Andy Edser, Hardware Writer
(Image courtesy of Future)
This month we’ve tested more keyboards, gaming mice, and headsets. We’ve also done a bit of testing with FSR 3.1 to see how AMD’s latest upscaler release stacks up against DLSS. We hate to spoil any future articles for you, but don’t get your hopes up.
A recent Microsoft ad claims that thanks to Copilot, you and I and all of us can be in multiple meetings at the same time. This caused some confusion online, but if you swipe past the ad, you’ll see that the feature Microsoft is touting is Copilot’s ability to summarize meetings on your behalf.
Currently, if you join a Microsoft Teams meeting that’s been recorded and transcribed more than five minutes after the start, you can select Copilot to read back a summary of the conversation you missed. Additionally, Copilot can use the meeting transcript to answer questions like, “Where do we disagree on this topic?” and create a table showing the pros and cons of each.
That sounds pretty handy, except that you’re not attending “three meetings at once” as the ad claims — unless you mean reading a Copilot-based summary after the fact is the same as attending a meeting.
But Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has bigger ideas about what these features might be in the future. In an interview with The Verge, Yuan revealed that part of the pitch for the video conferencing giant’s new collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace, is to introduce an AI assistant to join meetings on users’ behalf. And it could be that in the near future, we’ll all be bringing our own AI digital assistants into our meetings.
“In this session today, ideally, you don’t have to join. You can send a digital version of yourself to join and go to the beach. Or you don’t even have to check your email. You can read most of your email in your digital version.”
“Right now, I think the biggest problem is that AI isn’t there yet. It’s going to take some time. Let’s assume that AI is ready five or six years from now. It will probably help with like 90% of the work, but in terms of real-time interaction, today you and I are talking online. So I can send a digital version of myself, and you can send a digital version of yourself.”
Stay up to date with summaries and action items from Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Teams.May 17, 2024
As Yuan points out, shaking hands, hugging, and sharing coffee are things that a digital human can’t replicate, but why not let your AI avatar handle the boring, mundane tasks and spend more time at the beach?
Now, it’s easy to imagine where problems could arise here, but let’s try and be sure: First, while the tech industry is preoccupied with AI ethics, regulation, and post-mortem worries about a technology that is difficult to define, let alone control, the simple problem remains that AI will always make mistakes.
Intel’s Pat Gelsinger has an interesting take here. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, Gelsinger believes that the problem with AI today is that it’s very good at “thinking fast,” i.e. thinking intuitively, but doesn’t yet have the ability to “think slow,” which is the ability to think rationally and rationally about a problem, and which is currently a big area of research.
“Today, our system is hallucinating, but tomorrow, if we’re going to use it widely, we have to get it right.”
“Today, our system is hallucinating, but tomorrow, if we’re going to use it widely, we have to get it right.”
That’s exactly right. As it stands, if my AI avatar had a meeting with your AI avatar and either of us misunderstood a question or a response, we’d both be sitting on the beach drinking piña coladas with useless information.
But maybe that’s too cynical: Maybe in five or six years, as Eric Yuan predicts, AI will have improved so much that AI avatars will be as good (or better) than us humans at discourse, debate, rational thinking, and drawing meaningful conclusions.
In that case, my friends, instead of sitting on the beach and enjoying the sun, we will be walking around the beach with signs saying, “Enter your occupation here.” If there is one thing that is certain, it is that when AI is good enough and can replace many of the basics we do today, big companies will not be looking to hire clumsy, unpredictable, and maybe even creative humans to do our current jobs — at least not to the same extent.
Me on the beach after discovering my work was stolen. Or #1 from Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. (Image credit: Ryu Ga Gotoku)
Put another way, I’d love to live in a future where most of the boring parts of my job are done by cranky robot assistants, and I just have to write for a living or take sabbaticals, or whatever. But this seems like pure wishful thinking, at least to me.
This is the same argument used in utopian TV ads in the 1950s that, thanks to technology and mass automation, we’ll soon be living in an age of extended leisure. Soon, robots will arrive to do all the jobs we don’t want to do, leaving us wondering whether to paint the house or take up tennis.
Think about how that played out: Mass automation arrived, and technology developed the ability to simplify many repetitive tasks, yet today we still work just as hard, or perhaps harder, to make a living. Jobs that could be automated became impossible for humans to compete with, companies preferred to use machines to save money, time, and effort, and the people who previously held those positions simply had to move on and find other work.
If machines can do the same jobs as humans, they will surely be cheaper and more efficient to operate at scale. Tesla may already be showing us the future here, recently unveiling Optimus robots that it aims to mass-produce and sell for $20,000 apiece, performing “dangerous, repetitive and tedious tasks.”
(Image courtesy of Tesla)
This is less than the annual salary of a human in a similar role, but they will probably still be far inferior to humans at many tasks.But given how quickly AI and robotics technology is advancing, how long can this continue?
And let’s face it: while we as individuals may prefer things that are handcrafted, artistically crafted, and validated by someone else, it has become clear over time that businesses will consider using whatever automation is necessary to remove humans from their bottom line. And we will embrace it.
Rhetoric like “three meetings at once,” “digital twin,” and “life on the beach” are just fantasies. As things stand, AI may be a useful tool in certain scenarios, but if we are really moving towards a future where AI can attend meetings, organize emails, make action plans, and basically do half of our jobs, half the work, and probably half the salary, will remain with the human behind the AI.
And I let myself feel sad. I don’t want to come across as a fear-monger (and maybe I am) or to be overly cynical, but as I watch industry leaders speak passionately about the use of AI in the workplace and its future integration, I don’t see a bright future for leisure. I see a shark with teeth.
