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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#191

Post by edent »

esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

OP here! Thanks for replying.

To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology.

People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because they were useful. Car manufacturers didn't have to force GPS into vehicles - customers demanded it.

The narrative I'm describing is how hype sometimes (possibly often) fizzles out. My contention is the more a technology is hyped, the less useful it will turn out to be.

Now, excuse me while I ride my Segway into the sunset while drinking a nice can of Prime.

Re: This time is different

#192

Post by SchemaLoad »

parliament32 wrote: post #123

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…

I'd say speech to text is unsolvable for a more fundamental reason that it's hard to actually speak out an entire document flawlessly in one take.

Spoken language is very different to written language, which is why for example you can easily tell when an article is transcribing a spoken interview.

Re: This time is different

#193

Post by nicbou »

dwoldrich wrote: post #179
esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

Exactly my thoughts. Selective whinging indeed. Also meta-platitude whinging like > The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality. Sometimes the winner deserves to win, AND that's a good thing even at scale. It kindof depends.

The winner that deserved to win might turn into the complacent monopoly pf tomorrow. It might vow to Not Be Evil for a while, but the investors will demand that it does whatever it takes to grow.

Re: This time is different

#194

Post by nicbou »

camillomiller wrote: post #181
seertaak wrote: post #87

To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming…

This comment is scary. You don’t control these technologies, you are growing dependent on stilts that could disappear any moment.

What if they’re just good for a while and then you go back to the old way?

Re: This time is different

#195

Post by edent »

pedalpete wrote: post #132
senko wrote: post #122

The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech: > 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. ...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed: > microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cl…

Exactly! If this post had been written 20 years ago it would have started with Internet, handheld computers, electric cars...The problem is the same dudes. Putting beanie babies in with Quantum Computing and Nuclear Power completely ignores the potential life changing elements of some technologies, even if they don't work. Oh, and smart glasses he put in there, so he'll be eating his words in 2 years.

OP here. If you're interested, here are my thoughts on Google Glass from 12 years ago.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/quick-thoughts-on-google-gl...

I am looking forward to 2028 matching the hype of 2014.

Re: This time is different

#197

Post by parliament32 »

selridge wrote: post #183
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is exactly my view. We've had several years of work on the tech, and LLMs are just as prone to randomly spitting out garbage as they were the first day. They are not a tool which is fit for any serious work, because you need to be able to rely on your tools. A tool which is sometimes good and sometimes bad is worse than having no tool at all.

Did google not rely on Gemini to do their ISA changeover? https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14928 Was Gemini worse than no tool at all there?

Probably. According to the paper, 83.82% of automated commits were already made by algorithmic tools (non-LLM). For the remainder, a three-phase LLM approach was tried, and achieved a success rate of 30%. Based on these numbers, it probably would have been faster, cheaper, and more efficient to just enhance their current strategy rather than screwing around with text generators.

Re: This time is different

#198

Post by alpaca128 »

tomlue wrote: post #90
seertaak wrote: post #87

To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming…

"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different. Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no…

> Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12)

You're comparing a service that mostly costs a free account registration and is harder to avoid than to use, with devices that cost thousands of dollars in the early days.

Re: This time is different

#199

Post by dfabulich »

edent wrote: post #191
esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

OP here! Thanks for replying. To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology. People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because…

You have gotta stop cherrypicking. The massive influx of hyperbolic articles about how electricity will change everything started in the 19th century. It became a common theme in fiction (including classics like Frankenstein) and became an enormous media hype war, which historians call the War of the Currents.

Yes, electricity was useful. And it had hyperbolic articles talking about how transformative it would be. Like all prognostication, some of those articles were overblown, but, in some ways, they understated the transformative effect electricity would have on human history.

And cars? Did you somehow miss the influx of hyperbolic articles about how cars will change everything? Like, the whole 20th century?

What was your approach to researching the history of media hype? You somehow overlooked the hype around air travel, refrigeration, and antibiotics…?

Re: This time is different

#200

Post by _zagj »

kypro wrote: post #144

I invested in Tesla extremely early (2011) because electric cars, if built correctly, would obviously make great cars, and Elon was one of the few people I actually thought had a shot at doing it. I was right that blockchain was BS and all the "not sure about Bitcoin, but blockchain will be big" people were idiots. I've been right for the last couple of years on AI and that people were vastly underestimating it when…

> I needed to invest a significant amount of my net worth in Google simply as hedge against AI destroying knowledge work jobs

I felt similarly, and did similarly, with both GOOGL and MSFT. I'm not an AI "doomer" in the Yudkowski/LolzWrong sense, but I do think it's quite sad that generative AI is first branch of the AI "tech tree" we raced up. AI art, especially, is tragic.

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