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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#271

Post by qsera »

keeda wrote: post #241
massysett wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing! This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useles…

If you look closer into history -- or ask your favorite AI to summarize ;-) -- about what new jobs were created when existing jobs were replaced by automation, the answer is broadly the same every time: the newer jobs required higher-level a) cognitive, b) technical or c) social skills. That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along. (Would actually be relieved if someone can find counter-examples!) LLMs ar…

LLM's are just a better search tool. Nothing more.

Re: This time is different

#272

Post by kavalg »

qingcharles wrote: post #227
massysett wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing! This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useles…

But what if new jobs aren't created? I don't think it's an absolute given that because new jobs came after the invention of the loom and the tractor that there will always be new jobs. What if AI if a totally different beast altogether?

Then there will be no one to buy the robots :)

Re: This time is different

#273

Post by libraryofbabel »

qsera wrote: post #269
libraryofbabel wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents. If you t…

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.

I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much.

It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.

Re: This time is different

#274

Post by hdgvhicv »

I laughed at all those except Quantum Computing and Small Nuclear reactors which I did t have a timeframe for. I suspect that small nuclear will have been overtaken by renewables.

AI concerns me, it feels like it will come faster and at least as impactful on workers as the Industrial Revolution. The latter at least occurred over centuries and didn’t apply globally at the same time.

Is this round hype? Probably. Are we heading for a y2k crash? Probably.

However those who laughed at the dotcom boom and doubled their holdings in department stores and blockbuster video didn’t do well in the long run.

Re: This time is different

#275

Post by adaml_623 »

bandrami wrote: post #235
selridge wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is smuggling this in. The debate is over. It's transformative. We're in the midst of transformation.

It's really not over. Somebody has to actually put something into production with it first.

I feel like you might only be convinced when an AI powered robot rolls up to you and asks, "Bandrami, are you convinced that AI is transformative yet?"

Re: This time is different

#276

Post by getnormality »

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…

So if you were overwhelmingly wrong about technology fads in your lifetime by saying yes to everything, you can comfort yourself by saying that if you had gone back a century and said yes to everything, you would have been right about some things!

Re: This time is different

#277

Post by keeda »

sumedh wrote: post #262
keeda wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical labor, especially jobs requiring dexterity, will be left for a long time yet. Largely because robotics hardware production cannot scale to meet the demand anytime soon. Like, for many decades. I actually asked Gemini Deep Research to generate a report about the feasibility of automation replacing all physical labor. The main blockers are primarily critical supply chain constraints (specifically Rare Earth El…

> Like, for many decades. Didnt people say that AI is 50 years away in 2010s?

Yeah and until ChatGPT I thought even 50 years was optimistic, which is why current days feel like SciFi! However, at its essence, the current AI revolution has been driven primarily by a few key algorithmic breakthroughs (cf the Bitter Lesson), which are relatively easy to scale up through compute.

On the other hand, the constraints on robotics are largely supply chain-related. The current SOTA for dexterity in robots requires motors, which require powerful magnets, which require Rare Earth Elements, which are critically supply-constrained.

To be precise, the elements are actually abundant in the Earth's crust, just that extracting them is very expensive and extremely toxic to the environment, and so far only China has been willing to sacrifice its environment (and certain citizens' health), which is why it has cornered the market. Scaling that up to the required demand is a humongous logistical, political and regulatory hurdle (which, BTW, is why I suspect the current US adminstration is busy gutting environmental regulations.)

Now there may be a research prototype somewhere in some lab that is the "Attention Is All You Need" equivalent of actuators, but I'm personally not aware of anything with that kinda potential.

Re: This time is different

#278

Post by hdgvhicv »

mbgerring wrote: post #232
rogerrogerr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it: Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work. (Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and n…

No one is hired to swing a hammer? What world do you live in?

Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other.

Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.

Re: This time is different

#279

Post by William_BB »

inigyou wrote: post #263
prescriptivist wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a funny point that you're making (for me, anyway), because prior to early December, probably 5% of the lines of code I wrote in a week were AI-generated by cursor. Then I started using Claude Code. Fast forward to today, I would say 98% of the code that I've shipped in the last three weeks has been written completely by Claude Code. Prior to three weeks ago, I had used speech-to-text to do accomplish approxim…

What does the code do?

CRUD

Re: This time is different

#280

Post by qsera »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #273
qsera wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.

I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanize…

No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight.

It is generating large amount of power on demand.

From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!"

And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time.

So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.

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