Raw LLM Responses

As a tech nerd watching a lot of YouTube I guess I hear a lot more about this stuff than the average person normally would. Yes there are some automation tools that can reasonably effectively replace humans, but fortunately these big companies have and are continuing to discover that it’s really not working out very well and they are actually losing money as a result. Musk’s mostly fully automated Tesla factories were terrible as the robots were breaking down far too regularly and he had to hire back most of the humans to get production back on track again. Chat bots are not actually intelligent and can barely handle even the most basic customer service queries. As soon as you ask something that requires thinking to any degree, it falls down and a human is needed. Fast food chains that tried automated drive through ordering had to shut them down because they could barely ever get orders right. Plus people would mess with them, ordering impossible things like 18,000 medium cokes and it just had no idea what to do. People also just don’t want to deal with automated chat bots and will insist on speaking to a human. If they can’t get one they will take their business elsewhere. Automated HR agents are the worst because they have no ability to deal with real human HR issues, especially when they get complicated. Some types of robots and certain AI tools are extremely useful, but they have to still either be operated by humans, attended by humans or work with humans in some fashion. So regardless of predictions from some of these ceos, they don’t know what they’re talking about mostly. Some of them are smart, but others are just seeing the dollar signs and hoping it’ll make them richer. Also if millions of jobs are gone then there will be nobody to buy the products and services these guys are selling. Your customer service chat bots will have no customers to help. Your automated HR agent won’t be needed if there are no employees. The whole thing is a great big catch 22. Do these billionaires expect the robots to just talk to each other and sell stuff to each other, or what? I am a web developer and I use chat GPT in the form of GitHub copilot extensively. But it cannot replace me. It is not even remotely capable of building a website or an application by itself. It saves me a lot of time and finds me answers faster than ever and can look at my code and show me things I can do. It can also autocomplete pretty large chunks of code for me so I save a lot of time typing out all the basic part of the code. What it cannot do, however, is actually understand the bigger picture and the concepts of what I want to achieve. It sure is good at pretending to, but it’s just programmed to always give confident answers and use language that makes it seem that way. Driverless trucks and cars are certainly coming along and I’m sure that’s going to have a pretty big impact on transportation jobs. Especially for the types that can be fairly easily controlled by having set routes, dedicated lanes and other things that make the automation much easier and less prone to having to deal with accidents. But they still need remote operators to be available to take over manually sometimes because again they aren’t actually intelligent and can’t make real decisions. Some of this will of course get much better in time, but ultimately humans will be required until such time as we have invented Artificial General Intelligence that can truly think for itself. I have no idea whether we’ll get there at all or if so when. But we are not in danger of most working class jobs becoming obsolete in the next 5-10 years in my opinion. Still, it’s very important that this be discussed more publicly and in political circles and among policy makers to make sure we don’t get caught with our pants down one day when somebody has a new breakthrough in the technology. Right now I see a lot of hype and people who think things like terminators are just around the corner, but fortunately we’re still a very long way off. In the meantime, jobs will be lost and attempts will be made to replace humans as soon as possible, but that will continue to meet with limited success, they’ll waste millions in the effort and ultimately find that pushing out the humans simply doesn’t pay on multiple levels.