No. of Recommendations: 16
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't "someday." It's already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happeningCurrent challenges from a change in management will be a piece of cake compared to what may be coming next. Is our current BOD and management up to facing it?
No. of Recommendations: 1
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do"
Try driving a new Tesla with AI voice command and FSD and you’ll know you are on to something. Other than changing my parking spot I haven’t touched the controls for 6 months of driving all over south Florida. Amazing!
No. of Recommendations: 0
My question would be to ask Mr. Abel if Omaha has performed a sensitivity analysis to near & intermediate term effects of AI on the company's various businesses. Some will be much more affected than others.
No. of Recommendations: 16
My question would be to ask Mr. Abel if Omaha has performed a sensitivity analysis to near & intermediate term effects of AI on the company's various businesses. Some will be much more affected than others.
Probably a waste of time. Sure, it's absolutely a question that it would be great to know the answer to. But absolutely nobody knows the answers yet, so there is no need to have a big initiative involving consultants with crystal balls.
The main useful action item is to imagine the business model risks as much as possible as a when weighing new investment ideas, to whatever extent you can.
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 21
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't "someday." It's already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet.
Actually I think they’re already there (for some things) and miles and miles away for others. We already have robots. We don’t have the “one size fits everything you can imagine and walks and talks and dances” robots that are popular in the razzmatazz press these days.
Manipulating bits and bytes is trivial compared to doing so in the physical realm. The electron dance has been obvious since VisiCalc, if not before. And we have had robots long before, but they are the simple “do one thing repetitively and do it well” type: everything from the mechanical chain powering the assembly line to the one-armed robots doing the welding in an auto factory.
I think what you and mostly everyone else is talking about are “humanoid robots”, which are a mile away - and in my view probably going to be “less than advertised.” They are not going to do “one thing well”, they are likely to do “a lot of things mediocre”, because they will not have the agility nor the brain power that a human does - and by a lot. (That doesn’t mean they won’t have advantages like no-unions, or coffee breaks, or whatever, just that the expectation are absurdly out of line with what’s possible with today’s technology.)
Bouncing the pixels, as we have seen as recently as this weekend with “Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise” gets better and better with each iteration (which come faster and faster), but mechanical linkages, sensors, vision, reliability, integration, battery life for a contraption this complex, not to mention cost-effective production, are moving far more slowly - even glacially by comparison.
I know everybody's hyped up about this, but then “we’ll have a million people on Mars by 2050” was a cool dream too - but similarly unrealistic. That doesn’t mean there won’t be “humanoid robots” at some point, just that the path to get (useful ones) there is far more difficult than moving electrons around a screen because of the multiplicity of factors that ALL have to go right in order to make such a robot vision happen. There are sci-fi dreams coming true, just more slowly than enthusiasts ever think they will.
One final comment: There are some use cases for the humanoid form robot, even with limitations - after all there are jobs which have not been automated which humans do (over and over, ad nauseam) but a significant fraction of those are going to be beyond robotics capabilities for a good long while yet. Taking boxes off a truck? Sure. Deboning a chicken without getting bone shards in the mix? Not for a while, methinks.
