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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   4788 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Unfortunately I think sales will be sooner than most people think. The AI to automatically get rid of your accent in real time on a phone call already exists - from there you only need to be able to accurately feed phrases/words to the AI and it will be a better salesperson than most could hope to be. An AI also doesn't get discouraged, which from what I have seen is the #1 reason people leave sales.

I think music will be differentiated into different groups. People love concerts, and being able to physically play an instrument has always been, to my mind at least, much more impressive than being an artist. It's 'cooler' if you will, to play guitar than to wield a paintbrush.

Writing is, well, the writing is already on the wall. GPT-3 is incredible, and scaling shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. (1) I'm extremely confident that many lower-quality blogs are now entirely GPT-3, and instead of hiring ghostwriters, which is a shockingly common practice, writers will just use GPT-4 or 5 to offload their work. I'm neutral on whether or not this is a good thing.

Ironically I now think taxi drivers, who I once thought would be the first to go, will probably last pretty long. Mistakes are far costlier when driving than when creating a piece of art, or a piece of writing. One of the ways I view different jobs is how serious the immediate consequences are when you fail.

1 - https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.

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