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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#301

Post by marcus_holmes »

dcanelhas wrote: post #210
marcus_holmes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of them. Humans have always believed that we are headed for imminent total disaster. In my youth it was WW3 and the impending nuclear armageddon that was inevitable. Or not, as it turned out. I hear the same language being used now about a whole bunch of other things. Including, of course, the evangelist Rapture that is going to happen any day now, but never does. You can see the same thing at work in discussion…

If you look at timescales large enough you will find that plenty of extinction level events actually do happen (the anthropocene is right here). We are living in a historically excepcional time of geological, environmental, ecological stability. I think that saying that nothing ever happens is like standing downrange to a stream of projectiles and counting all the near misses as evidence for your future safety. It's…

Obviously this is all true. There was an event in the 5th century that meant we had no summer and all crops failed for 5 years, we all almost starved then. And that was only the most recent of these types of events.

It's not that it can't happen. It obviously can. I'm more talking about the human belief that it will happen, and in our lifetime. It probably won't.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#302

Post by aeternum »

akomtu wrote: post #300
aeternum wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People said similar things about the internet: never before has all human knowledge been available in one place (they forgot about libraries apparently). I think it's more likely that AI is just a further concentration of human knowledge. It makes it even more accessible but will AI actually add to it? Why doesn't the logical culmination of technology require quantum computers? Or the merging of human and machine bra…

AI means technology no longer needs humans. With AI, technology will become a quasi-lifeform, competing with us for resources.

I'm not convinced, is AI really sufficient to develop into a lifeform or specifically, to develop a separate will?

It's quite possible it's more like the computer in Star Trek. Highly capable and able to perform complex agentic tasks but lacks a will to act on its own.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#304

Post by gilbetron »

jcranmer wrote: post #38

Well, for starters, it would make The Economist 's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype. [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...

I don't understand, that recent article is a fairly balanced take on what the title literally asks: What if? It examines what if the hype is true, or what if it is partially true. That seems like a good article. You might have a point if the article was, "The hype is true: examining how the world will now change" or something.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#305

Post by AbstractH24 »

riku_iki wrote: post #292
AbstractH24 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply. I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

> I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click I imagine people eventually would switch on some simple programming and/or language for this, and world would be way more efficient compared to spreadsheet mess

Spreadsheets are basically the OG low code platform

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#306

Post by kragen »

mmargenot wrote: post #291
kragen wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software…

For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. A lot of that is garbage, but quantity has a quality all its own. If you look at, e.g. this clearly vibe-coded app about vibe coding [ https://www.viberank.app/ ], ~280 people generated 444.8B tokens within the block of time where people were paying attention to it. If 1000 tokens is 100 lines of code, that's ~444M lines of code that would not exi…

Plausibly most of those lines of code don't exist now either, if people threw them away. And the others might not be any good. Or they might be things that already did exist—either because the AI generate them previously or because it memorized part of its training set.

I spent a lot of the morning talking to GPT-5o Mini about desiccants, passive solar collectors, and candidate approaches to 3-D printing of glass and ceramics, and it generated many pages of text, but most of those pages of text will get deleted without anyone else reading them; large parts of them are just wrong, and I'll need to check the non-wrong parts against the research literature and rewrite them from my own perspective so they don't sound like an impatient sales pitch.

It did give me some pretty good ideas, though:

- Nitrates (of magnesium, calcium, yttrium, lanthanum, etc.) are good precursors for metal oxides for bonding ceramics, and have special virtues for SHS.

- Zirconyl chloride is the usual water-soluble precursor for zirconia for this purpose.

- Titanium oxysulfate is the usual water-soluble precursor for titania for this purpose.

- Advection of supercritical steam through a crucible with salt may be a viable way to salt-glaze ceramics if you can mitigate the HCl problem.

- Acidification of an object molded from zirconia-filled waterglass may be able to leach out the alkali, making it possible to sinter the shape into a continuous zircon object.

- When acid-leaching iron out of a heap of crushed terra cotta, sulfuric acid has the problem that it can clog the heap with gypsum particles, if calcium is present.

- You can electrodeposit iron at an acidic pH as well as a basic pH.

Like, none of these are novel, right? But they were new to me, and they turn out to be correct.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#307

Post by kragen »

spicyusername wrote: post #299
kragen wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have failed to notice that you were replying to a comment of mine where I gave a specific example of a book that I think wouldn't exist without Word (or similar WYSIWYG word processors), because you're asserting that I'm never going to see what I am telling you I am currently seeing. Generally, when there's a new tool that actually opens up explosive changes and development of new products, at least some of…

I noticed. Books written with WYSIWYG could have been written by hand just fine, it would have just been more painful and taken longer. What WYSIWYG unlocks is more books, not new kinds of books. And sure, you might argue that more books is new books, which is fair. So it is with LLMs. We're going to get more code, more lesson plans, etc. Accelerating. Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable? Li…

People talking a lot about their workflow with LLMs are evidence of the cost. What I'm asking for is evidence of the benefit, the "explosive changes and development of new products".

Remember that old Wendy's commercial, "Where's the beef?"

Where's the meat? I want to see your meat, and you're showing me pastures.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#308

Post by spicyusername »

kragen wrote: post #307
spicyusername wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed. Books written with WYSIWYG could have been written by hand just fine, it would have just been more painful and taken longer. What WYSIWYG unlocks is more books, not new kinds of books. And sure, you might argue that more books is new books, which is fair. So it is with LLMs. We're going to get more code, more lesson plans, etc. Accelerating. Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable? Li…

People talking a lot about their workflow with LLMs are evidence of the cost . What I'm asking for is evidence of the benefit , the "explosive changes and development of new products". Remember that old Wendy's commercial, "Where's the beef?" Where's the meat? I want to see your meat, and you're showing me pastures.

    explosive changes and development of new products
That's because that's not happening. Like I've been saying! The benefit is just that it makes coding (or brainstorming a vacation, or planning a diy project, or writing a dnd campaign, etc) a little faster... It's an accelerating technology.

I don't disagree that the hype around LLMs is overblown, but that doesn't mean the utility isn't tangible.

If you listen to the salesman, everything is always going to sound like it solves every problem, but that doesn't mean the products they are hawking solve no problems.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#309

Post by kragen »

spicyusername wrote: post #308
kragen wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talking a lot about their workflow with LLMs are evidence of the cost . What I'm asking for is evidence of the benefit , the "explosive changes and development of new products". Remember that old Wendy's commercial, "Where's the beef?" Where's the meat? I want to see your meat, and you're showing me pastures.

explosive changes and development of new products That's because that's not happening. Like I've been saying! The benefit is just that it makes coding (or brainstorming a vacation, or planning a diy project, or writing a dnd campaign, etc) a little faster... It's an accelerating technology. I don't disagree that the hype around LLMs is overblown, but that doesn't mean the utility isn't tangible. If you listen to the…

I see! Now I understand what you mean by "accelerating technology", and I understand that you're not in agreement with mmargenot's thesis. Thank you for having the patience to explain until I stopped misinterpreting you!
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