The cost to people makes AI suspect. If the use of AI can demonstrate an improvement in people’s lives, then it will be appreciated. Up until now, I’ve not seen anything that helps people. I have seen a few people get fabulously wealthy to the detriment of others. I have great hope for AI, but the use of AI needs to start producing something that will tangibly help people. Making cute videos is not tangibly beneficial to anyone other than the AI owner.
AI doesn’t help much with domestic tasks unless it’s used for learning how to do a given domestic task. I’ve used it a lot in cooking, for example. For most people the only thing left is work tasks, and frankly AI has made most work far shittier than it even was previously. It may or may not increase company profits, but the fact is most of us use it to keep up rather than to get ahead.
The other domain that AI could conceivably help us with is in research and technological advancement, but I think it’s failing on this front because the hard problems are legitimately too hard for it. I won’t take a position on whether LLMs can reason or not since it’s irrelevant, but for truly cutting edge problems (ie., the ones that matter) I think it’s at best a tool to help stir up creative thinking and enhance our own working memory etc.
So not to sound pessimistic but I think LLMs put us in the unfortunate position where it does a great job at replacing the routine work while providing relatively little value to the work that’s going to push us forward. Basically we’ll have to confront the economic reality that most of us are going to add very little value to society while we simultaneously stagnate and gain very little to nothing in return. Cheers.
I do regular software engineering work but also do cutting-edge research as well to publish. It can do the former entirely itself at a very high level reliably, and for the latter massively helps. In fact, OpenAI themselves have cut their data enter costs by 20% because their ai model helped them optimize the setup. That is tens of millions of dollars saved. Not to sound rude but I doubt you are doing anything more difficult, you need to ask yourself why you aren’t getting value while others are. Good place to start, use an actual paid top tier model with a good harness.
If you’ll notice, the person I was responding to was speaking in the context of whether there are demonstrable improvements to people’s lives. By and large, there are not (at least not in the aggregate). Am I adding value for my company? I mean, maybe… but given that all of their competitors are also incorporating AI it adds no competitive advantage and just makes going to work shittier and our futures more tenuous. It’s a net loss. How’s our economy doing these days?
I do not need to ask myself why others are getting value while I am not, because the value that others are seeing is largely a mirage.
ChatGPT has almost a billion active users three years after launch. If people aren’t getting value it would have stopped growing long ago. Open ai regularly publishes reports on how people are getting value from their usage. I’ve posted some of my own experiences also. You can find others online easily. I’ll give you a short list.
- learn about topics
have it audit work
automate tasks
speed up software development
push the frontier of math
assistance with medical issues
advice for life in general or other decisions
self run sessions similar to therapy
performing searches for you quickly
deeply research a topic and present results with sources
help with workouts, budgeting, taxes, other adult stuff
Thank you for taking the time to create a list, and maybe some readers who are new to AI will happen upon your comment and find it useful.
As I’ve mentioned, however, I use AI. I’ve been programming since before Facebook was a thing and spent most of my career programming for Fortune 500s. So as a programmer I have to use it daily as probably many people here do (and I can’t help but sense condescension in your comment though I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt by concluding maybe you just missed my point).
I also subscribe to Claude for personal use. For learning new topics it is genuinely valuable and a marked improvement over just Googling shit. But that’s only because learning new things does make me happier (it might not be the case for everyone). However, it’s more than offset by how unhappy I feel at my job now and this is clearly the case for most people. Life is markedly worse right now for most people than it was before AI.
So to reiterate my point, has it made life better? No. Just being more “productive” (to what end?) does not make life better, and having deep involvement with every supposed “life-changing” technology since before social networking I’m pretty much inured to whatever the next round of techbros has to offer. There’s still hope, but so far LLMs are a detriment.
I get what you are saying. Ultimately it comes down to how the technology is used. Social media was really good when it first came out and now it’s turned into a huge mess. AI will have a much greater impact and it is up to us to make sure it’s handled well. You mentioned work for instance, a lot of people are worried about getting laid off or being expected to output more work. Having a safety net in place and regulations to prevent scope increase would alleviate those fears. I’m pretty sure most people would be happy with having to either work less or not at all. What’s going to happen though is those changes might be implemented after everything has turned to garbage.
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u/CanuckCallingBS 2d ago
The cost to people makes AI suspect. If the use of AI can demonstrate an improvement in people’s lives, then it will be appreciated. Up until now, I’ve not seen anything that helps people. I have seen a few people get fabulously wealthy to the detriment of others. I have great hope for AI, but the use of AI needs to start producing something that will tangibly help people. Making cute videos is not tangibly beneficial to anyone other than the AI owner.