AI

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter

The web is no longer primarily human-generated text created for human readers; it is increasingly AI-generated text created for algorithmic amplification, mixed with human-generated text optimized for the same algorithmic reward functions.

As AI systems train on this degraded corpus, they learn to reproduce its characteristics—shallow reasoning,... See more

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.

The finding is elegant and disturbing: when AI systems are trained on data generated by previous AI systems—a scenario increasingly common as synthetic content floods the internet—the models progressively lose their ability to represent rare and subtle patterns. The statistical tails of the distribution vanish. The models converge toward median,... See more

Agrawal et al. argue that the framing of AI automation versus augmentation is wrong. Rather than being distinct they are often one and the same. They say that AI, initially intended for automating tasks, inadvertently acts as a force for augmentation of the broader workforce. For example, automating diagnostic skills in healthcare could diminish... See more