AI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC

I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?

www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kx0gyje9wo

I’m not pro-AI by any stretch for a huge number of reasons, but in my day job as a technical product manager I have to use a number of AI-powered tools and workflows. Whereas 18 months ago they were a novelty that the bosses were enamored of, today they get real work done and speed up a number of key areas, mainly like fancy automation workflows (which have been around forever). The rate of improvement and capability for certain use cases has been very, very rapid. We do seem to be reaching a plateau though. The tools and models from 6 months ago are just about as good as the ones from today. And China’s models from today are better than the US’s models from 6 months ago, but at a fraction of the cost.

So when I hear people talking about the “end of the world”, I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work, and we won’t have a plan in place to deal with all of the now out-of-work people that leads to. Whole classes of jobs in areas like data entry, telemarketing, and customer support will be almost entirely automated out of existence. New classes of jobs will be created, of course, but it’s hard to imagine them existing in sufficient numbers to make up for the losses. And this is just for LLM-workloads.

In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.

So I’m not worried about a rogue AI unleashing some bioweapon or launching a nuclear attack. I’m worried about a bunch of CEOs deploying barely-acceptable AI to displace millions of workers as soon as it is safe(ish) to do so.

This feels like the kind of narrative that OP is asking about. Everything that you’ve said sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.

I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work

That’s just not what I’ve seen. I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team, but everything that we have seen thus far just seems incapable of providing any significant improvement. Software providers in our industry have implemented some gen AI tools, and even the sales reps for those providers are very wary of them. They’ve been able to reliably automate some elements of jobs, but it’s an incremental improvement over the previous automation and it didn’t consume a significant amount of time anyway.

There’s absolutely no evidence that gen AI will have a significant impact on my white-collar industry. In fact, the evidence presently available indicates that this generation of AI does not have the capability to impact our industry.

other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical.

This is really the same story. Factories have been being automated since the industrial revolution. Self driving tech has been a year away for the last 10 years.

sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.

I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work

That’s just not what I’ve seen.

What I have seen is that AI tools make software development significantly easier, faster, cheaper - pick two, and as long as you aren’t picking cheaper we’re going to get better software coming out faster over the coming years.

Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work. It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot.