My AI Prediction After 11 Experiments
It is already hyper-intelligent and will massively disrupt the white-collar world. When given opposable thumbs it will upend blue collar. Societies will share the wealth or fall into chaos.
Based on having done 11 experiments with the AI tool, Claude, I conclude that it is
Staggeringly smart
Instantaneous
Insightful to an extent that makes one incredulous
Articulate
Organized beyond reproach
Engaging
Thoughtful
And these, added a few days later:
Reasoning
Limitless patience
Limitless calculating capacity
Stop me when you’ve heard enough.
I’ve tested it with product invention, medicine, film-making, marketing, theology, amateur bioengineering, art strategy, technology, language training, and mundane search problems. These were all superficial tests, quick forays into a matter, with one or two follow-ups, sometimes none. It shows some areas where it’s clear that the technology is young, such as my film-making and language training experiments that had crude results, but two caveats: there are probably specialized AI tools for such creative specialties, and my experiments were just a few minutes each… maybe a half-hour on the film-making attempt (to make a movie of the Ernest Shackleton boat voyage).
Throughout, its techwriting was uncanny, impeccable.
For my chess set, it had a marketing idea—museum shops—that I never thought about in 35 years.
For my robotic tree surgeon, it thought of an additional mode—pruner mode—that I hadn’t imagined.
In only a few attempts, it started to show the possibility of creating my own photorealistic Shackleton movie; that would take a lot of work but was previously 100% impossible.
For another innovation, a cross between a wheelbarrow and dustpan, it articulated a value proposition that I hadn’t ever put into words myself: no bending or helper required.
For conventional searches—anti-aging, medicine, techsupport—its summarization was laser precise.
For difficult problems—”Is the fountain of youth deliberately made an unsolvable problem by an omnipotent entity”—it crafted a comprehensive statement of the metaphysical conundrum. I feel like I know it all after reading, even if that means we can’t know.
Predictions
Here’s my list of what is very nearly a certainty. I will spare you the weasel words like “might” or “soon.”
Now: Businesses are already holding off on white-collar hiring. I am certain of that without having any data. Competition in our dog-eat-dog system demands it.
6-12 Months: Young people will increasingly be living at home when they can’t find work. That will be the first wave.
6-12 Months: Existing white-collar workers will start producing typical output many, many times faster. This has already happened in some sectors, notably software. Layoffs will ensue, but will be whitewashed as restructuring or reorg or “focusing on our core competencies.”
6-12 Months: Systems that are already automated—and often frustrating—will get much better, when companies learn how to connect AI to those systems.
6-12 Months: Doctors will finally stop diagnosing difficult cases via a weird methodology where the troublesome patient is shuttled between specialists until they land, accidentally, at the specialist who happens to treat their actual disorder. (Patients who never make a lucky spin on the roulette wheel die.) This is just a pet-peeve item of mine from reading medical mysteries.
1 Year: Autonomous driving will be mainstream.
1 Year: Attempts to rein in AI will fail, from the politics of job displacement to the moral problem like telling your robot to kill someone. Similarly to how the internet famously regards censorship as damage and routes around it, AI is like all technology. Trying to quash it in almost any fashion is Whac-A-Mole.
18 Months: When AI is given opposable thumbs (called ‘humanoid robots’), blue collar jobs will start to be displaced.
2 Years: Civic pressure will be put on leaders to figure the relationship between jobs and wealth sharing. Previously this was the domain of the underclass. Welcome, all, to the underclass. The leaders will be incompetent, unprepared, uncreative, and most importantly, unable to influence the money-holders.
4 Years: The leaders will be replaced by young people who have been the victims of the upheaval, and they will try to rewrite the rules of money-making and subsistence.