Melanie's Mostly Writing

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Melanie Lewicka

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I listened to a very interesting podcast today. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning Godfather of AI was being interviewed. Nowadays, at age 75, he was advocating for safeguards against artificial intelligence. Indeed he left Google, in 2023, partly because he felt he was getting too old for programming, but also partly because of concerns over AI technology.

The interview was in some ways awfully bleak about the future. It suggested that job displacement will be a huge problem, in as little as a decade. Of course, we’ve all already thought of these things. There was nothing new, as such, in the podcast. It just served to focus my mind though on whether my job, as an English teacher, is futureproof or not. I think in the short term, perhaps the next twenty years or so, English teachers will still be needed, but ultimately we will probably be replaced by AI. Better start saving for my retirement.

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