In the news

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65301099

Sunak is being investigated over declaration of interest.

Probably f-all will happen, again, but perhaps the Parliament's standards watchdog is starting to get a bit more bold and actually act?

perhaps the Parliament's standards watchdog is starting to get a bit more bold and actually act

Clearly Tory MPs will decide it's time to reform the whole system if it actually tries to hold them to account...

Slow handclap to the BBC for getting Katie Hopkins and Lozza Fox involved.

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Katie Hopkins and Lozza Fox

Are they still refusing to flush.

This guy just looking for his big break
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/65305903

Looks like he could do with a rest.

@mashton 's mate looks unimpressed.

AI wins art prize

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns society to brace for impact of A.I. acceleration.

I don't want to come across as a Luddite but...

... given a potential downside of general purpose AI being the replacement [sorry] disruption of the majority of work in the developed world, I do wonder if society and government needs to give it some thought. At least before it's too late and we transfer all of that economic gain to a small cohort of people.

Imma ask gpt4, see what it thinks

Or we could nationalise it and split the shares equally across countries so that all people can benefit from any financial upside.

Let me know. It's always at full capacity when I try.

Also the radiologist e.g. always irks me.

Sweet let's pick a profession who's volume of work is limited by the number of people available, so will only suffer a change in process, rather than total removal.

Lawyers strike me as a better e.g. What % of lawyers will be needed in an AI future? At a guess you'd only need those with rights of audience, tax, and immigration.

Well, there's a lot of risk if LawGPT generates a flawed but plausible-looking contract, so I imagine people will still want a human to check the results even if they don't have to spend time drafting it.

The lower echelons of journalism seem like a soft target, which is probably why journalists are so exercised. Reformatting press releases into house style, writing articles about things you saw on Twitter, and composing listicles. All bullshit, and all probably automatable, but it's not clear what the career path for new journalists will be if those dry up.

I think disruption is right, and what Pichai was alluding to.

For the moment (and likely for a while yet), AI is still a misnomer -the intelligence aspect is only what was baked in when the model was built (and there's little doubt that there are some very, very intelligent people that worked on them), but they are still slave to the data they were trained on, and ultimately are still just pattern matchers and Chinese Rooms.

The resultant tools are just that - tools. In terms of industry / business, they are still on a part of the value chain. It's a mistake to focus on the tool as being an overall solution by itself.

There could well be replacement, though - the tools have the potential and capacity to automate very sophisticated tasks. But that's not a new problem - since the industrial revolution, automation has been replacing workers. Now it's the white collar workers' in the firing line.

So, yeah - another disruption that will (given past experiences) lead to pressure that widens inequality.

In terms of contracts imo it's the inputs that you'd also want a lawyer for.

A big chunk of the skill of good lawyers is understanding the client's needs and identifying risks.

But then you'd just have a couple of partners churning out all the work.

The problem you have is where to tomorrow's partners come from?

If you get get a bot to do all the jobs that help to train/skill people irl then how do you make up for that? As TW says this isn't especially unique as it's also been a concern with offshoring as well as economic downturns - if your seat in property during your training contact coinsides with a period when there is no work what can you learn?

All true.

Now it's the white collar workers' in the firing line.

Putting my own biases aside, a huge amount of tax revenue comes from white collar workers - so if that money leaves our economy to sit in a tech Co's offshore structure what happens?

We get AI to implement a fair and redistributive tax system.

Looking at German politics right now I wonder if AI would do a better job than Scholz.

Quick work from the ref on the other table though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnZh9QAZIa8

There was an opinion piece in the FT from a guy who invests in AI about the approaching "Artifical General Intelligence" models or "God-like AI" or basically Skynet.

Argues that this type of AI needs governement level co-operation like CERN and only be researched on a fucking island air-gapped from the rest of the world.

Don't have nightmares.

https://www.ft.com/content/03895dc4-a3b7-481e-95cc-336a524f2ac2

all we can hope for is that whoever is developing AI tech has read the culture novels by Iain M. Banks, and we head for a post-capitalist society, rather than Terminator style doomsday scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

The Culture is a symbiotic society of artificial intelligences, humanoids and other alien species who all share equal status. All essential work is performed (as far as possible) by non-sentient devices, freeing sentients to do only things that they enjoy.
As such, the Culture is a post-scarcity society, where technological advances ensure that no one lacks any material goods or services.

Doesn’t seem to mesh with our civilisation, possibly even with our animal nature. Fingers are crossed though: life is finally getting good and I’d be damn annoyed if now some nerd creates a vengeful sentient global computer.

Let's hope someone doesn't ask it to do the best thing for planet earth.

Perhaps we should.