Books

Kurzweil nails it when commenting on the use of AI as a tool at the end of chapter 5 of his new book. The Singularity is Nearer (2024)

"In most respects we won't be competing with AI any more than we currently compete with our smartphones. Indeed this symbiosis is nothing new. It has been the purpose of technology since stone tools to extend our reach physically and intellectually."

I’ve heard this argument before but don’t find it compelling. Don’t Waymo’s already compete with human Uber drivers?

summoning the swarm @operator. mod /dacc, aixcryp.to

Sure, but I guess the idea is that Waymo cars are just tools operated by people.

AI tools will definitely disrupt the workflow of certain individuals, but at a high level it's still people doing everything, just with better tools.

The tasks are still being done by humans, but humans are becoming more and more capable of performing a multitude of tasks as the tools improve through various forms of augmentation (smart phones, LLMs, etc).

I *am* very bearish on the long term economic viability of totally un-augmented humans though.

I see that from a philosophical perspective, but the more agentic the AI gets, the more tasks it will replace.

On a long enough time scale, I wonder what workflows humans will be empirically better suited for