Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Maybe. I suspect you’re probably more comfortable with it than most people. [laughs] Most people would probably say, “Well, you’re asking the AI to be the layer of trust to remove the sensitive information, but it’s going to have a bias in doing so.” I think there’s always going to be some level of sensitivity around these topics. I actually believe that some of the companies that have done a very good job around their brand of privacy are going to have an advantage in it. Apple — while maybe not totally at the frontier of AI yet — has done such a good job in their brand around privacy. That’s going to allow them to have a lot of trust from users in a way that they’re able to collect all of this personalized information. Let’s say three to five years out, when the top models will be both clearly better than virtually all human experts or maybe all human experts and recognized as such — the latter we certainly don’t have — what do you think, in that world, the reputation of expertise is like? One view is no one respects the experts because the machines are better, but I think an alternative possibility is the machine, by not being tied to a personality, is less disliked. People actually respect the experts more because they get this impersonal distillation of the experts. It’s like, “Oh, the experts did that. They’re so amazing. They’re not annoying me like on the late-night TV show.” What will happen to the status of human experts? I think so. I think that I definitely am already at the point where there are certain domains where I trust ChatGPT or whatever model I’m using more than I trust a particular expert in that industry for a very quick medical perspective even in some cases, or whatever it is. I think that there’s some element of it being highly competent. There’s some element of it not having a face to it that causes us to place this high trust. But I do think that the point you made at the beginning is around evoking the question of what is the point at which these models will be able to do everything that experts aren’t able to do. My read on the market is that models are advancing very, very quickly in being able to automate — call it 50 percent or 75 percent of what humans and experts are able to do — but will really struggle with that last 25 percent. I think that for a very long time, human expertise will be imperative to help accomplish that last 25 percent as the ultimate bottleneck to more economic prosperity and productivity.…

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