We have a limited time on earth. AI may present an opportunity for us to improve the quality of life or the amount of time spent doing things we really want to do while we are here. Those who spend time figuring out how to use AI for these purposes will be heroes, and only then will AI have been a positive development for humanity. Get to work, heroes!
Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
271–280 of 377 posts
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#272We have a limited time on earth. AI may present an opportunity for us to improve the quality of life or the amount of time spent doing things we really want to do while we are here. Those who spend time figuring out how to use AI for these purposes will be heroes, and only then will AI have been a positive development for humanity. Get to work, heroes!
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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#273I 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
The difference is you still need to express creativity in your use of GarageBand and iMovie. There is nothing creative about typing "give me a picture of x doing y" into a form field.
Also, "democratizing"? Please. We're just entrenching more power into the small handful of companies who have been able to raise and set fire to unfathomable amounts of capital. Many of these tools may be free or cheap to use today, but there is nothing for the commons here.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foolishly, the Hacker News hive mind has a tendency to downvote any prediction that AI will be successful. It's clear a lot of people don't want it to eat the world, but it will.
Baffling comment Yeah it's going to eat the world, but it's foolish to wish that it doesn't? I guess you won't mind signing up to be one of the first things AI eats then?
The company I founded has adjusted our product line to meet changes in demand that have been driven by AI and last year was our best year ever, so I guess I'm the one doing the eating.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#275Earlier 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.
Everybody has to decide where to draw the line at convenience versus artistic purity. For most, the creative act is in selecting the color, not how you get there.
Do you sneer at those who use industrial pigments instead catching and crushing their own cochineal beetles?
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”?
When it comes to fan art of Disney characters, the legal position is "Disney could sue you for that, but chooses not to as suing fans would be bad PR, don't do anything commercial with it though or they'll sue you for sure" So - yes, as I understand things it can indeed be illegal even if a human does the learning.
If we're discussing ethics, copyright law is basically irrelevant. Copying the art from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would get you sued, but no sane person thinks it's unethical. Everyone involved in making it has almost certainly been dead for a while now. It's ethically no different from copying the original story like Disney did.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The thing is... Elbow grease makes the difference. If you're just generating images using AI, you only get 80% there. You need at least to be able to touch up those images to get something outstanding. Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really work?
It is apposite that in a lot of modern art, the concept and provenance are valued more than the execution.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#278I genuinely think that large language models are a useful technology in data processing. Being "language models" I find it easy to use LLMs to extract subject, object, quantity, time, verb, amount, user's language code and so on from the input text, and to a fairly trustworthy level. After that, standard Information Retrieval techniques take over.
What LLMs are absolutely not useful for, in my opinion, is answering questions or writing code, or summarising things, or being factual in any sense at all.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction . Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.
As others have pointed out, this is a fallacy. By reducing costs in the supply chain, higher volumes of outputs are enabled. Nobody digs holes for for the sake of digging holes; by reducing costs and transaction volume at this layer, more businesses can afford to open and more money can be spent at higher value layers.
Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
How does enabling every person on earth to create Hollywood-quality films (for better or worse) result in more natural monopolies?