If your reference class is “integrating a new technology into the economy”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over decades.
…But if your reference class is “integrating a new immigrant human into the economy—a human who is already generally educated, acculturated, entrepreneurial, etc.”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over years, months, even weeks. There’s still on-the-job training and so on, for sure, but we expect the immigrant human to take the initiative to figure out for themselves where the opportunities are and how to exploit them.
We don’t have AI that can do the latter yet, and I for one think that we’re still a paradigm-shift away from it. But I do expect the development of such AI to look like “people find a new type of learning algorithm” as opposed to “many many people find many many new algorithms for different niches”. After all, again, think of humans. Evolution did not design farmer-humans, and separately design truck-driver-humans, and separately design architect-humans, etc. Instead, evolution designed one human brain, and damn, look at all the different things that that one algorithm can figure out how to do (over time and in collaboration with many other instantiations of the same algorithm etc.).
How soon can we expect this new paradigm-shifting type of learning algorithm? I don’t know. But paradigm shifts in AI can be frighteningly fast. Like, go back a mere 12 years ago, and the entirety of deep learning was a backwater. See my tweet here for more fun examples.
Seconding quetzal_rainbow’s comment. Another way to put it is:
If your reference class is “integrating a new technology into the economy”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over decades.
…But if your reference class is “integrating a new immigrant human into the economy—a human who is already generally educated, acculturated, entrepreneurial, etc.”, then you’d expect AI integration to unfold over years, months, even weeks. There’s still on-the-job training and so on, for sure, but we expect the immigrant human to take the initiative to figure out for themselves where the opportunities are and how to exploit them.
We don’t have AI that can do the latter yet, and I for one think that we’re still a paradigm-shift away from it. But I do expect the development of such AI to look like “people find a new type of learning algorithm” as opposed to “many many people find many many new algorithms for different niches”. After all, again, think of humans. Evolution did not design farmer-humans, and separately design truck-driver-humans, and separately design architect-humans, etc. Instead, evolution designed one human brain, and damn, look at all the different things that that one algorithm can figure out how to do (over time and in collaboration with many other instantiations of the same algorithm etc.).
How soon can we expect this new paradigm-shifting type of learning algorithm? I don’t know. But paradigm shifts in AI can be frighteningly fast. Like, go back a mere 12 years ago, and the entirety of deep learning was a backwater. See my tweet here for more fun examples.