Live data from Hacker News

The turbulent AI era is here

gatesnotes.com

71–80 of 286 posts

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#71
post #70

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

When that was a thing, I could never forgive Bill for Windows ME.

But, where would you like to go today?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#72
post #41

We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done). https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...

Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.

It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#73

If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.

Have you ever played a game where everything is free? Most people would call this "broken".

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#74

Is it me or does it read like pure satire? An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.

Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to som…

> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?

the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.

AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#75
post #64
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen

Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.

The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.

Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#76

If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.

He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures: > The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goa…

Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)

Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.

Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#77
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.

It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.

The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.

It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#78
post #66
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

That’s irrelevant… I’m talking about the craze, not the technology

But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#79
post #64
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen

Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.

After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#80
post #75
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. The first card on the homepage of the DTCC ( https://www.dtcc.com/ ) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case. Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze i…

Ok, there are niche use cases but still - nothing world changing and real world adoption remains very low.
Post reply on HN