ChatGPT & AI

[Aegon]

It's Current Year. Names no longer suffice when it comes to assuming gender. I mean, they still do generally speaking, but you can't say that.

I’m in my early 50s and have yet to meet a woman called ‘Brian’. If this particular AI works on probabilities, the likeliest one is that ‘Brian’ is a name associated almost exclusively with people who identify as male. If it was a gender-neutral name (such as Dylan or Blake), I could see the program opting for a gender neutral pronoun.

Boru

You're thinking of gender in simpler and now-antiquated terms. Someone named Brian may be gender fluid, non-binary, etc. The way that the emerging generation of Americans perceive gender is such that a "they" pronoun is the safest bet, at all times, even if you're not AI. For better or worse that is a new cultural phenomenon.

[Aegon]

I think AI will definitely lead to serious job losses over the next half-century or so. Give them another decade to work on autonomous vehicles, and I'm betting a lot of truckers will be out of a job. They'll still need human truckers for dense urban areas, but all those rides on long, lonely highways at 3AM? Those will all be AI trucks soon.

I'm actually most concerned about AI generating fake videos, specifically videos of known personalities. I've seen the latest AI text-to-speech and videos, and the progress is actually stunning. Give it another few years and it will be harder and harder to discern a fake video from a real one.

Regarding the stereotypical concerns about AI, I still think the idea of AI achieving sentience and attacking us or whatever is complete fantasy. It either will never happen or I'll be dead loooong before it does.

A decade for autonomus cars.  At the state we're at, it'll be "in the next twenty years" for a long, long time.

That's why I specified that only certain trucks, for example, will be automated. I don't think a self-driving truck will be able to successfully navigate NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, etc for a very long time. But they could easily make it across, like, 4 midwestern states without issue. And any corporation that relies on trucking for its infrastructure will definitely take up autonomous trucks as soon as they're available. But even if you eliminate humans from just rural routes, that's still millions of jobs removed from one of the biggest sectors of our economy.