AI is different • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is different

#121

Post by Davidzheng » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:35 AM UTC

_jab wrote: post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

On current societal impact it might be close to the other three. But do you not think it is different in nature to other technological innovations?

Re: AI is different

#122

Post by Davidzheng » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

devmor wrote: post #88

atleastoptimal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot. No other tech has had an impact like that, even the internet.

What? The internet did that ages ago. We just pretended it didn't because some students didn't know how to use Google.

disagree? I had to write essays in high school. I don't think the kids now need to if they don't want to.

Re: AI is different

#123

Post by peepeepoopoo139 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:38 AM UTC

ahurmazda wrote: post #13

When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."

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Re: AI is different

#124

Post by Davidzheng » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:38 AM UTC

ahurmazda wrote: post #13

When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."

There is no jobless utopia. Even if everyone is paid and well-off with high living standards. That is no world in which humans can thrive where everyone is retired and doing their own interests.

Re: AI is different

#125

Post by marsven_422 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:41 AM UTC

schneems wrote: post #69

chrisco255 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

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Re: AI is different

#126

Post by vivzkestrel » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:41 AM UTC

I ll happily believe it the day something doesnt adhere to the Gartner cycle, until then it is just another bubble like dotcom, chatbots, crypto and the 456345646 things that came before it

Re: AI is different

#127

Post by atleastoptimal » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:42 AM UTC

devmor wrote: post #88

atleastoptimal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot. No other tech has had an impact like that, even the internet.

What? The internet did that ages ago. We just pretended it didn't because some students didn't know how to use Google.

Everyone knows how to use Google. There's a difference between a corpus of data available online and an intelligent chatbot that can answer any permutation of questions with high accuracy with no manual searching or effort.

Re: AI is different

#128

Post by atleastoptimal » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:43 AM UTC

fallous wrote: post #108

atleastoptimal wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything anyone could say about bad AI driving could be said about bad human drivers. Nevertheless, Waymo has not had a single fatal accident despite many millions of passenger miles and is safer than human drivers.

Everything? How about legal liability for the car killing someone? Are all the self-driving vendors stepping up and accepting full legal liability for the outcomes of their non-deterministic software?

Thousands have died directly due to known defects in manufactured cars. Those companies (Ford, others) still are operating today.

Even if driverless cars killed more people than humans they would see mass adoption eventually. However they are subject to farr higher scrutiny than human drivers and even so make fewer mistakes, avoid accidents more frequently and can't get drunk, tired, angry, or distracted.

Re: AI is different

#129

Post by Davidzheng » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:44 AM UTC

pton_xd wrote: post #103

AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.

Do we not have any sense of wonder in the world anymore? Referring to a system which can pass the Turing test as a "amazing productivity tool" is like viewing human civilization as purely measured by GDP growth.

Re: AI is different

#130

Post by s_ting765 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:44 AM UTC

I find it funny that almost every talking point made about AI is done in future tense. Most of the time without any presentation of evidence supporting those predictions.