Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, famously predicted the end of human radiologists within a few years, only to see a boom in hiring and salaries for radiologists when it turned out that AI actually complemented their skills. So how the heck are businesspeople and inventors supposed to 'steer' AI toward being complementary to human workers?
"These models are so amazing, it creates this illusion that it will be able to do everything, because you can experience GPT-3, you can experience GPT-3.5, right? And then you extrapolate what that's going to mean for size and scale in a way that's very logical, but it's not rooted in the reality of what a transformer is, right?"
We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government. Markets discount whether AI might threaten to undermine a business model until suddenly it can, leading to massive swings in stocks.
Corporate survival usually means transmogrification, but, as a mature business with added moonshots, SpaceX might be different. SpaceX is not going to flame out like Webvan, presumably, but after that, we've no idea. Neither do you. Neither does Elon Musk.
Some of those predictions were made two years ago — that in two years, 50% of jobs would be wiped out. Well, two years is up. Let's take a look. And anybody who makes that prediction for two years from now, I'm willing to take the bet.
1mo ago
The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding what's actually changing and what isn't.
2mo ago
The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding the incentive structures and constraints that will shape decisions.
2mo ago
The best way to think about the future is not by projecting the past, but by understanding what is actually changing in the world and which businesses benefit from that change versus which ones get hurt by it.
The reference forecast has as its core assumption of a relatively limited conflict that gets resolved in the second half of the year and then with energy prices that are normalizing in that second half of the year and into next year. Very clearly, with every day that passes, where we don't have a resolution, where the flow of oil and gas is more limited through the Strait of Hormuz, we're moving away from that scenario.
At the time, though, with Japan at its zenith, it was easy to make Vogel-like predictions of continued domination, and it was out of vogue to be a contrarian like Emmott. The same is true of China today.
