A pretty daily thought for me now is “there’s no point to this, AI can do it in 1 second, and no one cares” when thinking about doing anything art or programming related. Pretty much anything we do that is on a computer is totally useless now, and companies will probably be firing us all in 10 years or less if you aren’t a manual laborer.
The worst part is, I could be tricked by AI even now. The thought of hearing a song i like, and then finding that it’s AI, makes me physically sick. But 99% of the population wont care one bit.
I pretty much try to ignore it all, and I figure I’ll shut off the internet and enjoy my collection of physical art that I know was made by humans. It just really sucks that we are going down this path and it’s going to utterly destroy us. And no one seems to realize how bad it’s going to get.
We go through this hype cycle every time a technology grows exponentially. Every salesperson shouts “It’s going to the moon!” and it goes to Radio Shack and Walmart instead.
It actually turns out that everything that looks exponential, actually follows a logistic growth curve, constrained by other factors.
We’re usually pretty bad at guessing which other factors will kick in to stop the exponential growth, and when. And sometimes the exponential growth kills us anyway, before another factor kicks in.
But the current AI hype will also be governed by other factors. Even if we agree to have complete 100% faith in AI’s abilities growing as much as possible, it will hit a hard limit of tasks that it will remain stubbornly bad at.
Where ever that limit currently is, is where the interesting work will happen. Currently it’s at “go for more than a few minutes without lying or hallucinating”. Someday soon it will be around AI driving on a busy day without smearing an unacceptable number of pedestrians into mush.
AI becoming better will be a long, often sad, always interesting journey.
But whoever is telling you that AI has already replaced you is just trying to keep you off balance, hoping you won’t find and connect with your local union representative.