Take for example writing news / journalistic articles. [...] I think similar concerns apply to management, accounting, auditing, engineering, programming, social services, education, etc. And I can imagine many ways in which ML can serve as a productivity booster in these fields but concerns like the ones I highlighted for journalism make it harder for me to see how AI of the sort that can sweep ML benchmarks can play a singular role in automation, without being deployed along a slate of other advances.
Completely agree that high benchmark performance (and in particular, GPT-3 + 6 orders of magnitude) is insufficient for automating these jobs.
(To be clear, I believe this independent about concerns of accountability. I think GPT-3 + 6 OOM just wouldn’t be able to perform these jobs as competently as a human.)
On 1b and economically useful tasks: you mention customer service, personal assistant, and research assistant work. [...] But beyond the restaurant setting, retail ordering, logistics, and delivery seems already pretty heavily automated by, e.g., the likes of Amazon. So it’s hard for me to see what exactly could be “transformative” here.
For personal assistant and research assistant work, it also seems to me that an incredible amount of this is already automated. [...] Again, here, I’m not sure exactly what “transformation” by powerful function approximation alone would look like.
I strongly agree with this. I think predictions of when we’ll automate what low-level tasks is informative for general trends in automation, but I emphatically do not believe that automation of these tasks would constitute transformative AI. In particular, I’m honestly a bit surprised that the internet hasn’t increased research productivity more, and I take it as pretty strong evidence that time-saving productivity improvements needs to be extremely good and general if they are to accelerate things to any substantial degree.
Completely agree that high benchmark performance (and in particular, GPT-3 + 6 orders of magnitude) is insufficient for automating these jobs.
(To be clear, I believe this independent about concerns of accountability. I think GPT-3 + 6 OOM just wouldn’t be able to perform these jobs as competently as a human.)
I strongly agree with this. I think predictions of when we’ll automate what low-level tasks is informative for general trends in automation, but I emphatically do not believe that automation of these tasks would constitute transformative AI. In particular, I’m honestly a bit surprised that the internet hasn’t increased research productivity more, and I take it as pretty strong evidence that time-saving productivity improvements needs to be extremely good and general if they are to accelerate things to any substantial degree.