This is the 3D printing hype all over again. Remember how every object in sight was going to be made in a 3D printer? How we won’t ever need to go to a store again because we’ll be able to just download the blueprint for every product from the internet and make it ourselves? How we’re going to print our clothes, furniture, toys and appliances at home and it’s only going to cost pennies of raw materials and electricity? Yeah right.
So let me throw down the exact opposite predictions for social implications if there was absolutely 0 innovation in AI:
AI continues to try to shoehorn itself into every product imaginable and mostly fail because it’s a solution looking desperately for a problem
Almost no labor (big exception: self-driving) has been replaced by robots. The robots that do exist are not ML-based
Universal Basic Income doesn’t see widespread adoption and it has nothing to do with AI, one way or another
<1% of YouTube views is produced by AI generated content
Space is literally the worst place to apply AI—the stakes couldn’t be higher, the training data couldn’t be sparser and the tasks are so varied and complex and unpredictable they stretch even the generalization capability of human intelligence; it’s the pinnacle of AI-hubris thinking AI will “revolutionize” every single field
(I use ML and AI interchangeably because AI in the broad sense just means software at this point)
In fact, since I don’t believe in slow take-off, I’ll do one better: these are my predictions for what will actually happen right up until FOOM.
It’s time for a reality check for not only AI, but digital technologies in general (AR/MR, folding phones, 5G, IoT). We wanted flying cars, instead we got AI-recommended 140 characters.
This is the 3D printing hype all over again. Remember how every object in sight was going to be made in a 3D printer? How we won’t ever need to go to a store again because we’ll be able to just download the blueprint for every product from the internet and make it ourselves? How we’re going to print our clothes, furniture, toys and appliances at home and it’s only going to cost pennies of raw materials and electricity? Yeah right.
So let me throw down the exact opposite predictions for social implications if there was absolutely 0 innovation in AI:
AI continues to try to shoehorn itself into every product imaginable and mostly fail because it’s a solution looking desperately for a problem
Almost no labor (big exception: self-driving) has been replaced by robots. The robots that do exist are not ML-based
Universal Basic Income doesn’t see widespread adoption and it has nothing to do with AI, one way or another
<1% of YouTube views is produced by AI generated content
Space is literally the worst place to apply AI—the stakes couldn’t be higher, the training data couldn’t be sparser and the tasks are so varied and complex and unpredictable they stretch even the generalization capability of human intelligence; it’s the pinnacle of AI-hubris thinking AI will “revolutionize” every single field
(I use ML and AI interchangeably because AI in the broad sense just means software at this point)
In fact, since I don’t believe in slow take-off, I’ll do one better: these are my predictions for what will actually happen right up until FOOM.
It’s time for a reality check for not only AI, but digital technologies in general (AR/MR, folding phones, 5G, IoT). We wanted flying cars, instead we got AI-recommended 140 characters.