opinion Let’s face it. You’re a smart cookie. You work in technology, creating, managing, and helping others with some of the most complex machines in human history. So is it true that LLMs are after your job, as are others working in equally esoteric fields of knowledge work, such as law, finance, medicine, and creative departments? Do you sit at home watching daytime TV while the CEO asks Bing to come up with a better idea than the marketing director?
Seeking help elsewhere is futile. In the UK, the education minister appears to be the spokesperson for official AI assessments. She says that LLMs can take the burden off teachers by doing menial tasks like grading, but if you think that sounds ridiculously stupid, she doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. Acknowledge that you have not and back it up. New technologies threaten job restructuring, and governments hardly even bother to make a fuss about it.
Of course we have been here before. By the mid-to-late 1970s, microprocessors were no longer quirky outliers in the computing industry largely detached from everyday experience. Instead, people realized that microprocessors were ubiquitous and would change lives in general, and jobs in particular.
This recognition was not often seen in the British government at the time. They thought technology was about tech companies and that the UK tech industry was a mess. Consumer electronics gave way to imports, and the defense sector siphoned Cold War money, showing little interest to those who didn’t need to buy it. The same was true for IBM ICL aspirants. It was important as a technology policy to manage the decline and free the state from the influence of industry. That a revolution was coming that would bring technology into everyone’s life and potentially automate millions of jobs has never been so much a matter of state as writing limericks in Sanskrit.
Then something amazing happened. The BBC produced a 1978 documentary the chip is down now, as part of the acclaimed Horizon series. Take a look at what microprocessors do and can do across society and industry, and unusually for Horizon and the BBC, the UK is adrift, without political strategy and without political strategy. said no. The ending was unusually strong. “What’s shocking is that the government was completely unaware… Silence is scary. It’s time to talk about the future.”
This was shocking. Three years later, the UK government abolished the Microelectronics Education Program (MEP) and supported the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project. This led to the de facto adoption of the BBC Micro as the standard computer for schools. None of this would have cost much, with MEPs being funded at around £35m in today’s terms, but they would have been enough to foster a public frenzy for learning, playing and programming with computers. was helpful.
Many things didn’t happen as expected, such as the survival of the educational software market, but the likes of Arm and the UK video game industry made up for it. It is impossible to compare the number of people who have lost their jobs due to automation to the number of people who have lost their jobs due to mismanagement or industry decline. The service sector is growing at a rate unimaginable without the use of IT, and economists will be debating exactly what happened for years to come. But there is no doubt that the country was ready to act.
What will the equivalent of LLM knowledge engineering look like? . As with processors, the belief that change is coming is as strong as the realization that no one knows what it will look like.
The crucial difference is that it’s clear what the processor is good at and what it’s not good at. LLM not so much. They deal with knowledge, but know nothing of truth. They mix facts and hallucinations. They amplify prejudices. They are good at talking to people, but they don’t know what effect it will have. In short, the technology is far less mature than its phenomenal adoption implies, and it remains to be seen how the situation will evolve in the next five years. Frankly, this is our salvation.
One undeniable aspect of LLM is that it is too unstable without human involvement. A whole new field emerged overnight based on the strong correlation between usefulness of outputs and smartness of requests. Prompt Engineering. People who can do the job know the right questions to ask and how to interpret the answers, but LLMs can do neither. They can only be tools to help humans more or less.
So, here are our plans to prepare for the “AI revolution.” Rather than replacing teachers or encouraging addiction, students are exposed to technology to develop the skills to critically analyze what it does and how it does it. Encourage those in potentially affected work to find out what each new iteration does and does not do well in their area of expertise. He has three sides to this. Sure, LLM might be good for you and you should know how. No, LLM does not work without professional interaction. You are the best expert at your job. Finally, if your boss tries to kick you out in favor of his ChatGPT, you need to know how to tell your boss that they’re done with it.
It is unlikely that the government and public broadcasters of 2023 will find a common purpose this time to even create a framework for an education and awareness campaign. that’s ok. This time, thanks to the microprocessor, I now have access to everything I need to do on my own. The scale of state involvement at the time was modest. It doesn’t take long to get great results.
If you’re smart enough to use LLM to do your job more efficiently, or smart enough to understand why LLM isn’t working for you, then you’re smart enough to keep it. Don’t wait to be told. You wouldn’t think so – you’re smart, after all. ®
