answers. What you ask and how you ask the question to get a desired outcome is called a “prompt”. In the not-to-distant future companies will be looking for experts in AI Prompts. AI is absolutely going to eliminate jobs and reduce costs for companies. The impact of those job losses is difficult to calculate, but, already people are suggesting Universal Income as a solution to fewer people needing to work. We are already seeing education in America being deeply affected as students use AI to write book reports, essays, and to summarize books in order to avoid performing the hard work and effort to yield traditional results. This will have a drastic impact on future generations and the level of knowledge they have as they move into the workplace will be greatly diminished.
The medical industry is experimenting with “AI doctors” who will diagnose patients and make recommendations for treatment. No doubt hospital systems will relish the idea of reducing expensive doctor salaries and simply replacing them with computers. We’ve already seen that some AI systems show a bias towards one particular political view or social system belief. This allows one side of an agenda-driven system to influence millions. The military is certainly looking at AI for numerous applications including unmanned vehicles and combat analytics. Is it farfetched that at some point the movie Terminator and its Cyberdyne Systems SKYNET may come even remotely close to reality?
Technology can be a wonderful thing. What I have seen over the past 10-15 years tells me that technology is developing faster than society can adapt AND stay within a normal range of positive mental health. Basically – humans were not made to deal with all that technology is providing.
Thoughts? Please comment below and share this post with friends and family.
Take care all –
Rourke
I’ve always felt that technology was going to be the downfall of the human race and I’m more certain now about that than ever. It was easy to spot what smart phones did to the population. They are mind numb “Borgs” now.
I can’t see this ending well. I’ve felt for years that we’ve become too dependent on technology to the point that no one can think for themselves anymore. This is just going to make things worse.
CT and SM, your right. John you should get a copy of the movie, Idiocracy, I think you’ll see s lot of similarities to the people today.
As you allude to, we have already experienced bias built into the AI concept. It’s still the ole “garbage in, garbage out” mantra. Since it is clear there is little or no morality anymore, that will translate into the programmed learning aspect and eventually we will have a mass causality event propagated by the machines. How could it not? Machines analyzing human behavior, what could possibly go wrong? There is one thing AI will learn, humans are for the most part irrational life forms, so why bother with them at all? Better to take over genetics via transhumanism and eliminate the wild sown seed that propagates on planet earth otherwise known as mankind.
I wonder if anyones is brave enough to ask AI whether climate change is a real thing, or what could civilization do to be able to sustain 15 billion inhabitants rather than follow the zero carbon model, which is just another idea for murder. After all, we ourselves are carbon based and the idea is to reduce carbon footprint. That footprint will be smashed right on the face of humanity. Artificial Intelligence is going to lead to AL, Artificial Life. There may not be even that. If all the worlds doomsday devices are not air gapped, AI will find a way to connect to and launch armageddon, after all it does trillions of computations a second, the horse will be out of the barn before the farmer knows it. Kaboom, or some pharmaceutical genocide takes off or some other lovely catastrophe is unleashed. Hubris will destroy man in the end.
Thanks for the ray of hope there Ralph! lol
“You were so busy wondering whether you COULD do something, you didn’t stop to think about whether you SHOULD.”
quote Ian Malcolm from the movie, “Jurassic Park”.
Ray of Hope or a Death Ray, a little humor helps no matter the direction.