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Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
Where this information is located:
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
Well since you aren't on the unemployment/UBI queue yet, it follows that AI can't do your job. AI is pretty bad at using interfaces designed for humans.
But the hard part has already been done. I can prompt out a shader-evolution program, it basically evolves, based on human ratings of who propagates, generations of graphical animations, patterns of energy that would make pretty screensavers, save the ones I like to a folder.
That's easy, a couple of prompts.
Or I can have it write out fun skits, like the Iran/Hormuz situation mashed up with the "Ship Front fell off" skit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
The raw intelligence is there, there are just certain fiddly parts and a level of precision that's missing. A skit doesn't necessarily need to be precise, if code doesn't work right you can just tell it what went wrong and have it improve. Whereas with sending payment documents to people, precision is quite important.
I use it for work too, mildly superhuman proofreading and some other tedious document processing tasks, some of which need a certain level of judgement and wisdom. Precision is pretty good. But for these I have to use my custom scripts for that specific hours-long task, scripts that I've tried and tested over some time. And they really need to be more 'document input, document output' tasks rather than 'messing around with portals and niche software'.
But that's now, they're working on making agents reliable and cost effective. Eventually they'll get there. I can't understand a scenario where it's possible to create fairly complicated pieces of custom code with AI but logging into outlook, sending emails, logging into whatever govt portal, getting a 2FA code... is some domain reserved for humans alone. In the long term either AI has to be dumb as a rock/incapable of anything but specialized tasks like chess/go or it can be general purpose, doing anything a human can do.
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