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https://freedium.cfd/https://wlockett.medium.com/ai-has-a-serious-skill-problem-929c1f05954c>
“A research charity recently found that up to three million low-skilled jobs
could be lost to AI in the UK by 2035. There are a plethora of studies like
this floating around at the moment, claiming huge swathes of the global job
market will be replaced by AI, but they all seem to miss something utterly
crucial — the impact this kind of AI rollout will have. You see, AI has a major
skill problem. It's not that the AI isn't skilled (though it definitely isn't,
but that is a conversation for another day). No, it is more that it greatly
exacerbates the already dire issues with skill in the modern economy. This AI
rollout won't decouple economic growth from labour, as it is proclaimed to do.
Instead, it will deskill labour across the board and deal a catastrophic amount
of economic damage. Let me explain.
AI only really increases productivity for "low-skill" jobs, such as taking
meeting notes and providing customer service.
After all, AI gets things wrong constantly. The errors it makes are hilariously
called "hallucinations", even though that is just a blatant PR attempt to
anthropomorphise the probability machine. But these errors make using AI to
augment skilled tasks incredibly difficult. Ultimately, it takes a skilled
worker a tremendous amount of time and effort to oversee AIs used in this way,
identify their errors, and correct them. In fact, the time and cost wasted
overseeing the AI are more often than not greater than that saved by the AI.
This is one of the main reasons MIT found that 95% of AI pilots failed to
deliver positive results and why METR found that AI coding tools actually
slowed skilled coders down.
This problem isn't going to go away either. Data scientists have known for
years that AI is just a probability machine with diminishing returns and so
will always have a probability of getting things wrong. In fact, OpenAI
recently admitted in its latest research paper that more data and more
computational power won't reduce the level of AI "hallucinations", and that
there is currently no viable way to do so either.
However, these hallucinations aren't as much of a problem for these "low-skill"
jobs and tasks. The people doing these jobs are often inexperienced and make
errors, but that is okay, because the work is then fed to skilled workers down
the line. In these applications, the AI smooths out the output of these
low-skilled workers, making it easier for the high-skilled workers to utilise.
For example, an AI taking meeting notes might make some mistakes, but it might
make fewer than someone with poor corporate language experience.
Okay, so AI can augment or automate these "low-skill" tasks or jobs, then?
Well, it can. But it causes a lot of damage, thanks to cognitive offloading,
skill erosion, and blocking expertise generation.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
