AI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit
Second, there is the threat of job losses due to technological advancements. It is not a recent worry. People have complained about it ever since the invention of the loom. The arguments have also become stylized, with critics being labelled as Luddites that hate progress. Where are the lamplighters? The chandlers? When technology closes a door, it opens a new one, and the flow and talent of humans is simply redirected. Joseph Schumpeter said it best: It’s all part of the creative destructio of capitalism. It’s business as usual, even if the prospect of self driving trucks will put 3.5 million US drivers out of work is a reality. You’re right, unemployed truckers could learn to code.
These familiar responses make sense if people will always be needed to perform jobs that cannot be automated. AI is now affecting the knowledge economy, too, and jobs that are only performed by humans will disappear completely, not just change into something else. When AI takes over the trucking industry, coders will be able to do something else. While technological unemployment might be long-term in nature, it could be problematic. If the AI future we have is as revolutionary and unpredictable as I believe, even our economic system in that future will be unknown.
Third, there is the issue of dishonesty among students. A math professor said to me, \”welcome into my world\”, during a discussion about GPT-3. Mathematicians had long been fighting a losing war against tools such as Photomath which allow students to take a picture of their homework, and it will instantly solve it for them. It shows all the steps. AI is now available for all disciplines, including the humanities. Many university professors have insisted that AI would not be able to respond to their highly-specific writing requests, or claim that an AI can only produce a paper that is barely passable, or refer to software that claims it can detect AI products. Some researchers are working on developing encrypted watermarks that can identify AI output. This desperate optimism is nothing more than denial, the first stage in grief.
Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/13/ai-and-the-transformation-of-the-human-spirit/
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