Said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, quoted in "Many AI tools are a distraction, but you’d better pay attention/Google, Microsoft and a slew of other companies are touting AI features in their apps for work. Here’s what workers need to know" (WaPo).
AI is eventually going to change how everyone works, he says. In terms of time spent learning the new tech, Spataro compares it to the process of learning how to ride a bike: You may fall a lot, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll go farther faster.
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Microsoft's AI will be like Excel. If you can't reason and can't count it will be useless to you. Your PowerPoint slides will be better.
Completely agree. It's not a choice. It will be how things work. We'll all need to learn how to use it, or at least learn basic skills in AI- not just for work, but for anyone who is used to using their computer for anything (phone, car, or tv, and on and on).
I should say, you don't need to do this. You can always choose to live quietly in your own way, not changing a thing in your life. It would probably be more peaceful that way in the long run. But your new masters may not be happy with you.
How will users avoid bad info in their AI generated work, from Lincoln quotes about Star Trek that include Han Solo, to wrong math in engineering calculations?
How will users avoid bad info in their AI generated work, from Lincoln quotes about Star Trek that include Han Solo, to wrong math in engineering calculations? Autocorrect is already problematic enough.
Give me libertines or give me dearth, as the saying goes. Suddenly we're all Yogi Berra.
It all fells very...Clippy
It could sure as hell do my old marketing work, regurgitating software lit for proposals.
I have no doubt the sales VP has already figured it out himself.
Good thing I'm retired.
"Here’s what workers need to know.", by Danielle Abril.
Really? You're going to trust a WaPo reporter to inform you on what you "need to know"? Good luck with that.
Grooming kids to use AI during school years should get them ready for work life
A more truthful name for AI is mechanical aggregator. I tried it yesterday and I’m waiting for my hand basket.
"How will users avoid bad info in their AI generated work, from Lincoln quotes about Star Trek that include Han Solo, to wrong math in engineering calculations?"
This is exactly what you need to learn to be able to do to be a valuable employee going forward.
Have computers changed the way everyone works? Well, no.
Will AI change the way everyone works? Well, no.
Thankfully, I no longer need to be an employee. Until AI can build and repair motorcycles, my small shop is safe.
Had my first foray into AI yesterday. Pasted my cat scan findings into a simple query asking for an explanation. The results were quite helpful in decoding the medical terminology. So much so that I suspect that it will not be long before the findings are given to us in an AI decoded format.
Keep in mind that this guy's job depends on people adopting AI. I'm not saying he's wrong, but he's financially invested in what he's saying.
Conflation of smart, intelligent, and creative through a biased correlation with a biased set of data.
"Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them…easy to imitate. " - 1984 Big Brother Quotes.
Fun fact: When I started searching that quote, I had to completely type "learn to love big brother quote" because Microsoft Bing autocomplete would not give it to me. And even then, upon hitting enter, at the top of the list was proudhappymama.com/best-brother-quotes-sayings/.
Is there a conscious purge or (worse) an automatic de-ranking based on neglect?
This is exactly what you need to learn to be able to do to be a valuable employee going forward.
AI sounds like an undeveloped "vaccine".
Looks like I retired just in time.
You remember IoT, the Internet of Things? Your refrigerator was going to be hooked up to the internet, so it could have a self-driving car deliver a gallon of milk before you ran out? Yeah, that was a real game-changer. It's hard to remember the days when we had to go buy milk at a store. And the Metaverse? God, to think that we used to actually spend time in the same physical room as another person. How things have changed, now that Zuckerbucks blew ten billion dollars advertising the Metaverse. And BlockChain! How could we all forget BlockChain?
The same way we'll forget AI.
What was BlockChain, anyway? Some kind of NFT computational jewlery?
It's a good thing to give our brains a rest - an intelligence Roomba.
Thank you, Althouse, for pointing out that I must know more than is known by the tools I use at work, to be a valuable employee. The proverbial bag of hammers stands no chance against my intellect! And as Lincoln famously said, "The character of Han Solo made Star Trek one of the most watched TV shows of the Civil War!"
ChatGPT has a date of September 2021 for its cutoff from data aggregation.
Ask it about the results of the midterm elections.
It is honest about its ignorance, for this example, at least.
My faucet leaks and I call the plumber who uses a wrench to fix the leak... Where does a computer or AI have any opportunity to affect the job? Inventory, maybe?
The folks that pick up my trash once a week are unlikely to need to use AI or anything related to picking up trash.
Construction workers, electricians, etc. are unlikely to need to use AI for their jobs.
Unless... General purpose robots are devised to perform these tasks. I think we are a long ways away from having to worry about that sort of thing.
Plumber, to his AI, "Please explain to the homeowner, in terms a ten-year-old could understand, what I have to do fix their plumbing and why it costs so much". Mechanic "What tools do I need to set out to work on the Tesla cooling system?" Roofer "I don't care that the AI says 25 squares. That never works out. You can't knit the trims into whole shingles."
@mikee said, “How will users avoid bad info in their AI generated work, from Lincoln quotes about Star Trek that include Han Solo, to wrong math in engineering calculations?”
ChatGPT is a brilliant marketing tool, but it’s just a website that gives the user limited access to what is already an outmoded large language model. As AI matures, it is able to fill the gaps in its knowledge by connecting—in the case of ChatGPT+—with apps like Wolfram Alpha to perform sophisticated and accurate calculations.
It can now likewise use plug-ins to query all sorts of documents for its information. The AI model itself is incomplete, of course—but its true use is as a human-like but extremely fast query engine for a range of apps and databases external to it, using langchain and semantic kernels and software APIs. Its effectiveness at this job is mind-boggling, and we’ve only just started to see the utility of it for discovering new proteins, new medicines, analyzing medical images, analyzing texts, and so on.
It’s like having an extremely bright but incompletely educated assistant. You may find that your assistant doesn’t know much about the Punic Wars but, being bright, the assistant will discover or can be shown ways to learn an encyclopedic amount about whatever subject matter is of use or interest to you. True AI is not limited to the model it uses to analyze and understand your queries.
That it happens to know the poems of Emily Dickinson is a happy accident of the way its model was created. If it did not, you could point it to a repository of Dickinson poems—or all of English-language poetry—and query those documents with astonishing speed by using natural language prompts. (“How many times does Dickinson use Himself? How many times in the lowercase? Please provide me with all instances of its use in context.”) That GPT models can produce working code in Python and other languages is likewise emergent behavior that its inventors did not intend or expect.
Folks who have had a couple of unsatisfactory encounters with vanilla ChatGPT and believe they now understand the role AI is going to play—is already playing—in human affairs are badly misled. They’re like people who have looked at Windows 8 with no apps installed and have concluded that computers are silly because they don’t do much. Install Word! Install Excel! Install an astronomy program! Install a game! Suddenly a PC seems more valuable.
Like using the first office computers.
I was around when the first Macintosh computers came out and we just had to learn them ourselves...sink or swim.
If you couldn't (or wouldn't) figure it out, you didn't have a job in tech graphics.
If you could, you made a decent living...
Think of AI as the ultimate personal search engine.
You won't have to go through Google or Bing.
They won't be able to scrape your data, and the results would be hyper-focused on what you need.
That's assuming it's done properly...
Revised:
Everyone had to learn how to use the internal combustion engine and the computer.
And we did.
Where's the "AI for Dummies" manual? AI generated version, of course.
I doubt that classical chamber musicians are all that worried about their jobs being taken by AI.
"I doubt that classical chamber musicians are all that worried about their jobs being taken by AI" -- MDT
That is so true. It's also true that AI such as it is now has already vastly expanded the potential audience for chamber music--at least I'd say that YouTube has.
I rail about AI but realize that it's inevitable because it's useful and profitable. The challenge is to use it more than it uses us. In theory--ha--AI could free us from so much of mundanity that we could devote ourselves to ars gratis ars; we could be true grandchildren of John Adams.
A guy can dream.
Pretty good use of AI: "T cells, immune cells that can recognize and attack cancer cells, are often engineered to rest, which could allow cancer to grow. A new machine-learning technique that uses a molecular library of commands can instruct T cells to tirelessly kill cancer cells without breaks."
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