These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.
Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?
"Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto", per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.
"(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI", a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s "over 7 years in the tech sector" which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.
Other people making points in this article:
C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).
"Illustrator Martin Deschatelets" whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.
"Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan", per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.
Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):
Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?
Who is the "we" who have to adapt here?
AI is apparently "something that can tell you how many cows are in the world" (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.
"At the end of the day that's what it's all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets", from J.M.
"You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer", from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It's worth watching the video to listen to this person.)
Me about the article:
I'm feeling that same underwhelming "is this it" bewilderment again.
Me about the video:
Critical thinking and ethics and "how software products work in practice" classes for everybody in this industry please.
For the most part, no.
Smartphones could not do many jobs. Some people made a lot of money working in smartphone tech (apps etc) but this is a fundamentally different paradigm.
That being said,
How many successful businesses don't have a website nowadays?
To use my work as an example, I work in a standard IT unit for a large organization. Right now, people send our team all sorts of requests, easier ones get handled by new coders. However, AI will likely be able to do many of those same tasks faster and much cheaper than those junior devs. Someone (I'm hoping me) will get a raise and presumably, implement, train and run that AI.
Junior coders who don't know how to implement it are about to get screwed. And on the other end of the spectrum, senior coders who made a living by being good at very niche knowledge are about to have their exclusive knowledge exploded by AI.
I'm not actually sure learning AI will help much but what else can we do?
I wouldn't be so confident in replacing junior devs with "AI":
It's copy-pasting from stack-overflow all over again. The main consequence I see for LLM based coding assistants, is a new source of potential flaws to watch out for when doing code reviews.
Isn't the lack of junior positions already a problem in a few parts of the tech industry? Due to the pressures of capitalism (drink!) I'm not sure it will be as easy as this.
I said I wouldn't be confident about it, not that enshitification would not occur ^^.
I oscillate between optimisim and pessimism frequently, and for sure ~~some~~ many companies will make bad doo doo decisions. Ultimately trying to learn the grift is not the answer for me though, I'd rather work for some company with at least some practical sense and pretense at an attempt of some form of sustainability.
The mood comes, please forgive the following, indulgent, poem:
Worse before better
Yet comes the AI winter
Ousting the fever
Aha yeah, im in a pretty pessimistic place atm.