Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#141

Post by iamacyborg »

Den_VR wrote: post #139
iamacyborg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive r…

This reminds me of my preferred analogy: are digital artists real artists if they can’t mix pigment and skillfully apply them to canvas? Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.

Given the diversity of media involved in digital art, I’m not sure that analogy is a particularly good one.

And to add, like many of his contemporaries, Michelangelo likely didn’t do much of the painting that’s attributed to him.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#143

Post by RataNova »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Totally agree that what AI is doing right now feels more like the GarageBand/iMovie moment than the iPhone moment. It's democratizing creativity, not necessarily creating billion-dollar companies. And honestly, that's still a big deal

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#144

Post by RataNova »

lemonberry wrote: post #137

I can see AI helping some businesses do really well. I can also see it becoming akin to mass manufacturing. Take furniture for example, there's a lot of mass produced furniture of varying quality. But there are still people out there making furniture by hand. A lot of the hand built furniture is commanding higher prices due to the time and skill required. And people buy it! I think we'll see a ton of games produced b…

There's always going to be a market for things that feel personal, intentional, and imperfect in a way that only human creators can deliver

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#145

Post by RataNova »

kristianc wrote: post #36

> Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth; instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time, when technological advancement was a Red Queen’s race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for non-stop running. This c…

AI's already showing hints of the same pattern. The infrastructure arms race is fascinating to watch, but it's not where most of the durable value will live

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#146

Post by simianparrot »

Den_VR wrote: post #139
iamacyborg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive r…

This reminds me of my preferred analogy: are digital artists real artists if they can’t mix pigment and skillfully apply them to canvas? Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.

That's a really bad analogy, because even in digital art where you can pick your color from a color wheel on a monitor, understanding how primary colors combine to become different colors and hues is a _fundamentally_ important aspect of creating appealingly colored paintings, digital or physical. Color theory is about balance; some colors have more visual "weight" than others. Next to each other they take on entirely different appearances -- and can look hideous or beautiful.

This isn't me saying digital artists need to practice mixing physical pigment, but anecdotally, every single professional digital artist I know has studied physical paint -- some started there, while others ended up there despite starting out and being really good digitally. But once the latter group hit a plateau, they felt something was lacking, and going back to the fundamentals lifted them even higher.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#147

Post by RataNova »

visarga wrote: post #111

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

Feels like we're shifting into a world where “AI fluency” becomes a core part of individual economic agency, more like financial literacy than software adoption

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#148

Post by zwnow »

namdnay wrote: post #134
zwnow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.

Is it the same if it’s a human doing the learning? If I spend my youth looking at art, I’d any work I then do “theft”?

If you copy an artists style with extreme precision without their consent, yes.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#149

Post by oblio »

chii wrote: post #85
nostrademons wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you…

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

If AI concentrates economic activity and leads to more natural monopolies (extremely likely), yeah, the lower level activity becomes more efficient but the macro economy becomes less efficient due to lower competition.

Software has basically done the same thing, where we do things faster and the fastest thing that happens is accumulation of power and a lower overall quality of life for everyone due to that.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#150

Post by ACCount37 »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #49
awesome_dude wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich. There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in which is typically " What crops yield the best return next s…

The weather thing doesn’t seem… realistic. Have you heard of chaotic systems?

"All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control."

Not something that can be solved just by throwing more AI computation at it though.

Post reply on HN