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Hastening Demise

 Nice essay on the point of diminishing or even negative return from the use of AI. In the workplace, it maybe to everyone's collective advantage if the use and adoption of AI by employees varies a great deal. We can have some over-rotate and use it for everything - early adopter, paving the way for others. On the far end of the spectrum there needs to a strong set of luddites who refuse to touch it at all. The rest can be skewed to various degrees towards the different ends. Then we might hope for some sort of steady state for the eco-system where AI is used just enough by the population overall. Pushing for 100% adoption might be the beginning of the end and should not be viewed as a goal to aspire for. 

Imagine a medical-advice chatbot that lists fewer diseases that match your symptoms, because it was trained on a narrower spectrum of medical knowledge generated by previous chatbots. Or an A.I. history tutor that ingests A.I.-generated propaganda and can no longer separate fact from fiction.

Just as a copy of a copy can drift away from the original, when generative A.I. is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature, a group of researchers in Britain and Canada showed how this process results in a narrower range of A.I. output over time — an early stage of what they called “model collapse.”

In my generation there are any number of people who floated into management, leadership and executive roles without having spent any quality time learning the jobs they now managing, leading and executing by actually doing and failing many times along the way. These folks are fundamentally crippled and can exist in their positions as long as they are propped by the support structure they built to pull them up and keep them there. I have seen heads at all levels roll when a few lynch-pin resources who actually did the work left the organization. The system imploded as if in slow-motion - even to manage up some basic work needs doing. Imagine this process now fast-tracked with help from AI - it will not be a pretty sight to behold.

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