A local computer science expert, Dr David Gerhard, says swaths of Manitoban jobs could be at risk if Artificial Intelligence becomes more popular, but not all jobs will be impacted.
Gerhard who works at the U of M said what concerns him is how competent these AIs are.
“There was a report from the people who build this stuff that said that they put these models in front of the tests we use to measure intelligence like you know, the medical exams and the bar for legal and stuff.”
The most recent event being discussed is AI’s impact on the entertainment industry as some people believe the robots can predict hit songs and write TV scripts. Even AI radio hosts and anchors are beginning to take shape, but Gerhard said the one thing AI won’t be able to imitate or replace is genuine human connection.
“AI is going to have particular ways of responding and maybe it’ll be creative and clever, but it’s not going to be, human in a way.” he said “It’s not going be able to make those deeper, longer-term connections.”
Gerhard said all the time the audience demands human connection such as human anchors, human reporters, human actors, and human script writers, the chances of AI replacing these careers is less likely however it is already being seen.
“There are YouTube channels that are full of just like an AI that’s reading the news from some AP wire or something like that, and people watch it,” he said. However, while there is a market for this type of media, Gerhard said there will always be an appetite for human connection.
Unfortunately, not all jobs are going to be safe if a robot can perform better, since they don’t need to rest.
“If we’re going to employ a person to do this job or if there’s a box of numbers that can do it better, well then that definitely changes the conversation around who we need to employ,” said Gerhard.
He said the issue is a robot can just work and work and never stop or experience burnout and fatigue the same way humans do, which makes them a huge asset to businesses.
“This is the power of these models is that they’re not constrained by the problems of being a human. They don’t need to eat, they don’t need to sleep. If you ask a person to write a script or draw a picture, it’ll take them a long time to do it and then they’ll want to take a break, but if you ask any immortal to do that, it’ll do it right away and then do it again.”
Gerhard said the reality of the situation is some industries are safer than others such as computer science, technology, media, and banking but if a machine could do it better the job will likely be replaced by AI at some point in the future.
“These technologies will start to touch different in different industries in different ways.” he said “Hydro stuff like that, making decisions about how best to allocate power, how best to allocate resources. Some of the decisions that these models can make are going to end up being better than the decisions that humans can make.”
However, Gerhard said there are some scary scenarios that could manifest if machines were to take over every job, especially jobs in government or the military.
“All the nations that have access to nukes all agree together to stop playing around with nukes,” he said. “Buying access to these large server farms gets easier and easier. So it won’t be long until foreign actors with maybe nefarious purposes can build up one of these models that is competitive with the kind of models that we’ve seen built in the States today.”
“There are you know, the models can be scoped and re-scripted across a variety of different applications. So I guarantee there will be internal strategy models that are being used to decide what to do in warfare. There will be political models to decide how best to win elections. All of that stuff is going to happen for sure.”
Comments