What are your thoughts on AI?
Do you wonder if AI will make knowlege harder to gain? If we ask a question and get a bite sized gobbet of information will we be less able to challenge it, to question it? We've already seen how some AI has mangled news stories, how will it mangle things that are less easily checkable and what effect will that have? Will the information we get be less factual and more biased as data sets for more specialist subjects are smaller and more open to bias? Will our ability to research things for ourselves become less, the internet has already made some impact on this, yes we can access more and more information, but is it good quality information? For exmaple, if I asked what evolution is? How would I know if what I'm told is true if the data the Ai's been trained on is fundamentalist CHritian for example? Will I be told that it's false and given the biblical book of genesis instead, will Darwin be mentioned?
Sorry these are som late night ramblings, but I wouldn't be able to sleep if I didn't write them down.
AI is very cool, clever and interesting. I find it fascinating but its costing people more and more jobs all the time and it can be very dangerous because of some who use it for the wrong reasons. Its also causing a lot of uncertainty for future work because it's going to take over some work, one of the reasons why I haven't rushed in to studying and going in to a career. I don't want to end up jobless because AI ends up taking my job from me. Cool but probably going to further make life harder for people.
I haven't used it a lot yet but so far it's been pretty easy. I guess because in a database I'm asking for very specific information, there aren't many ways of wording it. I am very logical by default though so it'll be interesting to see if other people have problems.
This made me laugh a lot 
What you mean it will start swearing and crying when we ask it to do things it dosen't understand or ask it to many questions?
In work we also have an ai feature on a database we use and that is quite useful as I can ask it how to do things and I can also ask it to show me specific information I want without having to use a load of filters and run a load of reports.
There are products like Microsoft Business Intelligence that are good at this sort of thing but to get something useful out of it you need to know what to ask it - this is actually the hard part.
Phrasing it in a way that is logical, intuitive and clear is much harder than most people realise.
Maybe AI is actually autistic given some of these traits. Hyperfocus, poor social skills, prone to meltdowns etc...
I quite like it but some of the possibilities scare me. I've used chat gpt recently. Not to write anything for me. Just to clarify some things and I've found it really useful because I can get it to give me more or less detail in a way that a search engine can't. Sometimes I do get it to write me an outline to something but I usually change this to my own words and I'd obviously never try to pass it off as my own work.
My phone is testing a Google AI feature and that is significantly less useful and not always accurate.
In work we also have an ai feature on a database we use and that is quite useful as I can ask it how to do things and I can also ask it to show me specific information I want without having to use a load of filters and run a load of reports.
I obviously am using it for some very basic things. The are far more complex uses for AI. But so far I think used in the right way, it can be a good tool.
When the government starts talking about getting people vack to work and how many economically inactive people there are, I think they aiming they're efforts at the wrong people, yes there are many people in need of retraining and who's job prospects and general education could be better, But, I wonder how many of these people who've been economically inactive sinse covid aren't off sick, they've taken early retirement, they've been encouraged for years to build up big pension pots so as they can a good quality of life in retirement and they've decided to cash it all in, live for now and tey don't need huge amounts of money to live a good life, family and friends have become more important than chasing zero's in a bank account.
Probably a lot of the sort of jobs that will be lost to Ai will be ones where people are needed to read all the forms people are forced to fill in for things like benefits, having filled in the forms and gone through all the hassle, I doubt if AI could make them any more difficult and a whole new industry will be born by those former employees teaching people how to fill the new forms in a way the AI can cope with.
I don't like anything being driven down my throat!
Accordingly, I am a bit sceptical about AI........it feels like I am being told that it is either;
a) the best thing since sliced bread
b) the end of the world
c) inevitable, in any event.
My Possible Deviancy Agency, always tells me, in these circumstance = screw that?!
I like woods without signposts, seas without sewage and humans with their own agency.
Good to see you back, Mac. ....... as with any old-timer, beyond my vintage.
I did a short open university course a few months ago called An introduction to artificial intelligence, and afterwards I started a discussion about it on this forum:
I do not know much about it personally but I would imagine its like a lot of tech, can be very useful if used correctly but no doubt will have a lot of downsides likes some of the ones you mention. Not entirely sure what to make of it myself at the moment, trying to keep an open mind?
A broad subject indeed but I'll make a start.
I was training an AI model to replace front line support in a very large organisation a few years ago before I retired and it is clear that it needs a vast amount of high quality information to train on.
Most of the knowledge base articles the company already had on how to fix issues were hugely dependent on knowing how to do things, the companies current policies and the range of steps that go behind something as simple as "now create a new account for the user".
It was clear that huge amounts of effort had to go into breaking things into modular tasks that can be referred to from any particular task so I had to use my hyperfocus and black & white logic to work out what these were to the point it could all be written into a script for automatic creation.
I think there are lots of companies trying to build their AI system on very poor quality foundations and this is likely to lead to some major mess ups - look at Apple and the News app on their devices that started giving very warped interpritation of news stories.
All that said, once the dust settles and the companies start to get working models in place then there will come an era of mass layoffs as they no longer need staff. They have shown themselves to be willing to downsize as soon as it is advantagous to them to do so.
This glut of economically inactive people in society will generate its own problems (benefits, homelessness, mental illness etc) which will be a strain on the government to support and with less tax revenue as well they will have to start dismanting the benefits system in order to protect only the most needy.
I expect this will hit autists hard as we are typically hard to employ anyway and are on the edges of the benefits system on the whole.
My advice would be to find something a computer cannot do (I chose property renovation) and get into it before there is a rush of others into it as well.
Thats it's something else that goes over my head and I don't understand and have no use for, I've done online searches or things and have had AI generated answers, which I've ignored due to lack of relevancy and being just s surface skim of the iinformation I was looking for.
I have doubts about how much easier it will make life, I suspect it will just create more unemployment, and cut people off even more from goods and services they want or need, it will be "the computer says no" with knobs on.
