AI has been bubbling along for many years, but the real bloom was in November 2022, when ChatGPT 3.5 was rolled out. It was on a different level.
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I have gone back and pulled forward a couple of old posts on this, and here offer some updates.
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This first one is from June 11, 2010, and is entitled "Technology that Augments Labor with More Labor (Instead of Capital)".
At that time, it seemed like nanotechnologies and cloning were going to be relevant sooner than AI.
How much more productive would you be if a digital version of yourself could do the grocery shopping? How about if it could get your car inspected? What if it could go to a lecture you’re not sure is worthwhile, evaluate it as you would, and report back on it?
Ummm ... you can already do that last one. Just get a Zoom lecture, feed it into Otter, feed its output into a personalized AI using ChatGPT 4, and done. I've done it. Fourteen years ago that was science fiction.
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The second one is just a post about a poignant comic from July 25, 2011 entitled "Calling Robin Hanson".
Digression: I hate what the internet has become since the advent of social media. We had a good 15 year run of being able to find everything, and with social media it's gotten harder to find anything. In particular, that "permanent link" from 15 years ago is gone (which is actually really stupid, because if the comic has moved to a new place, anyone thoughtful can code a redirect in seconds ... but ... no one did). Anyway, you can still find it here.
I'm pretty sure the artist drew this about the ennui of getting older. But my alternative take was what if your smartphone could do this. Again, that seemed like science fiction in 2011, but this is actually possible in 2024. Heck, this was possible several years ago. Now we can make deep fake videos that are way beyond the little asterisks in the comic.
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The third one is from March 25, 2015, and is entitled "This Post Is Not a Joke". Here's a few updates.
Mongolia is no longer posting amazing growth rates. Ethiopia is. No ... wait ... that's so 2022 ... Guyana is boasting the highest growth rates now. But Mongolia does have a big capital city now, that's gotten pretty spiffy, even touristy, even if it is thousands of miles from ... anywhere.
BTW: We used to get some Mongolian students in our MBA program, and they felt that Cedar City was just like Mongolia, climate-wise.
In 2015, I mentioned drones because I'd recently seen a live demonstration of a (remotely piloted) drone that could and did push the elevator buttons and get off at its chosen floor. I am quite sure they can probably do that without human control these days, but I have not seen it.
My mathematical point and graph from that post still hold true. There's no way to prove it, but I think some people have already shifted from the orange path to the blue one.
Some people still play Borderlands, and the last entry in its universe was made about the time ChatGPT 3.25 came out. You can't buy it new, but I'm sure you can find the original ClapTrap robot for sale on eBay.
Do note the paragraph about what I might do with more Stata knowledge than you. The thing is ... I don't need that anymore ... ChatGPT writes my Stata programs for me these days. And I had it write a PowerShell script last month to sort all the digital images on my hard drives. I am now wondering if I rated some of my digital images and trained it ... whether it could reasonably rate all my images of my kids and dogs as if I had done it??
Also, SoundHound is still around and still great. People say Shazam is better, and that may be so, but I find it to be more intrusive too. I started to think my son could really pull off being a professional pianist when after SoundHounding him for many years and getting nothing ... he started to be good enough that it would think he was one of the professional releases in its database.
And finally, the last paragraph was the part of the motivation for the optional section in Chapter III of the Handbook that I covered briefly in response to ME's question in the Discussions. AI may make our productivity higher but our measure of that productivity lower if it converts things that used to be expensive and rare into the cheap and commonplace. Of course, you already know that's true of your phone ... provided that you can maintain some focus while using it ;-)
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