AI: Is It All Just Hype?
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
AI: Is It All Just Hype?
Victor Sample
Every single day as I read through my news feed, I see 10-15 articles about AI; every day there are new articles quoting CEOs of very large companies stating that AI will usher in a new golden age for humankind or AI will destroy our society as we know it!
From Fortune Magazine:
“Elon Musk says saving for retirement is irrelevant because AI is going to create a world of abundance: ‘It won’t matter’”
From The Economist:
Kristalina Georgieva, head of the IMF (International Monetary Fund), has said that artificial intelligence is “hitting the labour market like a tsunami”; Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, has forecast that America’s biggest bank would soon need fewer employees; and Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, has predicted the technology his company is at the forefront of developing could wipe out “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs”.
From Benzinga:
Bill Gates Says 'AI Will Change Society the Most'—Job Disruption Has Already Begun, 'Less Labor' Will Be Needed, And 5-Day Work Week May Disappear
From Futurism:
Futurism:
CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant.
Companies creating AI engines are raising TENS of Billions (with a “B”) in investment money. Large technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta (Facebook) and IBM have laid off tens of THOUSANDS of employees that are “being replaced by AI”.
However, I have read several studies by economists stating the data they see does NOT support the claim that the laid-off people are being replaced by AI. The CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) has said that the massive layoffs are unlikely to be due to AI.
Instead, the data indicates that during and after the Covid pandemic, the government was pumping billions and billions of dollars into the economy to keep from slipping into a depression. Many large companies simply over hired. Now that the free Covid money is gone, companies are laying off the employees they over hired. Instead of blaming poor management, they are using AI as the scapegoat.
For all the hype about AI ushering in a new golden age, I also read article after article about companies having great difficulty implementing AI and those that have are not seeing the ROI (return on investment) they had planned on.
Amazon has a pure technology business called Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers servers to companies for hosting their business processes or for storage. MT43News uses AWS for auxiliary data storage.
Recently, AWS suffered an outage affecting thousands of businesses. It was finally released that the reason for the outage was their AI engine making a bad decision.
I have read that AI is replacing computer programmers. Programmers no longer write code; programmers direct AI engines on what to implement and AI generates the programs. Last week, in a single day, IBM lost over $40 Billion (with a “B”) in market capitalization due to an article stating that AI is able to convert COBOL programs running on legacy hardware to modern languages.
I have also read that AI-generated programs are full of bugs (some very subtle bugs) that require a huge amount of human programming time to correct. Every once in a while, I ask Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini to create code for me just to see how they do. Even for very simple tasks, they rarely create code that will actually run. Although I will admit I asked Copilot to generate a small amount of code to execute some geometry that would have taken me a full day to work out. The code Copilot generated in seconds did work and worked perfectly, saving me time.
Just this morning, I read an article that AI engines are analyzing existing programs to detect security problems in the code. They are reporting about 40% false problems; on the other hand, about 60% of AI-generated code has security problems.
AI has also had a dark social side. Many people have become addicted to having conversations with chatbots. I have seen several reports of people spending 10 hours A DAY or more having conversations with AI chatbots. Chatbots have been implicated in “helping” or even recommending suicides.
So, is AI a real boon to humankind as Elon Musk asserts? Will AI destroy our society as we know it as many, many people are asserting? OR is AI just hype; the topic of the day?
AI is definitely real; it is not going to disappear like pet rocks or hoola-hoops did. I have had a lot of fun with AI and written a lot of articles I hope people found amusing about my interactions with chatbots. BUT, I do seriously use AI every single day for a variety of different tasks.
I always double-check any answers or directions I get from AI, but I do start there. If I ask AI to generate any code (I have never asked AI to generate a full program), I always have to carefully review what it generates – it is rarely fully correct.
Only time will tell if AI will greatly benefit humans or destroy our society or, eventually, get past the hype and become just another tool we use.
AI is here to stay; we should all start to learn how to live with AI in our lives.
Anthropic is a leading company developing and implementing AI. Anthropic has a very full list of FREE online courses in AI; everything from learning to be "fluent" in AI to how to develop AI solutions. To learn more about AI, visit the Anthropic site at: https://anthropic.skilljar.com/
