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AI as Normal Technology

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Re: AI as Normal Technology

#71

Post by fzzzy »

owebmaster wrote: post #31
throwup238 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thanks to both, future trends are getting established faster and faster. It took about a decade for the internet to go mainstream, maybe five years for smartphones, and now just a year or two for LLMs. It’s pretty fascinating watching that process get more and more compressed over a lifetime.

I think LLMs are actually taking quite some time to become economically and socially relevant. The smartphone/apps boom created a lot of opportunities for thousands of app developers while now besides some toy apps most people are not creating nothing too interesting. Which is funny because LLMs were supposed to make people code faster but everything is still bloated, broken, boring.

The ability to code faster leads to everything being bloated and broken even more.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#72

Post by srveale »

dayvigo wrote: post #67
pineaux wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is not the middle that should be considered. Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty p…

My social groups are almost exclusively non-techie. I am regularly exposed to networks that are very, very far away from HN. I assure you, there are people think AI is useless and purely harmful (in the sense of creating "slop," wasting electricity and water, etc. not evil AI). And there are a lot of them.

To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.

So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)

When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)

We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#73

Post by TheGRS »

sanderjd wrote: post #69
datadrivenangel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal, so except for the details, it's not a big deal. Going to be a simultaneously wild and boring ride.

I think this is my take as well. Like, the web and smart phones and social media have transformed everything ... and also life goes on.

Right, but society changes around this stuff pretty substantially. A lot of the discourse gets spent debating whether we like the changes or not, and the solutions to the new problems are usually very pie-in-the-sky or completely unachievable. Like we can't really put the social media genie back in the bottle, its here and society has reshaped around it. But banning phones from schools is pretty tangible and I'd probably argue its for the betterment of students.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#76

Post by senbrow »

pineaux wrote: post #61
LiquidSky wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? That's pretty clear. We already have two "sides": AI is the latest useless tech boondoggle that consumes vast quantities of money and energy while not actually doing anything of value vs. AI is the dawn of a new era of human existence that will fundamentally change all aspects of our world (possibly with the additional "and lead to the AGI Singu…

No this is not the middle that should be considered. Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty p…

You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody" considers AI useless.

There are a huge number of non-technical people who see its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing derivative (and often incorrect) slop.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#77

Post by lubujackson »

I like these "worldview adjustment" takes. I'm reminded of Jeff Bezos' TED Talk (from 18 years ago). I was curious what someone who started Amazon would choose to highlight in his talk and the topic alone was the most impactful thing for me - the adoption of electricity: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_the_electricity_metapho...

He discussed the structural and cultural changes, the weird and dangerous period when things moved fast and broke badly and drew the obvious parallels between "electricity is new" to "internet is new" as a core paradigm shift for humanity. AI certainly feels like another similar potential shift.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#78

Post by jzymbaluk »

loeber wrote: post #63
pluto_modadic wrote: post #58

Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal. The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power pla…

Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for computation directly incentivizes the construction of datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.

The only thing standing in the way of nuclear/solar/hydroelectric data centers is local laws and regulations. All the big cloud providers are actively researching this. see Microsoft's interest in acquiring the three mile island nuclear reactor for an example[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#79

Post by bilsbie »

tempodox wrote: post #74
bilsbie wrote: post #60

AI having the same impact as the internet. Changes everything and changes nothing at the same time.

I wouldn't call putting everything into overdrive “nothing”.

We still pay bills and have mortgages. Still drink coffee. Same dogs and cats. Same roof technology.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#80

Post by zifpanachr23 »

senbrow wrote: post #76
pineaux wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is not the middle that should be considered. Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty p…

You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody" considers AI useless. There are a huge number of non-technical people who see its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing derivative (and often incorrect) slop.

There are an enormous number of people such as myself that work in tech and believe the same exact thing.

At the end of the way we dont need to argue about this. The truth should be empirically knowable. If it's as useful as people say, it will show up in the GDP numbers (I wonder what's taking it so long...).

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