As someone who's admittedly anti-AI, what knowledge work does it replace? It seems to me it supplements some knowledge work, while outsourcing actual intelligence to the human operator.

IMO it seems like most AI intelligence is just a Clever Hans situation: the AI produces a stream of responses, and the human selects the one that is correct, then they conclude that the AI is intelligent.

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llbbdd 2 days ago | parent [-]

Let me prefix by saying that I'm solidly in some kind of AI middle ground. I think people who are fully outsourcing everything they do to AI are insane, and I think people who have planted their feet and are pretending AI is useless are also insane.

The way I think about it is that a lot of what we considered knowledge work isn't anymore. In "the before times", I would have considered it knowledge work to know how to dig into an unfamiliar code repo or long document and produce a useful summary of the information within, or identify which parts of a codebase are applicable to a given problem I'm trying to solve. AI turns semantic search up to 11; you can point it at an unfamiliar repo and say "what do I have to touch to make this work" and get a 90% accurate result. That's insane magic. I think if the bar is to consider it not a replacement for knowledge work as long as there is a human in the loop, then we're not there yet, but it keeps eating away at more and more of the basic pieces.

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anonymous_user9 a day ago | parent [-]

> I think if the bar is to consider it not a replacement for knowledge work as long as there is a human in the loop.

That's where I put it personally, because of humans' limited amount of useful focus during a work day.

Anything that requires human attention will take some of that resource, and don't think models' rate of improvement will be fast enough to overcome that in the near future. Reviewing an output that is 99%, 99.9%, or 99.99% correct all take about the same amount of time, so the output needs to be correct enough not to need review before any knowledge work is replaced.

	▲	djhn a day ago \| parent [-]
		I’m afraid your numbers, all over 99%, are anchoring the conversation to an unreasonably high quality level. I would have personally gone for 75%, 85% and 95%, which are all still best case scenario answers. Had I taken on chatbot advice on electronics or chemistry I’d have died every couple of weeks (doing some hands-on real world R&D in my basement as a distraction from software).