I work as a ethical hacker, so I'm well aware of the phishing and impersonation possibilities. But the net positive is so, so much bigger for society that I'm sure we'll figure it out.
And yes, in 20 years you can tell your kids that 'back in my day' support consisted of real people. But truthfully, as someone who worked on a ISP helpdesk it's much better for society if these people move on to more productive areas.
> But truthfully, as someone who worked on a ISP helpdesk it's much better for society if these people move on to more productive areas.
But is it, though? I started my career in customer support for a server hosting company, and eventually worked my way up to sysadmin-type work. I would not have been qualified for the position I eventually moved to at the start, I learned on the job. Is it really better for society if all these entry level jobs get automated, leaving only those with higher barriers to entry?
Historically this exact same thing has happened, it was one of the bigger arguments against the abolition of child labour. "How will they grow up to be workers if they're not doing these jobs where they can learn the skills they'll need?"
The answer then was extending schooling, so that people (children at the time) could learn those skills without having their labour exploited. I would argue we should consider that today, extend mandatory free schooling. The economic purpose of education is that at the end of it the person should be able to have a job, removing entry level jobs doesn't change the economic purpose of education, so extend education until the person is able to have a job at the end of it again.
The social purpose of schooling is to make good members of society, and I don't think that cause would be significantly harmed by extending schooling in order for students to have learned enough to be more capable than an LLM in the job market.
> But the net positive is so, so much bigger for society that I'm sure we'll figure it out.
Considering that the democratic backsliding across the globe is coincidentally happening at the same time as the rise of social media and echo chambers, are we sure about that? LLM have the opportunity to create a handcrafted echo chamber for every person on this planet, which is quite risky in an environment where almost every democracy of the planet is fighting against radical forces trying to abolish it.
I don’t think we know how these net out. AFAICT the negative use cases are a lot more real than the positive ones.
People like to just suppose that these will help discover drugs and design buildings and what not, but what we actually know they’re capable of doing is littering our information environment at massive scale.
I find this very interesting. If you work as an ethical hacker, I believe you see the blackhat potential there.
But you don't see the positive, you just have faith. That's beautiful in a way, but dangerous too. Just like the common idea that "I have faith that somebody will find a technological solution to climate change". When the risk is that high, I think we should take a step back and don't bet our survival on faith.
And yes, in 20 years you can tell your kids that 'back in my day' support consisted of real people. But truthfully, as someone who worked on a ISP helpdesk it's much better for society if these people move on to more productive areas.