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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#21

Post by gorgoiler »

gwbas1c wrote: post #10
gorgoiler wrote: post #3

I like the “wasn’t inevitable” list. The fact that two US corporations control 99% of phones is another one that feels about as comfortable as a rock in my boot and I hope this too is not inevitable, in the long run. Imagine if the 80s and 90s had been PC vs Mac but you had to go to IBM for one or more critical pieces of software or software distribution infrastructure. The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability did…

> The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. There's a recording of an interview with Bill Gates floating around where he pretty much takes credit for that. He claims (paraphrasing because I listened to it almost 20 years ago) that he suggested a lot of the hardware to IBM because he knew he could repurpose DOS for it.

I also phrased this badly. Cambrian explosions by definition happen in very short time frames (“overnight”), but the conditions required to set off the explosion take a long time to brew and are few and far between.

We’re two decades into the smartphone era and my hope is that we’re still in the DEC / VAX / S370 stage, with the “IBM-PC” stage just around the corner still to come.

Re: This is not the future

#22

Post by klysm »

encyclopedism wrote: post #20

This is the inevitability of unfettered capitalism. The pressure is towards generating wealth, with the intended hope that the side effect will be that this produces net 'good' for society. It has worked (to varying degrees) and has enabled the modern world. But it may well be running out of steam. I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential res…

COVID was in many ways the opposite of a reset. It further solidified massive wealth disparity and power concentration. The positive feedback loop doesn’t appear to have a good off-ramp.

Re: This is not the future

#23

Post by Aeolun »

I think this person is too optimistic. Everything that will give powerful people money or influence and not get them killed is pretty much near inevitable.

Re: This is not the future

#26

Post by raincole »

I mean... of course it's not the future. It's the present. I have been seeing AI-generated posters and menus in real life on daily basis for about half a year. AI-upscale is completely normalized for average users. I don't know about other fields, but for graphic design we have well past this discussion.

Re: This is not the future

#27

Post by cons0le »

>Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable.

This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this

Re: This is not the future

#28

Post by lekevicius »

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple:

> Tiktok is not inevitable.

TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in Instagram and Snapchat. Global content discovery is a natural next experiment after extended follow graph.

> NFTs were not inevitable.

Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.

I could deconstruct more, but the broader point is: coordination is hard. All these can be done by anyone: anyone could have invented Ethereum-like system; anyone could have built a non-fungible standard over that. Inevitability comes from the lack of coordination: when anyone can push whatever future they want, a LOT of things become inevitable.

Re: This is not the future

#29

Post by skybrian »

raincole wrote: post #26

I mean... of course it's not the future. It's the present. I have been seeing AI-generated posters and menus in real life on daily basis for about half a year. AI-upscale is completely normalized for average users. I don't know about other fields, but for graphic design we have well past this discussion.

It's similar to saying "everyone else is doing it" which is itself a bad argument for doing something badly.

Re: This is not the future

#30

Post by delichon »

gwbas1c wrote: post #19

I do think AI involvement in programming is inevitable; but at this time a lot of the resistance is because AI programming currently is not the best tool for many jobs. To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heati…

For you it's "purely for pleasure," for me it's for money, health and fire protection. I heat my home with my wood stove to bypass about $1,500/year in propane costs, to get exercise (and pleasure) out of cutting and splitting the wood, and to reduce the fuel load around my home. If those reasons went away I'd stop.

That's a good metaphor for the rapid growth of AI. It is driven by real needs from multiple directions. For it to become evitable, it would take coercion or the removal of multiple genuine motivators. People who think we can just say no must be getting a lot less value from it then me day to day.

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