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Artificial Intelligence


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1 hour ago, tinker said:

AI's real danger is how it learns to influence humans to believe they are forming their own opinions when really they are being influenced by AI. It's quite possible to influence whole electorates to vote certain ways.

I have read my own results from a physiological profiling test and was shocked out how accurate it was in reading my personality, my likes and dislikes , weakness and strengths. The questionnaire seemed pretty harmless roughly 50 multiple choice type questions. The result was about 500 words profiling my personality,  friends I had for 20 years wouldn't have been that accurate with my personality.

As per usual our politicians will follow the developments and quite possibly close the door once the horse has bolted.

When I was studying psychology, we had a lot of fun with the Lüscher colour test, which claimed to reveal various aspects of personality.

Without exception every subject believed the results - (the Barnum effect).

I thought the best use for it, was a way to get clients to talk about themselves.

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43 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

When I was studying psychology, we had a lot of fun with the Lüscher colour test, which claimed to reveal various aspects of personality.

Without exception every subject believed the results - (the Barnum effect).

I thought the best use for it, was a way to get clients to talk about themselves.

I once took part in a similar experiment. We were all asked what our zodiac sign was, and were then each given an appropriate astrological  'character description'. We were then asked if we thought the analyses were accurate. Everybody (even the sceptics) agreed that they were surprisingly good. 

We were then told to have a look at each other's analyses. We all had the same one. 

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I’ve started using ChatGPT for work to write macros and scripts for me in excel, powerBI and Python. 
 

Im pretty good with those programs, but chat GPT will do things in seconds that I would do in hours. 
 

It’s pretty scary

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13 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

I’ve started using ChatGPT for work to write macros and scripts for me in excel, powerBI and Python. 
 

Im pretty good with those programs, but chat GPT will do things in seconds that I would do in hours. 
 

It’s pretty scary

I don't know but I suspect, that just like the old days when you needed to ask the right questions to get the information you wanted from a search engine, that you need a certain amount of expertise to get the same result you got.

So the simple question is, would someone, me say, with no knowledge of coding be able to get the same results as yourself?

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4 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

would someone, me say, with no knowledge of coding be able to get the same results as yourself?

Good question. And would they know whether the macro, or script was right or had errors? Or was malevolent and suffused with evil intent determined to make your spreadsheet slightly more clumsy to manipulate leading to you having to go and get a really strong coffee.

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39 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

I don't know but I suspect, that just like the old days when you needed to ask the right questions to get the information you wanted from a search engine, that you need a certain amount of expertise to get the same result you got.

So the simple question is, would someone, me say, with no knowledge of coding be able to get the same results as yourself?

No you wouldn’t. But I think what it does is it gives people with a basic knowledge of that stuff the ability to get the kind of results more advanced users would get. And far quicker. 
 

One example is I wanted to write a macro in VBA to combine a number of spreadsheets into one in Excel. I asked ChatGPT and it spat it out instantly. 
 

But it didn’t quite work. It included some tabs that I didn’t want so I just asked it to tweak it so that it excluded those tabs. And then it worked. Perfectly. 
 

Now I could have done that myself. It would have probably taken me an hour or two as I’m not that good with VBA but I could have done it. 
But now somebody with absolutely no knowledge of VBA but a basic knowledge of excel could also have done it in the same way

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11 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

No you wouldn’t. But I think what it does is it gives people with a basic knowledge of that stuff the ability to get the kind of results more advanced users would get. And far quicker. 
 

One example is I wanted to write a macro in VBA to combine a number of spreadsheets into one in Excel. I asked ChatGPT and it spat it out instantly. 
 

But it didn’t quite work. It included some tabs that I didn’t want so I just asked it to tweak it so that it excluded those tabs. And then it worked. Perfectly. 
 

Now I could have done that myself. It would have probably taken me an hour or two as I’m not that good with VBA but I could have done it. 
But now somebody with absolutely no knowledge of VBA but a basic knowledge of excel could also have done it in the same way

Yeah it’s just the next step along from software engineers having several StackOverflow tabs open in Chrome, which would have been baffling to a time travelling programmer from the 1970s

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19 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

Yeah it’s just the next step along from software engineers having several StackOverflow tabs open in Chrome, which would have been baffling to a time travelling programmer from the 1970s

It is, but it's an absolutely massive leap forward, and it's just getting started.

I think we're on the cusp of the biggest distribution to the way we work since the internet took off.

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1 hour ago, blandy said:

Good question. And would they know whether the macro, or script was right or had errors?

This is key. It's never going to make software developers redundant, non-techies are never going to be able to properly evaluate what it's doing, or give the best prompts. What it may well do is make each dev much more efficient and mean that you need only a quarter of the previous workforce.

Until a few months ago, I thought I'd picked wisely and had a career that tech wouldn't steal

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29 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

What it may well do is make each dev much more efficient and mean that you need only a quarter of the previous workforce.

Surely there will be a counter to that, in that developing all the new code and uses for code and integrating it and so on will generate jobs?

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1 hour ago, Stevo985 said:

No you wouldn’t. But I think what it does is it gives people with a basic knowledge of that stuff the ability to get the kind of results more advanced users would get. And far quicker. 
 

One example is I wanted to write a macro in VBA to combine a number of spreadsheets into one in Excel. I asked ChatGPT and it spat it out instantly. 
 

But it didn’t quite work. It included some tabs that I didn’t want so I just asked it to tweak it so that it excluded those tabs. And then it worked. Perfectly. 
 

Now I could have done that myself. It would have probably taken me an hour or two as I’m not that good with VBA but I could have done it. 
But now somebody with absolutely no knowledge of VBA but a basic knowledge of excel could also have done it in the same way

That clarifies things nicely.

In theory it should make you far more productive and therefore increase added-value, which should justify increased pay.

 

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1 hour ago, Davkaus said:

This is key. It's never going to make software developers redundant, non-techies are never going to be able to properly evaluate what it's doing, or give the best prompts. What it may well do is make each dev much more efficient and mean that you need only a quarter of the previous workforce.

Until a few months ago, I thought I'd picked wisely and had a career that tech wouldn't steal

This is the Luddite Fallacy.

What actually happens is new tasks, jobs, products, etc are created by the innovation. Innovation may kill specific types of jobs, but it hasn’t historically harmed employment in general.

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2 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

This is the Luddite Fallacy.

 

U **** wot m8 ;)

You're probably right. It's a little bit scary to be on the other side of it for once.

The thing to consider is that while it may make more jobs, they're not necessarily jobs for the same people. It's probably a good step forward for jobs across the board, just not necessarily for me, so it's a reminder to keep my skills fresh.

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20 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

This is the Luddite Fallacy.

What actually happens is new tasks, jobs, products, etc are created by the innovation. Innovation may kill specific types of jobs, but it hasn’t historically harmed employment in general.

I remember when I started in IT, back in the early 1980s, one of my friends saying "But, surely, once you've written all the programs, there's nothing more to do?" 

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5 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

No you wouldn’t. But I think what it does is it gives people with a basic knowledge of that stuff the ability to get the kind of results more advanced users would get. And far quicker. 
 

One example is I wanted to write a macro in VBA to combine a number of spreadsheets into one in Excel. I asked ChatGPT and it spat it out instantly. 
 

But it didn’t quite work. It included some tabs that I didn’t want so I just asked it to tweak it so that it excluded those tabs. And then it worked. Perfectly. 
 

Now I could have done that myself. It would have probably taken me an hour or two as I’m not that good with VBA but I could have done it. 
But now somebody with absolutely no knowledge of VBA but a basic knowledge of excel could also have done it in the same way

I'm curious about this too. I watched a Tom Scott on it recently (he likened the applications of things like Chat GPT to Napster back in the day, a vanguard for what is to come in the next decade or so), but he didn't really specify exactly what it meant to ask it to code something for you. 

Would I be wrong in assuming that you don't just say 'I want an spreadsheet in excel to do this this and that', and then it gives you something back? 

Would you instead present it with what you already have, and then ask it to make changes or additions to it? 

As an almost complete novice with knowledge only of basic excel stuff, I find it fascinating that you could give it a load of parameters and requirements and it'd throw something out you could then use, which as you say would be a massive time save even if you did know what you were doing. 

My experience with ChatGPT so far has been mixed. I tried to play Yahtzee with it, it knew the rules, it kept track of our turns, but for some reason it couldn't reliably keep the score accurately. It used some really weird terminology for certain moves too. 

Still, pretty cool. 

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What we mustn’t repeat, is the mistake last time. Where the Luddites, let’s call them miners, factory workers, dockers were all made redundant but we couldn’t be seen to have created mass unemployment in certain sectors and age groups as other jobs were supposed to fill the gap. So we put them on the sick. But then didn’t like the cost of the sick pay, so called them scrounges and gave them a miserable life so they’d **** off and die.

Meanwhile, the new jobs in call centres and insurance office data input, they occupied the next generation. So there wasn’t a mass unemployment event, that was just some people not keeping up.

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12 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

What we mustn’t repeat, is the mistake last time. Where the Luddites, let’s call them miners, factory workers, dockers were all made redundant but we couldn’t be seen to have created mass unemployment in certain sectors and age groups as other jobs were supposed to fill the gap. So we put them on the sick. But then didn’t like the cost of the sick pay, so called them scrounges and gave them a miserable life so they’d **** off and die.

Meanwhile, the new jobs in call centres and insurance office data input, they occupied the next generation. So there wasn’t a mass unemployment event, that was just some people not keeping up.

I do think nowadays people and communities are a lot more prepared for the reality that you probably can’t work in the same career your entire working life. The workforce is more mobile, many more people are educated to 18 or beyond, and remote work / internet / etc make it somewhat easier to retrain and find work.

Obviously it will be very disruptive and some people will struggle, and govt should mitigate that as much as possible rather than just telling them to get on their bikes.

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Just now, KentVillan said:

I do think nowadays people and communities are a lot more prepared for the reality that you probably can’t work in the same career your entire working life. The workforce is more mobile, many more people are educated to 18 or beyond, and remote work / internet / etc make it somewhat easier to retrain and find work.

Obviously it will be very disruptive and some people will struggle, and govt should mitigate that as much as possible rather than just telling them to get on their bikes.

Yes, there’s not much a community can do when a government actively decides they are the problem.

Whether we’ve moved beyond that Neanderthal level of thinking, I guess we’d have to ask 30p Lee and the rest of his party. There is nothing wrong with disruption and change, it’s a positive, it’s how we progress. To date, we have a poor record on how we do it.

 

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2 hours ago, hogso said:

I'm curious about this too. I watched a Tom Scott on it recently (he likened the applications of things like Chat GPT to Napster back in the day, a vanguard for what is to come in the next decade or so), but he didn't really specify exactly what it meant to ask it to code something for you. 

Would I be wrong in assuming that you don't just say 'I want an spreadsheet in excel to do this this and that', and then it gives you something back? 

Would you instead present it with what you already have, and then ask it to make changes or additions to it? 

As an almost complete novice with knowledge only of basic excel stuff, I find it fascinating that you could give it a load of parameters and requirements and it'd throw something out you could then use, which as you say would be a massive time save even if you did know what you were doing. 

My experience with ChatGPT so far has been mixed. I tried to play Yahtzee with it, it knew the rules, it kept track of our turns, but for some reason it couldn't reliably keep the score accurately. It used some really weird terminology for certain moves too. 

Still, pretty cool. 

No you just ask it. 
 

I said “write me a macro in VBA to copy the contents of various spreadsheets in an excel file and paste them all into a tab called combined”

And it immediately spat out a macro in VBA. I copied and pasted it in and it worked, ish  

Then I asked it to exclude tabs named “tab 1” and “tab 2” (I can’t remember what they’re called) and to exclude the top row of data in each tab (they were headers)

And it spat out an altered macro. Copy and pasted that and it worked perfectly. 
 

At no point did I give it any information other than my two requests

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It's interesting that we talk about AI as better 'workers' or 'machines' being able to do tasks more efficiently and adding value through their ability to do technical stuff better than people - isn't the next step in AI, the thing that makes it different, that it'll be doing the deciding? The management rather than the factory floor. It'd be interesting to see what a decent sized company with an AI CEO would produce rather than an AI tech team.

 

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