AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions • Hacker News Board

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#171

Post by boringg » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

mmargenot wrote: post #153

At least within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products. While many of these fail, things like agents and other approaches for handling foundation models are only expanding in use cases. Agents themselves are hardly a year old as part of common discourse on AI, though technologists have been building POCs for longer. I've been very impressed with the wave of tools along the lin…

I think the payment model is still not there which is making everything blurry. Until we figure out how much people have to pay to use it and all the services built on its back it will remain challenging to figure out full value prop. That and a lot of company are going to go belly up when they have to start paying the real cost instead of growth acquisition phase.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#172

Post by naasking » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #159

jcranmer wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI. If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.

This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"): > If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of St…

I think any improvements to productivity AI brings will also create uncertainty and disruption to employment, and maybe the latter is greater than the former, and investors see that.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#173

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #155

chpatrick wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are also trained on data made by humans. > it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety". That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.

> Humans are also trained on data made by humans Humans invent new data, humans observe things and create new data. That's where all the stuff the LLMs are trained on came from. > That's creativity which is a different question from thinking It's not really though. The process is the same or similar enough don't you think?

I disagree. Creativity is coming up with something out of the blue. Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion. LLMs so far are not very good at the former but getting pretty damn good at the latter.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#174

Post by giardini » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:44 AM UTC

...right into the dustbin of computing history. But possibly faster than most other technologies.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#175

Post by janalsncm » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology. Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

To be honest, no one can agree on what “intelligence” is. The “artificial” part is pretty easy to understand though.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#176

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:11 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #154

chpatrick wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think plenty of people have problems with the second one but you wouldn't say that means they can't think.

We don't need to prove all humans are capable of this. We can demonstrate that some humans are, therefore humans must be capable, broadly speaking Until we see an LLM that is capable of this, then they aren't capable of it, period

Sometimes LLMs hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't, sometimes humans hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't. It's not like you can tell a human to stop being delusional on command either. I'm not really seeing the argument.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#177

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:13 AM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #170

chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

The classic God of the Gaps - we don't know how human brains think, so what LLMs do must be it!

I'm not saying that LLMs do anything, just that it's rich to confidently say they don't do something when we don't even understand how humans do it.

It's like we're pretending cognition is a solved problem so we can make grand claims about what LLM's aren't really doing.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#178

Post by akomtu » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #56

akomtu wrote: post #46

Normal? AI is an alien technology to us, and we are being "normalized" to become compatible with it.

AI actually seems far less alien than steam engines, trains, submarines, flight, and space travel. People weren't sure if human bodies could handle moving at >50mph.

All those steam engines, trains and submarines were steps toward what we are seeing now. AI is the logical culmination and the purpose of technology.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#179

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

lordhumphrey wrote: post #142

chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

Yes, and the name for this behaviour is called "being scientific". Imagine a process called A, and, as you say, we've no idea how it works. Imagine, then, a new process, B, comes along. Some people know a lot about how B works, most people don't. But the people selling B, they continuously tell me it works like process A, and even resort to using various cutesy linguistic tricks to make that feel like it's the case.…

Again, I'm not claiming that LLMs can think like people (I don't know that). I just don't like that people confidently claim that they can't, just because they work differently from biological brains. That doesn't matter when it comes to the Turing test (which they passed a while ago btw), just what it says.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#180

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:27 AM UTC

wvbdmp wrote: post #124

measurablefunc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recom…

I agree that the mere theoretical possibility isn’t sufficient for the argument, but you’re missing the much less refutable component: that the inevitability is actively driven by universal incentives of competition. But as I alluded to earlier, we’re working towards plenty of other collapse scenarios, so who knows which we’ll realize first…

None of them.

Humans have always believed that we are headed for imminent total disaster. In my youth it was WW3 and the impending nuclear armageddon that was inevitable. Or not, as it turned out. I hear the same language being used now about a whole bunch of other things. Including, of course, the evangelist Rapture that is going to happen any day now, but never does.

You can see the same thing at work in discussions about AI - there's passion in the voices of people predicting that AI will destroy humanity. Something in our makeup revels in the thought that we'll be the last generation of humans, that the future is gone and everything will come to a crashing stop.

This is human psychology at work.