AI Scary! AI Bad! AI... Good?

When Will see's a sign on a store that says it's "completely AI run!", he is sad.

Losing jobs to AI would be scary and walking down a street full of AI robots would feel alienating.

But...

In a practical sense, AI is a lot more efficient at doing certain tasks than us human counterparts and that efficiency frees up our time, which allows us to spend time on more original, creative pursuits.

A really interesting news article:

Basically:
1. Swipe your credit card
2. Pick up whatever items you want
3. Leave the store, your credit card will be charged based on the items you took.

There are no employees in the store (except probably to re-stock from time to time).

This is amazing. Yes —technically a student who could have been employed there no longer has an opportunity to have a job there and make money, but everything else in an operational sense is more streamlined and efficient.

We're looking at a store that operates basically on its own and is open 24/7. If this was rolled out to more stores, we'd see:

1. Less late-night shift workers: working late-night shifts messes up your sleep cycles, so less people doing that means a "healthier" society overall
2. More options late at night: if you do happen to be awake, there would be more options for satisfying a late-night craving.
3. Potentially lower-costs over-time: since hiring an employee at 24 hours costs $$, but obviously at this stage the technology probably costs more than hiring the employee and the cost savings / where it goes also depends on the owner of the business.

The territory of tasks that an AI can help us with is only increasing (like this autonomous pizza making machine)...

But I suspect that AI will always require some sort of direction or input from a real human to actually work. All AI (to my knowledge) operate based on specific inputs, then run through a neural network, and finally produces an output.

While this is simplistic explanation, it hard to see how AI can move past this sort of paradigm and develop faculties like free-will.

Of course, not every person believes in their own self-efficacy and free-will, and this is sort of goes back to ancient times on the debate between free will and fatalism, but there's still so much we don't know about the human psyche and how we operate, arrive at decisions, etc. that for now, I have to stand on the side of believing our choices are not pre-determined or fated.

For an AI to debate and even ponder these sorts of questions seems far-fetched. An AI wouldn't actively explore a topic or attempt to clarify knowledge on their own. They wait for prompts from us and then generate outputs. For an AI to be truly autonomous it would have to move past that model of behavior to be "human-like".

What's most exciting is that with less people being needed to run menial jobs, it leaves more room for people to work on jobs they may actually enjoy, and to make a living on their craft as opposed to their labor.

With AI improving efficiency, less man-hours and people are needed to accomplish / create the same end-results. It may take a year or two for a season two of an anime I want to watch to release, but if AI can get to the point where it helps the teams creating these stories and animation to the precision a person / team can, that means faster release schedules, more anime to watch, and at the same quality level.

Finally Will wakes up from his dream.

And realizes tomorrow is Monday and he has to wake up for work.

Till next time!
Mindless Blob