"I lost my job to AI this week."
The guy was a graphic artist doing visual design for electronic marketing campaigns. And in this case, apparently he was quite literally told he was being replaced by AI.
I suspect this is the ultimate fate of all of us. It's an open question how long it will take. Some days I think AI is going super fast and it'll be real soon, other days I think it'll be like when Elon Musk predicted in 2016 that Telsa would have "full self driving" by 2017. And in 2017, he predicted 2018, and in 2018 he predicted 2019... and so on. He was taking the current rate of change and extrapolating it out into the future, but in fact while the technology continued to improve, it entered a domain of diminishing returns, and while Tesla's Full Self Driving is by all accounts pretty good, nobody is ready to rip the steering wheel out of any car entirely, which is what "full self driving" is really supposed to mean. And I think that may happen with the current explosion in language, image, audio, and video models -- they may enter a domain of diminishing returns, and "artificial general intelligence" that surpasses humans may be farther away than people think.
I don't know. Right now either scenario seems plausible. The rate of change still feels fast. At the same time, people are running into the limitations of current models and getting annoyed by them.
See below for more thoughts on "the future of labor in an AI-driven economy" from Nikola Danaylov.
