Rosencrantz2
5d ago
In general I don't think I've seen a rigorous argument supporting the idea that "AI just needs X more months to develop Y capabilities and it'll have Z real world effect", when it seems that nobody really understands what capabilities are missing from the current models that are currently preventing them from having major real-world impact in the first place.
I keep thinking about this in the field of advertising, where AI is just as good at many creatives at coming up with ideas – and most clients don't care sufficiently about or cannot see the quality gap that talent creates anyway.
I think the difference is that even if a creative gets their ideas from AI, the job isn't just writing down some ideas. Creatives then have to convince the rest of the team, who have to present the idea to a client, who has to buy it believing that their agency is ready to produce it and genuinely likes what they propose (or at least thinks it will look good in their reel). But current AIs aren't build to convince people, even though they are pretty good at making a case for something if you ask them to. Because you have to ask them to persuade you, the efficacy of their persuasion capabilities is inherently lower.
Somewhere along the way (and I have not articulated this properly yet), I have come to the conclusion that today's obedient AIs do not have the skin in the game necessary to contribute to certain types of group dynamics which are at the core of many business endeavours. For this reason I think a different form of more autonomous AI is going to be needed to realise the job replacements possible, and we may need AIs with stable personalities that develop track records in specific fields and must compete against humans 'in the open', before they can take on a whole swathe of white collar jobs that on the surface look eminently replaceable already.
Rosencrantz2
12d ago
This post is poetry.
I guess the theory is pretty much this! People will figure out how to automate the production of good training data from company files and ever increasing quantities of video, audio and chat logs. Then in x years, the ai will have learned how to problem solve edge cases like yours from precedent.
It seems inconceivable that all service companies will be able to do things well enough via their existing humans plus the unemployed mathematicians to train ai to be actually competent though. More likely the ai will end up being trained to emulate all the bad traits of service desks as well as the good, and the mathematicians will discover themselves brought low by bureaucracy like the rest of us.
Especially because the company's most pressing incentive is to get some form of ai talking users in circles for an hour to use up time before a competent person becomes available.
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