281–290 of 400 posts
> 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…
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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?
What if we just run out of new jobs?
It’s not unprecedented however the scale and speed that it will come at is. Things like the spinning jenny came along and replaced spinners, but weavers stayed for another generation.
Selfishly though I am more concerned about losing my job and industry than I was concerned about others suffering from the 80s, or during the pivot to the intenet. To quote Dr McCoy
> We're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine. When it comes to your job, that's different. And it always will be different.
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Stuff that's going into production now (actual production, not startup MVP production) would have been being written just before Claude Code came out, so pretty much by definition no. There's some copilot-style assisted stuff in the wild, I guess? But not really more of it than pre-copilot so the productivity argument kind of falls through there.
Cursor came out 3 years ago. "Agentic" refactors have been a thing for 1.5 years. Vibecoding as a term has been created 1 year ago. There are multiple companies that deploy to production daily. What are we even talking about?
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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. L…
You can find similar hype articles about the Palm Pilot, then all the neighsayers who said most people wouldn't want and had no need for computer in their pocket. And yet here we are.
Mmm..they didn't, at that time.
That we grew to be dependent on the computer in the pocket does not mean that it was a necessity at any point.
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"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…
There's another perspective you can see in the comparison with the dot com boom. The web is here to stay, but a lot of ideas from the beginning didn't work out and a lot of companies turned bankrupt.
However some will survive, and there will be far more bankruptcy and downsizing in the industries replaced
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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 s…
Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us
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https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/sep/rapid-ado...
So about 10%, using it less than once per day means you didn't find it useful for most tasks.
In 1995 how many people used the internet in their daily work, of those that did how many was it a curiosity that maybe supplemented their existing business practice (sending a memo via email rather than post for example). Large companies were using large computer mainframes but the majority of employers - the SMEs - weren’t.
By 2005 it massively shifted, and AI seems to be coming faster than the internet and computers in general.
By 2015 non intenet companies were going the way of the dodo. How many travel agents were there per 100k in 1995 compared to 2015?
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This comment is scary. You don’t control these technologies, you are growing dependent on stilts that could disappear any moment.
I'd be remiss to point out we went from "LLMs are vaporware" to "people are becoming slaves to their LLMs" awful quick. > [I'm scared] you are growing dependent on stilts that could disappear any moment. First, I do control the RTX3070 I own, and that can actually do a pretty decent job nowadays with some of the 3B parameter models. Second, maybe if people like you showed as much concern for the fact that LGBT people…
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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…
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…
This ignores that the forces of capitalism, the labor market, value, etc are all made up. They work because people (are made to) believe in them. As soon as people stop believing in them, everything will fall apart. The whole point of an economy is to care for people. It will adapt to continue doing that. Yes, the changeover period might be extremely painful for a lot of people.
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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 s…
> No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do fo…
Better search could be used in ways that we can't think of right now..