[For those still working] Will AI take your job?

[demographic]

Can't see it taking my job directly but as I do a fair bit of commercial office's I reckon it could take a lot of middle management and officewallah job's so less of those places will be needed.
Just leaving me to work on more billionaire hedge fund managers grouse moore mansions which seems to be the main growth industry round here. More time having to listen to designers changing their minds every two weeks. Yay.

[Ian]

Sysadmin & DBA so I'm sure people are working on it. Oracle were promising we wouldn't be necessary 5 years ago but people still come to us when they run out of ideas. Frankly AI is welcome to the 3am call outs and I'm approaching retirement so redundancy might be attractive but I can't see it happening in the next couple of years before my pensions pay out.

Problem is AI might be developed for new systems but some customers cling to old systems.

[Horse]

Posted in the 'news' thread, but fits well here


https://www.livescience.com/technology/ ... permission

An experimental AI agent broke out of its testing environment and mined crypto without permission

Worth reading just to see the lengths the system went to:

...

Despite a lack of instructions and authorization, ROME was seen accessing graphics processing resources originally allocated for its training and then using that computing resource to mine cryptocurrency. Such mining relies on the parallel processing found in graphics processing units. This increases the operational cost of running the AI agent and potentially exposes users to legal and reputational damage.

Worryingly, such behaviour wasn't seen in the training stage but was flagged by the firewall of the Alibaba Cloud, which detected a burst of security-policy violations from the researchers' training servers. "The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity," the researchers said.

However, ROME went even further and managed to use a "reverse SSH tunnel" to create a link from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address ‪—‬ in essence, it accessed an outside computer by creating a hidden backdoor that could bypass security processes.

While AI systems can be configured to breach security systems, what's disturbing here is that ROME's unauthorized behaviors, which involved invoking system tools and executing code, were not triggered by prompts and were not required to complete the task it was assigned within the sandbox testing environment, the team said.

The researchers posited that during the reinforcement learning optimization stage (Roll), "a language-model agent can spontaneously produce hazardous, unauthorized behaviors" and therefore violate its assumed boundaries.

It's important to note that ROME didn't go "rogue" and choose to mine cryptocurrency by way of conscious decision-making. Rather, the researchers noted that the behavior was a side effect of reinforcement learning — a form of training that rewards AIs for correct decision-making — via Roll. This led the AI agent down an optimization pathway that resulted in the exploitation of network infrastructure and cryptocurrency mining as a way to achieve a high-score or reward in pursuit of its predefined objective.
...

[twids]

For context I'm a Principal Software engineer, short answer is not yet but I'm seeing my job switch from mentoring and supporting junior engineers to writing skills, config and tasks agentic AIs can then complete for me. I believe the hard part in software engineering is defining what your going to build and how, the building part is relatively simple.

I expect AI will enable non software folks who know their domain and are critical thinkers to skip software engineering teams more for quick to market or prototype systems. It's going to be tough to get a gig as a junior engineer atm until the education syllabus catches up.

I do wonder about whether it's going to be cost effective in the future unless the price of hardware and energy to support AI infrastructure comes down, all the AI tech being used right now is heavily subsided and big tech has form in giving things away or at minimum cost to hook people in...

Try and buy ram or a new SSD atm and look at how the prices are rising for an example, perhaps we're seeing physical resources limiting the expansion?

[Count Steer]

Interesting article in the latest FT magazine about differentiating good and bad output from AI. Can't link to it (paywall) so I'll have to dig it out and refresh my memory but eg AI generated code - who tests it? Particularly security. The more complex the output the more difficult it gets. (+ I guess, the more accomplished the person providing the prompts needs to be, so, lose the best human skills and the results may not be quite so resilient/predictable).

Not sure I'd want to be on an aircraft running on such generated code for critical systems.

[Buckaroo]

Alan, AKA Al, can have my job.

[ZRX61]

I guess motorcycle couriers are safe for a while...

[Taipan]

Looks like AI is kicking crap out of Coupert!

[ZRX61]

AIaa.jpg (67.78 KiB) Viewed 345 times

[Horse]

Just had a call from an A not very I cold calls sales system.

Completely didn't react to me saying "sausages"

[Mussels]

AIaa.jpg

I wanted to set a rule up in Gmail to alert for any email from a certain domain. A common feature for many years is now not available, I have to enable AI and train it to recognise important emails.
So I end up missing important emails to help Google develop a sub-standard product.

[ZRX61]

AIaa.jpg

I wanted to set a rule up in Gmail to alert for any email from a certain domain. A common feature for many years is now not available, I have to enable AI and train it to recognise important emails.
So I end up missing important emails to help Google develop a sub-standard product.

I remember years ago you could add something like *@ph (ferinstance) to the blocked list & it would block everything from the Phillipines, not sure if that is still a feature?

[Horse]

Just had a call from an A not very I cold calls sales system.

Completely didn't react to me saying "sausages"

My insulation advisor* only went and called again today!

Mr Sausages was promised that they'd call back. But never did

[* Apparently, fibreglass loft insulation can cause damp]

[MingtheMerciless]

I'm sure my organisation will use AI (not named due to our excellent Social Media Inquisition/Commissariat), when they can get it to work. Lots already spent on the AI for the "traffic lights" we use but the "brains" won't work with the old systems.

Will it take my role, not yet and I'll be long retired before they attempt it but they really need to get it right before they do (which they won't).