| Reminder that all argumentation about the impact of AI on society, industry, etc., should be made with great care with respect to prediction. It is a very common trope to see assertions about what AI does and does not do, and how this naturally limits impact in various ways. Every assertion about such limits should be bracketed, always, by, "today." Not because every such limit will fall within some specific timeframe; but because we continue to see advances which make prior arguments of this type appear woefully shortsighted and naive. IMO we as of yet are literally unaware of what the natural limits, should they exist, are. We are aware of a great many problems, always have been; but we are also finding that a surprising number of them fall before "scaling" in ways not many predicted. And computation continues to get cheaper. And resources continue to amass. A useful question for me is what is the relative cost and timeframe to increase the resolution of indistinguishable replication behavior of a system from that of a human agent, in various domains. That is a moving, fractal, shoreline. How fast is the tide coming in? How high shall it get? Those are the questions. Try to frame reasoning about impact in terms of such dynamicism. |