AI AN IN-DEPTH REPORT being conscious and solving all the world’s problems, and it’s just not there yet. There is also the idea that it will be the end of humanity; I think those fears are just overblown. OB: My concern is not that the AIs are going to get too good but that managers are going to say, “This is good enough” and cut jobs. We’re already seeing that in my industry. Although, to your point about skepticism, there was a big scandal with Sports Illustrated using a bunch of AI-generated articles written by fake writers; they created fake profiles for writers, but because other journalists caught them, those articles were taken down, and I believe the editor who commissioned them was fired. Venkatraman: I feel lucky, in my generation, to have witnessed the internet revolution and the mobile revolution. This one seems bigger than both of them combined. When you talk about job displacement, if you look at just what happened with the internet and the mobile revolutions, it — in the aggregate — created a lot more jobs than it displaced. I think the generative AI revolution is going to create a lot more jobs, but yes, there will be displacement. A law firm may not need to hire 100 paralegals when it can just do with 10 — but then they would be a lot more productive because they know how to use the tools. That’s why it’s so important to teach everybody how to use AI models. One thing I keep harping on is that we really need to make a computer science course that has the foundational basics of AI, or using AI as part of a core graduating requirement at K through 12. I’d really love to make that happen; I just don’t know how. Dykeman: The hunger is out there. When I’m talking to K-through-12 teachers, they want to know about how to use it, they want to know turnaround and how to teach it, too. Where I start is the basics of prompt engineers, just in teaching them all the chain-of-thought reasoning and how to do that, and those basics and how to turn around and train that. Now, at some point, the LLMs will probably do all that prompt engineering for us. That training needs to happen at the workforce-development level, graduate level, all the way down to kindergarten. Jennings: I get asked often by people who say, “Should I have my child study coding in college?” And I say, “Well, maybe there are some other options.” In my book, which was written in 2018, I said, “Don’t let your children grow up to be radiologists, because AIs are going to be much better at image recognition.” You know what? I was completely wrong. Stanford did a great study of the 28 qualities it takes to be a great radiologist. Two of them involve visual recognition of anomalies in a scan. The others are all dealing with other doctors, understanding insurance — they’re all human things, like dealing with patients. No one wants to be told by an AI that they have cancer. But there are other places where I think you’re going to see a massive displacement. It’s really hard to know in advance which ones they are. Dykeman: There’s a preprint that just came out a couple days ago that looked at AI patents and asked how they might impact the job market. You normally hear that coding and those types of things are going to go away, but all of the trades will stay. What they found was that some of the trades are going to prosper, and some of the trades are going to disappear. Across every industry, every spectrum of work, some things are going to be impacted and some things are not. The Impact of AI Innovations on U.S. Occupations Ali Akbar Septiandri, Marios Constantinides, Daniele Quercia “…Our methodology relies on a comprehensive dataset of 19,498 task descriptions and quantifies AI’s impact through analysis of 12,984 AI patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2015 and 2020. Our observations reveal that the impact of AI on occupations defies simplistic categorizations based on task complexity, challenging the conventional belief that the dichotomy between basic and advanced skills alone explains the effects of AI. Instead, the impact is intricately linked to specific skills, whether basic or advanced, associated with particular tasks. For instance, while basic skills like scanning items may be affected, others like cooking may not….” Source: https://arxiv.org/ abs/2312.04714 In November, the website Futurism reported on a series of articles on Sports Illustrated’s website that appeared to be AI-written, with fake bylines and AI-generated writer photos. The articles and writer profiles were subsequently deleted and parent company Arena Group fired SI’s CEO in December. In mid-January Arena Group announced that it had lost its license to publish the magazine and laid off most of its staff. Cass Dykeman 31
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