I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”.
You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in.
It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.
Completely unusable in any bank, or almost any organization dealing with data secrecy. You have complex, often mandatory processes to onboard folks. Sure, these can be improved but hiring some 'Bob' would be far from smooth sailing.
Big enough corps will eventually have their own trusted 'Bobs' just like they have their own massive cluster farms (no, AWS et al is not a panacea and its far from cheap&good solution).
Giving any form of access to some remote code into internal network of a company? Opsec guys would never ack that, there is and always will be malice coming from potentially all angles.
I have worked at a place with serious opsec and none of that was allowed. Everything pointed at private mirrors containing vetted packages. Very few people had the permissions to write to those repos.
Not to mention that if Bob works as the current overhyped technologies do, it will be possible to bribe him by asking him to translate the promise of a bajillion dollars into another language and then repeat it back looking fort deciding on his next steps.
> I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”.
Exactly. The problem with the AGI-changes-everything argument is that it indirectly requires "plug-and-play" quality AGI to happen before / at the same time as specialized AGI. (Otherwise, specialized AGI will be adopted first)
I can't think of a single instance in which a polished, fully-integrated-with-everything version of a new technology has existed before a capable but specialized one.
E.g. computers, cell phones, etc.
And if anyone points at the "G" and says "That means we aren't talking about specialized in any way," then you start seeing the technological unlikeliness of the dominoes falling as they'd need to for AGI fast ramp.
Honestly, I think the mode that will actually occur is that incumbent businesses never successfully adopt AI, but are just outcompeted by their AI-native competitors.
Sears also did everything it could to annihilate itself while dot-com was happening.
their CEO was a believer of making his departments compete for resources leading to a brutal, dysfunctional clusterfuck. rent seeking behavior on the inside as well as outside.
"Bob" in this example is just some other random individual contributor, not some master of the universe. E.g. they would have the title "associate procurement specialist @ NHS" and join and interact on zoom calls with other people with that title in order to do that specific job.
Right, but these jobs are inefficient mostly because of checks and balances. So unless you have a bunch of AIs checking one another's work (and I'm not sure I can see that getting signed off) doesn't it just move the problem slightly along the road?
There's an argument here something like.. if you can replace each role with an AI, you can replace multiple with a single AI, why not replace the structure with a single person?
And the answer is typically that someone has deemed it significant and necessary that decision-making in this scenario be distributed.
Yup. If we ignore all the ‘people’ issues (like fraud, embezzlement, gaming-the-system, incompetence when inputting data, weird edge cases people invent, staff in other departments who are incompetent, corruption, etc), most bureaucracies would boil down to a web form and a few scripts, and probably one database.
Better hope that coder doesn’t decide to just take all the money and run to a non extradition jurisdiction though, or the credentials to that DB get leaked.
Just look at names. Firstname, lastname? Jejeje, no.
Treating them as constants? laughs in married woman.
If you can absolutely, 100% cast iron guarantee that one identity field exactly identifies one living person (never more, never less), these problems are trivial.
If not? Then its complexity might be beyond the grasp of the average DOGE agent (who, coincidentally, are males in their early 20s with names conforming to a basic Anglo schema).
The ability to use that tech effectively to optimize the organizations internal processes. Or do the job of a person without actually being a person with a name that can be held accountable.
Most of those orgs have people in key positions (or are structurally setup in such a way) that isn’t desirable to change these things.
You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in.
It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.