By the time we have “Real AI”, the world will look substantially different than it does now. A “Real AI”, dropped into today’s world, would be enormously transformative and disruptive. But consider a “Kinda Fake AI” which is current AI extrapolated by another year of progress, assuming AI capabilities stay about as “spiky” a year from now as they are now and the spikes a year from now are similar to the spikes now.
Unlike current AI systems, human scientists are able to learn very efficiently from limited real-world experiments. They do this by putting lots of thought into what hypotheses are worth testing and how to test them. Kinda Fake AI can say a lot of the same words human scientists say, and work through the same checklists they would work through, and a surprising amount of the time this is good enough for it to accomplish the task at hand.
Kinda Fake AI takes quite a bit of work to integrate into a company’s workflows and processes, but it offers compelling advantages in speed and cost on a huge number of tasks, which makes that integration work worthwhile for large companies and new companies. Most of the companies that don’t integrate Kinda Fake AI are small old businesses (e.g. hole-in-the-wall restaurants, window tinting shops)
Kinda Fake AI would also be a great salesperson, particularly at the top of the funnel. It would have much better emotional intelligence than canned spam emails, and it turns out that improving your conversion rate at the start of the funnel by 50% is about as useful as improving your conversion rate at the end of the sales funnel by 50%. For the later stages of the funnel where humans are better, companies continue employing human salespeople.
Kinda Fake AI could navigate bureaucracy much more cheaply than humans, meaning that things which previously required the production of too much paperwork to be profitable become viable. As one concrete example of this, Kinda Fake AI can cheaply do things which make the legal process take more time, extending the amount of time companies using it can continue operating in legal gray areas or in areas where the law is clear but the legal process for dealing with violations of it isn’t clear.
I expect we’ll get this “Kinda Fake AI” substantially before we get the “Real AI” described in your post. And the “Real AI” will be coming into a world which already has “Kinda Fake AI” and (hopefully) has already largely adapted to it.
I think you’re overoptimistic about what will happen in the very near term.
But I agree that as AI gets better and better, we might start to see frictions going away faster than society can keep up (leading to, eg. record unemployment) before we get to real AI.
By the time we have “Real AI”, the world will look substantially different than it does now. A “Real AI”, dropped into today’s world, would be enormously transformative and disruptive. But consider a “Kinda Fake AI” which is current AI extrapolated by another year of progress, assuming AI capabilities stay about as “spiky” a year from now as they are now and the spikes a year from now are similar to the spikes now.
Unlike current AI systems, human scientists are able to learn very efficiently from limited real-world experiments. They do this by putting lots of thought into what hypotheses are worth testing and how to test them. Kinda Fake AI can say a lot of the same words human scientists say, and work through the same checklists they would work through, and a surprising amount of the time this is good enough for it to accomplish the task at hand.
Kinda Fake AI takes quite a bit of work to integrate into a company’s workflows and processes, but it offers compelling advantages in speed and cost on a huge number of tasks, which makes that integration work worthwhile for large companies and new companies. Most of the companies that don’t integrate Kinda Fake AI are small old businesses (e.g. hole-in-the-wall restaurants, window tinting shops)
Kinda Fake AI would also be a great salesperson, particularly at the top of the funnel. It would have much better emotional intelligence than canned spam emails, and it turns out that improving your conversion rate at the start of the funnel by 50% is about as useful as improving your conversion rate at the end of the sales funnel by 50%. For the later stages of the funnel where humans are better, companies continue employing human salespeople.
Kinda Fake AI could navigate bureaucracy much more cheaply than humans, meaning that things which previously required the production of too much paperwork to be profitable become viable. As one concrete example of this, Kinda Fake AI can cheaply do things which make the legal process take more time, extending the amount of time companies using it can continue operating in legal gray areas or in areas where the law is clear but the legal process for dealing with violations of it isn’t clear.
I expect we’ll get this “Kinda Fake AI” substantially before we get the “Real AI” described in your post. And the “Real AI” will be coming into a world which already has “Kinda Fake AI” and (hopefully) has already largely adapted to it.
I think you’re overoptimistic about what will happen in the very near term.
But I agree that as AI gets better and better, we might start to see frictions going away faster than society can keep up (leading to, eg. record unemployment) before we get to real AI.