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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#161

Post by mikert89 »

dcminter wrote: post #144
mikert89 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, only a few years ago, the concept of a real time voice conversation with a computer was straight out of science fiction

This is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam speech and act upon it was, to those in the know, hilariously unrealistic until very suddenly just recently it wasn't. Pretty cool.

pretty much all of the classical ideas of what an ai could do, can be done with our existing capabilities. and yet, people continue to live as if the world has not changed

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#163

Post by gosub100 »

falcor84 wrote: post #20
Mistletoe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we make money on it, especially if massive amounts of the population lose their jobs?

You know the quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"? Well, AI has allowed me to start imagining the end of capitalism. I'm not claiming we're necessarily very close, but I can clearly see the way from here to a post-scarcity society.

That's hypothetically possible if a government somehow forced corporations to redistribute their wealth. But a civil war is equally likely. Where society is destroyed after poor people with guns have their say.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#164

Post by coderenegade »

mrcwinn wrote: post #34

Without moralizing or assuming the worst intentions of oligarchs, globalists, evil capitalists, and so on, I still don’t understand how a consumption based economy continues to fund the build out (oil->Saudi Arabia->LPs->OpenAI) when the technology likely removes the income of its consumers. Help me understand.

Nothing in capitalism suggests that consumers have to be human. In fact, the whole enshittification trend suggests that traditional consumers are less economically relevant than they've ever been.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#165

Post by rootusrootus »

mikert89 wrote: post #119
dcminter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "make decisions" such that an 'if' statement does not qualify but an llm does. LLMs may be a stepping stone to AGI. It's impressive tech. But nobody's proven anything like that yet, and you're running on pure faith not facts here.

i mean, if given the choice between using a coding agent like the codex ui, or a CS intern, I would take the coding agent every time. to me its self evident whats going on

I get a new batch of CS interns for my team every year, and I use Claude Code every day. I think Claude is pretty amazing and it definitely provides value for me, but I would choose the intern every time. I am really skeptical of any claims of getting the kind of productivity and capability growth out of an LLM that would make it an adequate replacement for a human developer.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#166

Post by throwawa14223 »

mikert89 wrote: post #107
dotnet00 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of crypto/Web-3.0 hype. Lots of bluster about changing economic systems, offering people freedom and wealth, only to mostly be scams, and coming with too serious inherent drawbacks/costs to solve many of the big problems it promises to solve. In the end leaving the world changed, but not as meaningfully or positively as promised.

the difference is the impact of crypto was always hypothetical, chatgpt can be used, explored, and if you are creative enough, levered in ways as the ultimate tool

ChatGPT is just as useless as a shitcoin and just like a shitcoin the sooner we stop burning electricity on LLMs the better.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#167

Post by dcminter »

mikert89 wrote: post #161
dcminter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam speech and act upon it was, to those in the know, hilariously unrealistic until very suddenly just recently it wasn't. Pretty cool.

pretty much all of the classical ideas of what an ai could do, can be done with our existing capabilities. and yet, people continue to live as if the world has not changed

"AI" has been doing that since the 1950s though. The problem is that each time we define something and say "only an intelligent machine can X" we find out that X is woefully inadequate as an example of real intelligence. Like hilariously so. e.g. "play chess" - seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but clearly 1980s budget chess computers are not "intelligent" in any very useful way regardless of how Sci Fi they were in the 40s.

So why's it different this time?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#168

Post by gosub100 »

AstroBen wrote: post #44
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

..except they can't It's blatantly obvious to see if you work with something you personally have a lot of expertise in. They're effectively advanced search engines. Useful sure.. but they're not anywhere close to "making decisions"

An RNG can "make a decision" lol.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#169

Post by card_zero »

stanac wrote: post #87
lifestyleguru wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is calling you on the rotary dial phone.

Is that why we no longer have telephone boots? They want to prevent Neo from jumping in and out of Matrix?

Telephone ... boots?

Napkin scribbles

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#170

Post by deadbabe »

I think we will enter a neo-Luddite era at some point post-AI boom where it suddenly becomes fashionable to live one’s life with simple retro style technology, and social networks and much of the internet will just become places for bitter old people to complain amongst themselves and share stupid memes. Social media was cool when it was more genuine, but it got increasingly fake, and now with AI it could reach peak-fake. If people want genuine, what is more genuine than the real world?

It will become cool for you to become inaccessible, unreachable, no one knowing your location or what you’re doing. People might carry around little beeper type devices that bounce small pre-defined messages around on encrypted radio mesh networks to say stuff like “I’m okay” or “I love you”, and that’s it. Maybe they are used for contactless payments as well.

People won’t really bother searching the web anymore they’ll just ask AI to pull up whatever information they need.

The question is, with social media on the decline, with the internet no longer used for recreational purposes, what else are people going to do? Feels like the consumer tech sector will shrink dramatically, meaning that most tech written will be made to create “hard value” instead of soft. Think anything having to do with movement of data and matter, or money.

Much of the tech world and government plans are built on the assumption that people will just continue using tech to its maximum utility, even when it is clearly bad for them, but what if that simply weren’t the case? Then a lot of things fall apart.

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