I saw a Canadian ad for euthanasia services the other day and was appalled in a way I haven't been in quite a while. By far the most dystopian thing I have seen thus far in my life.

Definitely. What we have seen so far is really interesting because as you say it definitely is the death knell for certain jobs but because it is also massively expanding what we can do with computers (and who can do it) it seems like many employment opportunities will spring up as well.

It is hard to say. What we have seen of AI so far indicates to me that it can't fully replace people (outside certain roles that are overly focused on one task) but it will lead to a big increase in productivity for individuals.

The practical impact of that would seem to me to be that competition will be more fierce between marketing agencies and employees within them. But businesses will still need marketing and from what I can see of AI currently it is not well-suited to replace all the roles a skilled digital marketer will provide for a business:

• Marketing Plan
• Market research
• Assist on sculpting the campaign
• Identifying who to target with the campaign
• etc

The general way I am thinking of AI atm (at least what we have seen) is that it is exceptionally good at certain very specific tasks but struggles to change context. So it can be amazing at certain games/writing things/folding proteins/creating images, but can't piece any of these individual tasks into something that creates full value. Even some of the things it seems best at like generating images, the images still likely need a minor touch-up by a real artist depending on what it is being used for (although this may change especially as if you are after something like a book cover an AI can create something an order of magnitude more cheaply than an artist).

For me, the real question is what exactly is GPT-4 going to be able to do. Rumours say it has 500x more parameters than GPT-3. If we assume this is true (which I have no hard verification on and it could easily be false) what would it mean exactly? Is 500x more parameters equal to 500x as powerful? Or does it mean something else?

Apparently GPT-4 should be with us by the end of February so my plan is basically to keep going exactly as I was in terms of work etc until then and then reassess.

It's going to be hard to tell. All current AI is still pretty "stupid" in that it can't really take a task from start to finish.

My personal prediction is that helpdesks/software support will be one of the biggest areas hit. If a commercial model can be tuned towards a specific business/product it would be a lot cheaper than staff/not require an office/always available/etc. Anything requiring interaction with the physical world will be a long way off imo. Marketing departments (especially dealing with online) will be heavily hit as well.

I also think dealing services will spring up to handle dealing with legal/bureacratic services using AI.

Currently AI has shown no ability at all to discern where it has made a true novel discovery vs spewing nonsense but I expect as a tool it would help a lot of scientists/engineers/creatives be more productive.

> The real issue is ensuring that man-made art is appreciated and that AI art is labeled as such.

From everything I have seen the major issue is attribution and financial compensation. I personally see no direct connection between AI art and human art in how it makes me feel. I have seen some AI art that has touched me very deeply just as I have seen some human art that has done the same.

I have some good friends who are artists and honestly feel for them. And I am an aspiring fiction writer looking at the same issue for myself (although thus far these tools have also been hugely helpful for my own productivity so its not all bad). But I think the reality is that when anything changes from being difficult/rare/expensive -> easy/common/cheap it changes everything about that area of life.