When the following works I'll be impressed: "ChatGPT can you explain possible ways to make fusion power efficient for clean free energy production given the known and inferred laws of physics?" and it actually produces a new answer and plans for a power plant.
It's very hard to know how close we are to this, but I do think it's possible these AI models end up being able to infer and invent new technology as they improve. Even if nearly 100% of the guesses at the above question are wrong it doesn't take many being useful for humans to benefit.
I wonder what humans will do when the AIs give us everything we could ever want materially.
Correct. What we need is intelligence rooted in math, physics, engineering, chemistry, material science (aka great grasp of reality).
Then you can ask it to create designs and optimize them. Ask it to create hypothesis and experiments to validate them.
Human brains are v capable at abstraction and inference but memory and simulation compute is quite limited. AI could really help here.
How can we design better governance strategies?
Analyze all passed laws and find conflicts?
Analyze all court cases and find judges who have rules against the law and explain why? Which laws are ambiguous? Which laws work against the general public and favor certain corporations? Find ROI of corporation donations which led to certain laws, which led to X% rise in their profits.
The really big piece missing from current AI is reality grounded modeling and multi-step compositional planning + execution.
It is literally a task that requires large amounts of super smart, well-educated people to work on for years and fail many times in the process. So we should only be impressed when it can one-shot such insane questions? On the other hand, I expect 2024 to make 2023 look like a slow year for AI and maybe some of the nay sayers will finally feel at least a little bit impressed.
2. """I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution, like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.""" - Agent Smith in The Matrix
It's very hard to know how close we are to this, but I do think it's possible these AI models end up being able to infer and invent new technology as they improve. Even if nearly 100% of the guesses at the above question are wrong it doesn't take many being useful for humans to benefit.
I wonder what humans will do when the AIs give us everything we could ever want materially.