Unlike 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, we have heaps upon heaps of labeled datasets now. So much human life happens through technology that we are doing an astounding job of producing labeled datasets.
And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap.
AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intelligent" per se, their cleverness has definitely started impacting desk jobs.
The desk job stuff is what most of those alarmist news items are worried about. Nobody seems to worry [too much] about reducing blue collar jobs through automation. Can you imagine how many people you'd need to unload a modern container ship without computers tracking stuff and optimizing storage? Or how much work it would take to harvest modern crops where automated harvesters are used?
There are some promising ideas out there based on unsupervised ("self-supervised") learning. There, the problem of needing big labeled datasets doesn't exist: just turn on a camera and have a motor point it at the surrounding world. Data of this kind is and always has been super abundant. But using it requires making a conceptual leap away from supervised pattern recognition -- which is pretty much what today's "AI" does...
And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap.
AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intelligent" per se, their cleverness has definitely started impacting desk jobs.
The desk job stuff is what most of those alarmist news items are worried about. Nobody seems to worry [too much] about reducing blue collar jobs through automation. Can you imagine how many people you'd need to unload a modern container ship without computers tracking stuff and optimizing storage? Or how much work it would take to harvest modern crops where automated harvesters are used?