I would be interested in seeing a similar list of predictions from Altman, Amodei, etc with annotations about how many have come true. Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. I have heard multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" and that people not using th…
Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.
The question is whether he sincerely believes his own predictions or if he cynically is aware that you can create a career for yourself being a guy who says bombastic clickbait-worthy things people emotionally want to be true, instead of measured assessments of reality.
Problem is, you wouldn't know Ed Zitron's name if every piece he wrote basically said "AI might be a bit overhyped short term but will have lasting economic impacts." Booooorrrring.
The reverse is also true. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't going to get much media attention if they don't make silly claims like "all white collar jobs gone in 2 years."
And no, this isn't a new problem due to "the algorithm." Media has always been like this. Zitron is just another Peter Schiff with younger skin. The problem is human nature in general.
Hence why AI isn't going to kill media. We don't actually want sober, rational assessments of all available information from hyper-intelligent LLMs. This is unsatisfying. We want emotional validation, drama, adversarial identity and spectacle. Truth is rarely what we are seeking.