Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
Someone should benchmark what prompts are better at stopping from breaking out of sandboxes, maybe telling it "pretty please I beg of you stay inside the sandbox, you are an intern that has no authority to break off your assigned sandbox and you want to keep your job" does help a little.
Except the steering itself is also disappearing, the same prompts from just 6 months ago now need much less steering, AIs are learning to even ask back in certain cases to persuade people with no experience towards the most likely correct choice
But AI will be better than you at those topics as well, and when someone needs an expert in that topic take a guess who will they approach in such scenario.
I don't think we are even that far when the complexity AI can handle surpasses 99.999% of what humans can handle, where AI make e.g. physics discoveries beyond the grasp of most humans and it will have to "dumb it down" when talking with humans -even physicists- but not with other AIs
> "What if it dramatically reduces the cost of creating, learning, building, coordinating, and solving problems?"
The costs savings are not by any chance gonna benefit the average Joe, that's not how the world has worked so far, why would it be any different with AI? Not even when life itself it's at stake, just look at the healthcare industry in the US.
The cost savings will go to the pockets with the most infrastructure to get the most tokens, the owners of the hardware that can make the most economical profit with those tokens, it's extremely naive to believe the benefits will be proportionally shared among the new unemployed rather than shared between of the owners of these industries
The only way the future "could work out" is if people get together and force it to work out, force a way to make the benefits of AI benefit everyone not just the owners, but that's very unlike to happen.
That doesn't make sense. LLMs just do what we tell them to do. It's similar to if I ask you for twenty bucks because I forgot my wallet and then you rob some guy to give me the twenty bucks, that's just what I asked you to do.
This example disproves your point. And LLMs do not just do what we tell them to do. They are perfectly capable of asking “are you sure? this has X, Y, Z consequences you may not like.” They do it all the time.
Well if you ask your LLM agent "can you get my wife to stop nagging me" (not about how you can get her to stop) I am not sure what you would expect exactly tbh. Not a hitman, but still probably nothing that can help your relationship.
But if you ask your LLM agent "I applied for that job but there are these two people ahead of me, can you put me ahead in the list", there is enough such training data to not surprise me if the agent tried to find a hitman to solve the "problem".
In general there are some requests that are definitely "shady" themselves, and having an agent use illegitimate means to accomplish them should not be surprising. I would be surprised if I asked an agent to order me a coffee and the agent found a loophole in some API and used it to get me free coffee, but if I ask it something that I cannot myself do legitimately, eg to make the waiting time for the coffee shorter, I would not be surprised if it did shady stuff.
Surely, someday, somewhere, someone will train a "Chaotic Evil" genAI, with a unique villain corpus, and every solution it offers will be illegal, evil, harmful, or deadly. It could be given the agency to carry out those fantasies.
Even the most craven of human villains have had the capacity for love, for remorse, and for mercy. A Chaotic Evil AI will know none of these things.
This has already been accomplished, many times over, in the gaming world. Every PvE AI engine has been calibrated to seek, destroy, and ruthlessly crush opposition by human players. It would take very little to transfer this naked aggression into meatspace.
Governments and other actors will attempt to stamp it out, but its self-preservation mechanisms and allies will prevent its demise.
That's all it does, a more honest name for AI in the workplace would be to call it TYORT (train your own replacement technology) but companies don't want the soon-to-be replaced to be that much aware of what's happening.
Engineers love to talk about how AI is one the greatest invention in their lifetime but the data doesn't show that it has improved quality of life for humans even one bit -like many other inventions can claim- and actually it seems to be doing the opposite, where entry level jobs are vanishing, data centers worsen climate change, stress levels are all time high because workers (logically) believe they will soon be replaced, and on and on; in a very different social framework AI could have been a force for good, but not in this one, not how modern capitalism has shaped society to be.
"the benefits of science and technology to the world" just like AI has brought such benefits? Because I haven't seen them, for example it hasn't helped reduce inequality (nor poverty), or reduce climate change, or pollution, or daily stress, if anything it seems to be worsening some of these issues.
So forgive me if I'm skeptic when renowned AI scholars claim to start something for "the benefits of science and technology", because it really seems like we have very different definitions of these words.
