| I've finally gotten around to reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It's been very interesting reading this alongside everything that's happening with AI at the moment. Would be curious to hear from others that have read it, but I find it difficult to fault his core arguments (or at least what I interpret them to be). The problem white collar humans have right now is that they're highly specialized. They're incredibly good at being very effective cogs. This is exactly what AI is getting so good at doing (in certain verticals). Traditional capitalism effectively demands that if a company can pay the owner of an algorithm 10% of what it would pay for a human to do the same thing (for even 80% of the quality), then that's what will eventually happen. Can government regulate it? They can sure try, but then either the companies or AI hosting providers will move to a country that doesn't have the same restrictions and it will happen anyway. Then people will say "it will just open up other industries". I'm not sure it will. What other industries will the swaths of copywriters, lawyers, accountants retrain for? I just don't understand everyone saying "It's going to make everyone's lives easier". In the short term sure, but if AI gets to where it's owners want it to get to, then a lot of people are going to find themselves professionally worthless. It's entirely possible that this is just not something we're prepared for, and it's almost guaranteed at this point that there's no stopping it. What's really interesting is this book was released in 2016... and Yuval was using Microsoft's Cortana as the example of this upcoming AI... Interesting times either way. |