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When I heard that AI could write decent code, I’ll admit it: I felt a little chill down my spine. Every day it seems that the AI threatens a new occupation. SEO bloggers are shaking in their boots. Artists watch in horror as users flock to Midjourney’s Discord server. And now this.
GPT Chat Screenshot
I have always been a supporter of the argument that technology doesn’t eliminate jobs, it adds them. Yes, word processors made typists obsolete. And before that, cars made carriage drivers obsolete. But the total number of jobs—good jobs, fun jobs, cool jobs—has increased over time, despite the rapid influx of new technology.
The data agrees with my intuition. The World Economic Forum Dear All that technology will add 12 million jobs by 2025. Economic historian James Bessen suggests that part of the jump in wages in the last two centuries is due to increased production, which in turn is due to automation and technology.
But this was the first time I had faced my replaceability. ChatGPT can write code.
Does this mean that AI will ultimately replace us?
I think it’s not just unlikely but impossible, thanks to the way the AI is trained. There are skills (for example, these data science skills) AI will never be able to replace, no matter how advanced it is.
AI will never be creative. AI will never be innovative. The AI will never be able to reason, think or argue.
Right now, all he is is a very capable mimic. the AI can pattern matching, and it can do it incredibly well. But it can’t do the things that make human workers and human brains so valuable.
Why is this? Think about how the AI generates images to use as an example. Midjourney has been trained on millions of images taken from all over the web. To each image, there is an associated text. An image of a smiling woman will be described as a “smiling woman.” A Raphaelite work of art will be described with the name, style, and content of the painting.
When you ask Midjourney to generate a painting of a woman smiling Raphaelite-style, it’s putting all of its training data into a blender and spitting out the composite result. That is not innovative or creative. The AI is not “thinking” or “reasoning” to create that image. He’s just using pattern recognition to follow her lead.
Image created by Midjourney | Message: a woman smiling, Rafaelite style, painting
Nick Cave was upset for a song created by ChatGPT in his style. In explaining why, he showed an understanding that what ChatGPT does is ‘imitation, replication or pastiche’. And this is everything writing a good song is not. Then he explained what it is about: “It is an act of self-suicide that destroys everything that one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous and heartbreaking departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. In that, I think Nick Cave explained the difference between a human and an AI. The way I read it is that we should distinguish between generating and creating. All the AI does is generate, while humans have the ability to create.
It seems that ChatGPT agrees with Nick! I asked him to write a blog post on whether AI will ever be used to replace software engineers. You can chew through thousands of blog posts being read on the subject and spit out the best approximation of that. It’s not considering your question and thinking about the best way to answer it. You are only using the training data to complete your request.
ChatGPT says it best:
Image from ChatGPT
This means that AI, as used and trained today, will never be able to truly generate a unique work of art. You can never come up with an original thought or share a unique and personal experience. And you can’t be a software engineer.
All you can do is consume and regurgitate.
This is also why AI sometimes makes mistakes, such as adding too many fingers to human hands or providing incorrect information or fabricated reports in blog posts. You cannot know what is good and what is bad, only what is consumed.
All of that said, I find the current use cases for AI to be impressive and valuable. Besides writing Python code to generate five random numbers, there’s a lot more the AI can do. And most of these skills fall under the umbrella of “making my job more interesting and less drudge-based.”
For example, the bloggers we hire to write for our company blog often spend a lot of time optimizing blog posts for search engines. (We do this to help interested readers find our blog posts more easily.) This can be a bit overwhelming. Our writers like to focus on making a blog post interesting, informative, and fun. It’s less fun to make sure a blog post has an optimal number of keywords to reach readers.
AI is already used for spell checking as well. Grammatically, for example, applications those same pattern-matching skills to make sure that what you write conforms to the conventions in which it’s been taught.
You can also use AI for research. It is very effective at consolidating and conveying information because it has already scanned more text than any human being could read in a lifetime. For example, ChatGPT can explain to me how a camera works, how planes fly, or even quantum mechanics.
Finally, software engineers and data scientists can rely on AI to debug the code they’ve written. We’ve all been on StackOverflow. Think of AI as a StackOverflow wizard that has read every question and answer and can consolidate the findings into a simple answer for you.
The truth is, if AI can replace your work, it means you were doing something pretty menial to begin with. Current iterations of AI should free you up to do more engaging, intellectual, or skill-based work.
There is one area where AI can not only automate basic steps in your workflow, but also make humans work better. That’s in the medical field.
AI can ingest vast amounts of data and detect patterns, making it exceptionally good at helping medical professionals make a diagnosis. While most doctors will still prefer to talk to patients to get a holistic view of their symptoms, an AI assistant can monitor blood pressure and relate symptoms to potential illnesses.
The field of AI in medicine remains somewhat controversial, ever since IBM bought the “Watson” AI that could beat Jeopardy. contestants to use it to diagnose patients. Ultimately, the AI had too much trouble with complex patient files and was unable to make reliable diagnoses. But as AI gets better at ingesting complicated and varied sources of information, and as clinicians become more accustomed to relying on AI to interpret medical scans and symptoms, this is one area where AI could make a difference. the difference and save lives.
I got over my shock pretty quickly as soon as I started interacting with the AI technology. The more I used it, the clearer it became that what I do, as the owner of a human brain, is not replaceable by AI. AI will never be able to solve problems like me. AI will never be able to tell personal experiences like me.
In my opinion, AI is not here to replace us. He is here to help us. And if you can replace him, then you should probably start adding some extra skills to your resume ASAP.
nate rosidi He is a data scientist and in product strategy. He is also an adjunct professor of teaching analytics and is the founder of StrataScratch, a platform that helps data scientists prepare for their interviews with real interview questions from top companies. Connect with him at Twitter: Stratoscratch either LinkedIn.
