> I kind of flipped out, and was motivated to finish this blog piece, when I saw this: “UK government wants to use AI to cut civil service jobs: Yes, you read that right.” The idea — to have citizen input processed and responded to by an LLM — is hideously toxic and broken; and usefully reveals the kind of thinking that makes morally crippled leaders all across our system love this technology.
And this will not just be in government, it will be everywhere. The scariest part is that as people start to spend less time developing a skill set, and instead deferring to AI answers, you will cross a point where this problem can't be fixed (because nobody has the skills to fix it and the AI is trained on the outputs of previous generations of humans).
For the "olds" who already have a skillset, this will be incredibly lucrative (as those who can afford to pay to fix it will handsomely). But the potential for this to—at best—plateau humanity and at worst, make it regress, is significant.
The dark humor in all this: we thought AI would get us the Terminator, but instead it's going to get us rapid degeneration.
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Edit: an addendum, the overall point I'm making is well encapsulated in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
And this will not just be in government, it will be everywhere. The scariest part is that as people start to spend less time developing a skill set, and instead deferring to AI answers, you will cross a point where this problem can't be fixed (because nobody has the skills to fix it and the AI is trained on the outputs of previous generations of humans).
For the "olds" who already have a skillset, this will be incredibly lucrative (as those who can afford to pay to fix it will handsomely). But the potential for this to—at best—plateau humanity and at worst, make it regress, is significant.
The dark humor in all this: we thought AI would get us the Terminator, but instead it's going to get us rapid degeneration.
---
Edit: an addendum, the overall point I'm making is well encapsulated in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko