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In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.
It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.
I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.
Something I'm curious is how AI has been implemented to peoples professional workflows. My company has been implementing Ai in various places, but thanks to the level of human supervision and human-centric communication needed in my work process, I'm not convinced of significant human replacement for quite a while.
AI benefits:
Meeting transcriptions. Online meetings between two parties require each interaction to be recorded. Representative case notes are spotty at best, and the AI generally make significantly more complete and timely transcriptions freeing up a lot of time, and being more accurate than most human-written notes. Adoption of this tool has been spotty, but the people who are using are seeing significant benefit. Job replacement impact: 0, as no rep has someone to specifically write case notes. Benefit: significant.
Internal document searches. AI searches generally are better than our internal search engine in locating company documentation and resources. It is still hit or miss, but luckily the AI search provides the links it is citing, so I can go through the links to locate the specific policy or document I'm looking for. It's not consistent, but generally I use it before I use our internal search engine. Job replacement impact:0 Benefit: Medium
Email drafts: Great for rapid iteration of emails. They still need to be edited and reviewed, but they're very helpful if I'm having trouble finding the correct wording and I need to get something out quickly. Some people use it a lot, I use it only when I don't have a clear structure in mind. Job Replacement impact:0 Benefit: Limited to significant depending on user preference.
AI weaknesses
In the various professional careers I've held, I still don't see a significant AI impact in that it's replacing workers or reducing the intellectual motivation of young professionals. I still hold on to the idea that AI will be and is unable to innovate because it doesn't and cannot push against the zeitgeist on the data it is trained on. If AI was around during the time of the Wright Brothers, would it think human flight was possible?
The main problem of AI is people trying to use it to do their thinking for them, when it is most effective at automating monotonous tasks and increasing productivity. Maybe it's because I don't use AI in my life the same way many adopters have, but I don't see any significant impact in my day to day even though it is coming more advanced.
I don't know how my coworkers are using it, but I've been having great results with replacing "google an excel function and hope somebody else had the same problem and got it solved".
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