Just as the AI industry is becoming more analytical and realistic about how best to use AI, some users are falling in love with chatbots. We need to know more.
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From recent news: ● “AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies” Down? The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey of 1.2 million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees, see chart below. Torsten Sløk, Apollo Chief Economist, September 7, 2025 Apollo is a coaching firm for investors. Currently, unemployment is up but it’s still more likely to be due to traditional issues than “A hot bot got my slot!” However, some Read More ›
It’s no mystery why LLMs aren’t intelligent in any meaningful way. The real mystery is why so many otherwise intelligent people still take the claims seriously.
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LLMs excel at simple coding tasks but are still too unreliable to use without extensive human supervision on complex tasks where mistakes are expensive.
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The job market for recent college grads may be warning us that participation trophies for college and ChatGPT use have long-run costs.
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Suppose that AI genuinely poses a threat to the human species, but in a much subtler way than we expect?
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Individual workers may claim huge productivity gains for their work, ignoring the impact of AI on the work of downstream employees within the same process.
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Among the problems that AI Morality tackles is the risk that even if AI doesn’t reduce the quantity of jobs, it may greatly affect the quality of jobs available
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Full-time employees, challenged to incorporate AI more fundamentally into their schedule and skillsets, are not seeing the promised productivity yields.
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Even though writers wanted nothing to do with the chatbots, their work is still being flagged by detectors. And it’s literally costing them their jobs.
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Semi- but not-fully capable AI systems allow us to be lazy in some respects, but demand that we be less lazy in others.
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The Big Tech companies may see replacing workers with AI as only natural. After all, that’s the future their executives were told from childhood to expect.
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Actors and entertainers might be needed much less — only to generate a new idea that can then be tweaked and replicated by ever-smaller studios.
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The pandemic changed the way we work, with more people opting for online or “hybrid” schedules, office buildings emptying, and boundaries between work and other aspects of life starting to get blurred. But what is the general attitude towards work in the United States? According to Simone Stolzoff, author of the forthcoming The Good Enough Job, Americans are turning to their careers like people used to turn to religion: for meaning and a sense of self-worth. This new secular religion is called “workism.” In an interview with Wired, Stolzoff said, [Workism] is treating work akin to a religious identity. It’s looking to work not just for a paycheck but also for a community, a sense of identity and purpose and Read More ›
As chatbots become more sophisticated, some writers predict that they will take over run-of-the-mill writing jobs that don’t need or attract much creativity. For example, copyright and plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey points out, “AI doesn’t have to be great, just good enough.” In 2017, five years ago, the Washington Post revealed that an AI bot named Heliograph had produced some 850 articles for the paper. However, those stories were for things such as local high school football games and financial reports. They were all short, formulaic and not worth sending a human reporter to. At the time, the stories had generated more than 500,000 clicks. In short, they were ridiculously successful, delivering information that was important and sought after, but Read More ›
Science Uprising released an extra feature on Tuesday, following Science Uprising 10, in which philosopher Jay Richards discusses what underlies the myths of artificial intelligence: It isn’t a superior grasp of the technology involved that drives some (Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and others) to warn that AI will achieve superiority over human beings, drive us out of work, and finally out of existence. It’s the hidden premise that humans are just “meat machines” rather than spiritual beings in a creator’s image. If that were true, of course it would follow that other, faster machines would likely overtake and replace us. David Klinghoffer, “Jay Richards: Myths, Metaphysics, and Artificial Intelligence” at Evolution News (October 4, 2022) However it plays out among Read More ›
Earlier this year, we learned about the best employee tracking software for 2022. (The Head Office can know if you went to the washroom or phoned your dog’s vet … ) Not everyone thinks that total surveillance by management is the best way to get optimum performance: But technology is not a replacement for what good managers do. They pull disparate groups of people together and build camaraderie, share a vision, grow trust, and—over time—create cohesive teams that achieve big goals. They get to know their team members individually and work carefully to set expectations, be supportive, understand context, and give feedback and direction. They take into account the nuance of uniqueness, inherent both in the person and in the Read More ›
Recently, we wrote about unsubstantiated accusations of shoplifting at retail self-checkouts — sometimes accompanied by attempted shakedowns. But bigger, more complex issues loom in the background: Self-checkout probably does make theft (along with false accusations of theft) — and various other reasons that unpaid-for items find their way into shopping bags — much easier. So one large retailer, Wegmans, has decided to just forget it for now: “SCAN users have told us they love the app and convenience it offers,” a Wegmans spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. “Unfortunately, the losses we are experiencing prevent us from continuing to make it available in its current state.” The grocery chain said the app would remain shut off until it can Read More ›
In the “Top Gun, HAL 9000, and Jobs of the Future” podcast (September 15, 2022), WBC director Robert J. Marks discusses whether AI is sucking up all our jobs with talk show host Mark Hahn, who can be heard on KSCJ in Sioux City, Iowa. Dr. Marks, author of Non-Computable You is a professor of computer engineering at Baylor University and a pioneer of AI swarm intelligence. This is the second half of the podcast. https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/09/Mind-Matters-Episode-204-Robert-J-Marks.mp3 A partial transcript, notes, and Additional Resources follow. Mark Hahn: Dr. Marks, artificial intelligence is something that many people have fantasized on a science fiction level; many shows have been about that. Of course, in Space Odyssey 2001, HAL took over, and that’s what Read More ›
(This article by engineering prof Karl D. Stephan originally appeared at Engineering Ethics Blog (August 14, 2022) under the title “AI Illustrator Still Looking for Work: The Shortcomings of DALL-E 2,” and is reprinted with permission.) The field of artificial intelligence has made great strides in the last couple of decades, and any time a new AI breakthrough is announced, critics voice concerns that yet another field of human endeavor has fallen victim to automation and will disappear from the earth when machines replace the people who do it now. Until recently, the occupation of art illustrator seemed reasonably safe from assault by AI innovations. Only a human, it seemed, can start with a set of verbal ordinary-language instructions and come Read More ›