How much time has to pass before we can dismiss the widely cited predictions by the media (and also many popular bloggers and podcasters) that AI will lead to mass joblessness? Those people need to at the very least acknowledge that their forecasts are so far wrong.
To answer your question: It depends on your claim. All claims of mass unemployment thus far are evidently not true. All claims of mass unemployment in the near future: We'll have to wait and see.
The prediction that AI will lead to mass unemployment is largely a widespread fear more than an observation.
AI washing: On the one hand, you have periodic mass layoffs that could be related, but also could be "AI washing", with the companies citing AI to sound progressive when, in fact, they just over-hired.
Congratulations on shipping! Not sure what the process is for US-based public libraries to buy new books, but you should look into it. Where I live (Cupertino, California), the new books section gets read (a lot!)
Thank you! I did also submit this to IngramSparks, which is a platform for bookstores and libraries. From what I've read, the process would be to enable the book for distribution, and libraries would have a way in their systems to review and place orders for new books that are released.
The handwringing tone of the article is off-putting.
Ed is confused between whether AI is useful, and whether the current level of funding and valuations are sustainable. The following statements can both be true:
1. AI is already quite useful and will continue to be so. This is true even if AGI doesn’t happen.
2. The funding and valuations of many AI companies are too far ahead of their skis, and will probably roll back. Some may fail entirely.
About the “where’s the productivity in AI?” question: I think it’s entirely possible that the primary benefit of AI will not be top-line growth but reduced costs (through reduced human labor). Companies will need to reduce prices to prevent losing market share to existing or new competitors, meaning that GDP may not increase, but costs will.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?
My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
> it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.
I've considered whether our current transformer-based AI could be conscious, as I understand it, which I deem to include some degree of self awareness combined with some degree of external awareness. I can see how theoretically something could be self aware without any external awareness, but I grasp at straws when I try to envision what that experience could be like.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
> That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.
I can't empathize with this mindset at all. I'm in the polar opposite camp. I don't want a list of search articles; just a direct answer to the information I was looking for. I see the problems pointed out by OP but they are being solved away.
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.
> It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking.
Dont we frequently complain that the primary driver behind ensittification of products is the need for perpetual growth at any cost.
I understand the need for growth but if the market is saturated and profits are stable, then may be thats a signal that they need to innovate or branch out into other/adjacent tech without making it worse for their existing customers. But leaders take the shortcut.
Yeah but in a market where the current suppliers are satisfying demand, I feel like the churn just means your customers will go across the metaphorical street to the other guy, and you likewise have the opportunity to bring in someone from a competitor. So you still, of course, need to invest in marketing and retention, but as a means to maintain stability, not to grow forever. The cloud storage market feels pretty mature, so customers are going to be constantly shopping around for the best deal, or the best support contract, or whatever.
They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company.
All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.
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