Ask HN: Whats Your Take on How AI Will Impact Our Future? How do you see AI shaping the future of work, enhancing jobs, or replacing them? What are your thoughts on AI's effects on human cognition, Does it boost your ability to learn and process information, or does it make you less critical and more dependent? What's your overall vision of AI's role in our future?" |
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/pfei.png
What you would expect if you read all the media hype about new technology is that there would have been massive increases in productivity in the last 15 years compared to earlier years. Instead productivity increases were significantly greater before then.
I expect AI will be similar. I expect there will be some areas where it will have major impacts, but most areas will continue on about the same.
For example, people like to say that computers or the internet have changed the world. In some ways they have, but in most ways, for most people, the world is not very different at all from what it was before those things. We just have some new toys in it.
This is what I expect from AI once all of the dust settles. Mostly more of the same as it ever was. There will be winners and there will be losers, but on the whole...
5 to 10 years out a similar thing will happen with robots and anything involving physical labor or appearance.
Society will need to be restructured.
Website/app design and development for small companies could go the same way too. We've already got platforms like Squarespace and Shopify replacing the work agencies and freelancers used to do there, and I suspect AI in these sorts of platforms will lower the bar to working on these types of sites even further.
I don't see it having much of an effect on other fields just yet though. As much as AI replacing lawyers and doctors and engineers is something that's on the cards, it's probably still a good 5-10 years off at least, especially given how unreliable our current systems are and how damaging the consequences of screwing up are in some of these fields.
I do worry about its effects on the media though. People are already bad at fact checking stories they hear online, and we've already had cases where blatantly incorrect information has spread like wildfire due to AI. Fact is, I'm worried that even journalists won't be able to tell the difference between real and fake media if things keep getting more advanced like this...
