| When google search was introduced it was a revelation. Search results were eerily accurate compared with the then-state-of-the-art. The key was using computers to interpret and leverage human-made webs of knowledge. 20+ years later, search sucks because it’s mostly robots (or humans acting like robots) writing SEO centric copy to capture valuable queries. Most of these strikingly capable “AI” tools today like DALL-E and Codex are fundamentally built by applying more leverage in new ways to a corpus of human work: art/code/etc. What happens if these systems take over and 99% of the humans stop writing code or making art and successive systems are trained on mostly regurgitated AI output? The same effect is apparent in equities: index funds now make up the bulk of investment, but they merely follow other money flows in lock step, many of them driven by computers. As a result the decisions of a relatively small number of actual humans have incredibly outsized impact on markets. We will have a system of infinitely recursive navel-gazing that is devoid of utility once the actual intelligence that was the key driver of the system has dried up because it’s economic value was captured by greedy hill-climbing algorithms. Pieces like this are naive because they extrapolate what they see as trends without recognizing that the world is a dynamic system. Predictions are never this simple when the subject is so dependent on the state of the world which it will dramatically change. |
But what happens when AI needs less and less "real" data for training then it, will not degrade like google's search, which by the way is still the best from all the search engines I have known and tried.