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The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

This year is called the "first year of AI popularization",

With the release of ChatGPT-4 and Midjourney v5,

Ordinary people taste AI dividends for the first time,

With the blessing of new tools, the work efficiency has been greatly improved.

But it has also raised concerns about a wave of unemployment.

In the past six months,

One interview with many scholars and technical practitioners in the field of AI,

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, one of the earliest researchers of artificial intelligence technology,

There are architects and programmers who use AI as an assistant.

And advertising directors after experiencing AI tools,

Worry that your future workload will increase instead of decreasing.

How can ordinary white-collar workers use AI to enhance their workplace competitiveness?

And if their jobs are replaced by AI in the future,

How can people rebuild their sense of value and meaning in life?

Editors: Zhang Ruijia, Ni Yingyi, Liu Yameng

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid
The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

Dr. He Bin is a Class I Registered Structural Engineer

AI building design user

I have been engaged in architectural structural design for more than 20 years, mainly urban renewal and luxury houses.

This year is a big year for AI, and there are suddenly many AI design software in the construction industry on the market, such as drawing AI for real estate development, computational AI for structures, and AI for drawing individual buildings. In fact, the research and development of these technologies began a few years ago, and with the help of ChatGPT's hot spots, it has attracted more discussion.

In the past, after we received a case of villa renovation, we would find a large number of intentional pictures for customers online, which were very vivid and specific. But the core problem is that the Tuli house is not the owner's house after all. So the traditional way is that we make models and produce renderings.

The cycle of making a model is long, and it takes two or three days to draw a diagram. And the speed is slow, manual drawing can only draw one at a time, it is impossible to do ten or eight in batches for the other party to choose. Therefore, the cost is high, and it costs thousands of dollars to go out for a few days of labor.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Molded bag cloud import line drawing

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Left: Mini Program operation interface Right: Select the generation diagram created by Master Miyazaki

Momobag Cloud is an AI drawing software in the construction industry, which is used more for villa design. They began research and development two or three years ago, have been doing internal testing, and the AI module only officially began to be used by the outside world a month ago.

In this mini program, the designer can import a simple graphic of the building, and in less than a minute, he can produce an effect, and he can also choose the style.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Left: Generative diagram of "Corbusier" master style Right: Generative diagram of "Thomas Heatherwick" master style

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Left: Generative diagram of the "Tadao Ando" master style Right: "Zaha Hadid" master style generative diagram

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ The architectural AI software "Moldbag Cloud" provides a choice of master style

There are several masters to choose from, such as Tadao Ando, I.M. Pei, Zaha Hadid, Corbusier, and you can also generate multiple pictures for you to choose from.

Compared with foreign mapping websites such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, the training library of this mini program is highly targeted, basically related to architecture, interior and landscape, and the R&D team behind it also understands the pain points of the construction industry.

But because it's new, it does take longer to train, and more data and resources are needed to "feed" it. But the progress is also very fast, maybe in a week or a month, the experience is completely different.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ "Mies" master style generation diagram

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ "I.M. Pei" master style generation diagram

It is not easy to train an architecture student, not only to learn art design, but also the structure of science, but also to learn social subjects such as architectural history, and to master the style of masters, so it is difficult to train architects.

In the past, our undergraduate teaching used textbooks, such as I.M. Pei's style in books, read many of his cases, extracted elements of his style, and then imitated him to do creation, the cycle is very long, but now with AI, you can quickly export his style design pictures.

The whole construction industry is not too prosperous, and we in civil engineering hope that students will balance professional knowledge learning and technical application, and focus on the creativity and output of solutions.

At the end of the day, AI is now more of a tool person, and the core of design is creativity, so I think designers will not be able to be replaced by AI for at least the next 5-10 years.

Xiao Song, 27 years old, algorithm engineer

ChatGPT user, former researcher

I studied natural language processing as a graduate student, and now I am working as an algorithm engineer in a large factory, responsible for the landing page advertising of the web page and the monetization income of e-commerce, to put it bluntly, when you brush short videos, recommend ads that are more interesting to you, and then try to let the audience place orders for monetization.

Now the very popular ChatGPT, the essence is a language model, simple understanding is a converter, you feed it casually, it can spit out a bunch of things for you. For example, if you give it a piece of text, it outputs another piece of text by encoding-encoding. It can be a relationship such as question and answer, continuation, retelling, machine translation, etc.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Xiao Song's ChatGPT operation page

At work, ChatGPT is the equivalent of one of my personal assistants.

Now I basically have to ask ChatGPT every day. The most common use is to ask it about syntax and algorithms that I don't know or can't remember.

Some time ago I was going to use a grammar called bosun, to be honest I didn't learn this grammar, I couldn't write, and no one in the group replied to me, so I sent my question to ChatGPT: "Please write it for me using bosun grammar." ”

The answer it initially returned me was wrong, and I typed it again: "You wrote it wrong." "It just replied to me, it would modify it according to my needs, and then give me a satisfactory piece of correct code."

The point of using ChatGPT is how you describe your problem, and it requires you to break it down into very granular pieces so that it can be easily understood.

When I am sure that I can find a problem in the search software, I will ask ChatGPT directly, which is equivalent to sending it a job to check it for me, and then it will summarize the results to me, such as asking me to write me a unit test of C++ code.

But if it's a problem that I don't think I can find if I actively search for it, then it may be nonsense, and I don't ask about it.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ ChatGPT usage records provided by Xiao Song

I also ask ChatGPT a lot in life.

For example, I am recently decorating, buying the model of furniture and home appliances, the pros and cons of wooden skirting board and aluminum alloy skirting board, mainly to see if it has a more powerful answer than me.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid
The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

Wu Ge, 39 years old, advertising director

Midjourney users

I am currently working as an advertising director in Shanghai and worked as a cinematographer for 15 years before.

Midjourney is really fast, it makes my job easier, but at the same time it increases my workload and allows me to do things that a team can do alone.

My job is to come up with a visual plan after receiving the project, which includes a script, which is usually a black and white line drawing drawn by an illustrator, and an atmosphere map, which is to find a visual reference map on the Internet, which is also the most time-consuming.

One day I swiped Midjourney on TikTok, and I was so excited that I immediately tried it out in the second project, which was a bit of a subversion to my imagination.

Previous line drawings and atmosphere maps can now be done with Midjourney's software, saving pre-production costs and improving efficiency.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid
The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Brother Wu's visual diagram of the script exported with Midjourney

For customers, they can see a specific image reference in the early stage of shooting, including people, scenes, objects, light, color, and composition, and even the ideal picture they want to shoot at the end.

Midjourney's way of working is also friendly to me, I describe it in my own words to give it the picture I want, and it starts working efficiently for me, and the results are mostly satisfying.

And not foolishly, Midjourney's parameter settings are very specific.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Midjourney's operation page

In the bottom dialog box, a description is entered manually, and the generated image is at the top

For example, in the case of the aromatherapy advertisement I did a while ago, the story takes place in a room at the foot of the mountain, the heroine is a beautiful girl, I will enter: a beautiful girl sitting by the window, next to the coffee table with our aromatherapy products, morning atmosphere, soft light, mountains in the distance outside the window, realistic style, UE5 engine, 8K resolution,- - ar 16:9, - - v5, and click generate.

In less than a minute, it will generate 4 frames according to your narration, and I can choose the one I feel is closest to and let it generate 4 more until I get the one I am most satisfied with.

If you want a handsome guy, it is recommended to enter Korean boys on the Internet, which may be related to kpop culture.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

The whole industry is very excited about the emergence of Midjourney, but there is also anxiety about the future, especially illustrator friends, I heard that some illustrators have been replaced by AI tools such as Midjourney.

I worry that this efficiency of AI will not reduce the work pressure of young Chinese people, but will encourage the greed of capital and continuously squeeze the labor force of young people. Projects that were originally delivered in 3 days may be required to be delivered within 1 day in the future because of AI.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid
The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, aged 61, is an international AI expert

He was a global vice president of Google and Microsoft

I predict that by 2033, 40% of human employees in jobs will be replaced by AI and automation technologies.

AI can free humans from repetitive tasks, but it can't replace the creativity of the human brain. AI does not have the ability to create, ideate, and plan strategically, and it cannot replace trust, friendship, and care between people.

To compete with AI, I would advise young people to rank these two skills, arguably soft skills, the highest. Then you must also be very open to learning the tools to use AI, and find a direction you like, you eat and bathe are thinking about this thing, and the ability to achieve is more difficult to be surpassed by AI.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

In the era of AI, the relationship between people and work will change greatly.

In the industrial age, business owners need to convince many blue-collar workers to do boring repetitive work, which will describe that the future can make money to buy a house, future generations can live better, hard work is the most important, etc., in short, "work is the meaning of your life".

Therefore, many people believe in the life model of "work - make a living - get a sense of achievement" and work for a lifetime.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ Two-dimensional diagram of intellectual work being taken over by AI

Creative or decision-making, highly social jobs are not easy to replace

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ A two-dimensional diagram of labor-type work being taken over by AI

Social, flexible jobs are not easily replaced by AI

But with the advent of the AI era, some blue-collar and white-collar jobs will gradually be replaced by AI, and if most people still think that work is the meaning of our lives, and work is replaced again, it will be very painful.

Before we were not disciplined by "work", in ancient times, in fact, many people thought that the meaning of their lives was greater than work, it may be family, friendship, or what they love to do, Qinqi calligraphy and painting, etc., really did not change until the industrial age.

We need to take some time to return ourselves to the previous human state, but we can't expect this change to happen in 10 or 20 years, it will take a long time.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

▲ In the movie "Ready Player One", the male protagonist is in a sundries compartment to experience XR technology that covers all six senses

Many people are wary of technology out of fear of being controlled by it, and then wonder, can technology really make us happy?

For example, modern people are addicted to mobile phones, and screen time is getting longer and longer. Because many apps are designed to use artificial intelligence to push content according to everyone's past use, make us addicted, and thus make a lot of money.

And the meta-universe will also come in 5-10 years, considering that if many people really lose their jobs because of AI, they may take the handout, decadently enter the meta-universe to play games, and indulge in it and not come out.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

How to cross this problem?

I really think that an engineer who is an AI algorithm can't just make users spend more time infinitely, but let users see content that is also beneficial to him at the same time, helping him become a more knowledgeable, intelligent, or happier person.

As long as there is enough data, whether his performance online is more erudite and whether he feels happier can theoretically be measured. This task is complex, but can be disassembled.

At present, AI's ability to recognize human emotions has exceeded the average human ability, and it can recognize not only people's ordinary expressions (usually lasting 0.5-4 seconds), but also micro-expressions (usually lasting 0.03 seconds to 1 second). In addition, the level of a person's voice, the speed of the rhythm, the severity of the intonation, and the degree of pupil dilation can also be used as effective characteristics to assess a person's emotions.

By 2042, we may still not fully understand how happiness arises. But at that time, the ability of AI to interpret human emotions will evolve to be very powerful. Some prototypes of AI designed to bring happiness to humans will also be produced at that time.

The first people to work for themselves with AI: more relaxed and more afraid

In the era of AI, objectively speaking, the probability of us entering a fertile society is very large.

Because in the future all items will become cheaper, AI and robots can do manufacturing, synthetic biotechnology to invent materials (such as using animal stem cells in the laboratory to synthesize "artificial meat", which has the same protein and fat composition as real meat, and even taste and texture), and energy will become cheaper and cheaper.

It can even be expected that in 20 years, if we humans only work 15 hours a week, we can feed ourselves and get food and clothing.

But is a fertile society really coming? Not necessarily. Some companies can still be brainwashed through monopolies and marketing to make us pay the highest price to get what we need to live on.

We are at a fork in the road where these technologies can lead to a fertile society, and what stops it is our own greed.

How to reduce greed, may it require a new business model, or a more human-minded CEO, or the government does not allow the company to obtain unreasonable profiteering... I don't know these pathways, but I know that we can reach a fertile society.

We must also be pragmatic and see that money is so important today that change could take decades, centuries, or years.

I think that the final outcome of mankind, whether it is a particularly exciting best ending or a worst ending, is what human beings bring to themselves and that human beings deserve.