AI is extremely useful, we just haven’t zeroed in on your specific use cases yet. Robotics has been transformed by it, IT and tech has been transformed by it. Finance and Legal have been transformed by it. To say it’s 95% useless is a personal bias.
To me it’s 65% useful. As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
People's workday has been transformed by it. But I fail to see actual transformation beyond "more crap, faster."
AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.
> AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.
You forgot CHEAPER (at least now, burning VC money), which is a major motivating factor.
When you factor in all the factors (fixing issues, implementing features that were added only because it was easy and shouldn’t exist in the first place, losing skills in the process (this one is a fact), losing grip on the codebase etc - it is not cheaper at all, probably more expensive
That just isn’t true.
AI is capable of performing a lot of grunt work reliably. Still must be reviewed. But a big productivity gain over doing everything yourself.
While I agree with you in principle, I think the parent has a point here: where's the amazing product that couldn't have been done without AI? By now we should have seen some major new invention/company, incredibly fast revolutionary feature rollouts etc but I'm just seeing more of the same.
Curious, what revolutionary products would you cite, that existed within 4 years of the underlying technology? I feel like within that time frame, you're looking at "AOL chatrooms" for the internet, and I'm not even sure what the killer app was for smart phones - GPS was around before that.
Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s
Visicalc was released 2 years after the Apple II was released. Visicalc changed the world for the better faster than AI has up to this point.
I think that a fairly significant amount of the "revolutionary" ideas or usecases for specific technologies will come with maybe not the most optimized of solutions as people that aren't career programmers who have ideas and can now figure them out increasingly pick up on using AI to get what they want to exist
not everything needs a unicorn product to validate it's existence. even just moving the field forward is sometimes enough to clear the air. what is clear is that we aren't going back.
> "where's the amazing product that couldn't have been done without AI?"
My phone can search my photos with text based on what's represented in the photo. That wasn't a thing for computers from 1950 through about 2012, and now it's just normal. Google Lens will tell you what a plant is, Merlin app will identify birds from birdsong.
In 2000 we had Dragon Naturally Speaking and Kurzweil VoicePad, now we have voice recognition and machine transcription that works usefully well. 'Now' being sometime after 2012.
I don't remember what we had for human language translation, but since transformers and LLMs and GP-GPU, we have Google Translate and a lot of competitors, such that usefully good translation is everywhere - in the right click menu in FireFox, for example. Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text, overlay it on the photo.
Useful programming language porting, it's gone from basically impossible or unusable, to very usable.
Text synthesis, my employer has an AI generated newsletter. It's not something I want, but it's also not something you could do at all ten years ago.
Script synthesis, it's now easy to one-shot a few lines of script or command line to do something, faster than opening the ffmpeg man pages or whatever. "that didn't work, here's the error: <>" "the codec is not supported in this mode, try --work-please" and
Image synthesis. My local daily newspaper has at least one full page AI image, that's not something you could do at all ten years ago.
Camera drones, now they can clock onto your face, fly while following you and keeping the you in shot, and respond to gestures for things like landing.
> "By now we should have seen some major new invention"
There's no law of the Universe which says this, "you should see a new invention k years after the invention of a transformer architecture". Solar electricity generation was first noticed in 1839, first commercialised in 1954, and it's only just (give or take a few years) become a significant percentage of world power generation (6% in 2022) and the cheapest form of electricity.
"AI" was considered a hundred years ago with 'Robots' and Turing Tests, wasn't usefully progressed until computers in say the 1950's with LISP and chess, the 1970s with Prolog, but had a huge shift around 2012 with GP-GPU and powerful enough video cards to crunch large amounts of data and with the internet providing large amounts of data, then again with transformer architectures and LLMs, and then with tensor flow and TPU/NPU dedicated accelerators.
Do you expect the world will look the same in 2036? 2046? That all this investment in AI datacenters will just stop and go away? That all the dedicated cores in mobile devices will fall unused? That Waze and Tesla Full Self Driving will just stop where they are even if processing power 10x's? That Amazon will stop rolling out warehouse robots because humans are better? That drones and robo-mowers, robo vacuums, Alexas and OK Google's are going to be no different? That nobody will train anything else, connect up any other inputs or outputs, try any new uses, or make use of any changing costs?
Claude Code.
Productivity gains maybe but nothing actually novel.
And those productivity gains are moot if AI costs (including externalities) increase commensurately.
Your perspective is a short arc. “Look what I can do now and look it made me way more productive.” I have no doubt it is true, you are on the up right now.
However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.
Just food for thought.
On the long arc is a better world: post-scarcity, accelerated advancement in important fields (such as medicine), and just general improvement in lifestyle for the greater global population. The primary scare is that the higher capabilities will be restricted to some small subset as most resources currently are today, but the increasing release of open models is helping to counteract that possibility.
Yes, I think agree with what you say. I think the future is still wide open, and I feel we must start thinking of what creates better results in the long run.
Yes, if the Cro-Magnons had guns they’d say “wow, hunting meat is WAY easier” and then experience massive-scale death in the future. But that kinda happened anyway in various places, just using much more primitive tools. Humans gonna human.
> AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands
You have to spell this out a lot more if you want to have credibility.
I’m not seeing anything in discussed here that seems scary.
Already real: Automated scams & deepfake pornography. You can deepfake a real time video call to look and sound like someone else. If you're used to entering passwords this is easy to solve, but it's already a billion dollar industry.
Moving into the future slightly: they're already getting decent at video games, and if they can win at Counterstrike they can probably also win at real-life Drone Warfare.
I'd say the risks are mostly still hypothetical, though. There's a ton of reading out there if you take that idea seriously, but I don't blame you if you dismiss it as being a bit too "Science Fiction"
I think the sibling comment shares some good examples. Maybe future drone armies is another one.
That you don’t see anything scary that’s your prerogative of course.
I've been on the up, and the down, the lull and the acceptance. AI as it stands today will bring destruction to the world we knew. However, that doesn't mean the end of the world. Rather a new beginning, and we get to shape what that might look like. Sadly, all signs point to medieval times and digital feudalism but at least we have history to fall back on. Until such time occurs, AI will continue to bring value to companies just perhaps not in the ways they expected. There's no "replace my business with a workflow" silver bullet and I think that's what was sold to them. The reality is closer to the ground. 65% usefulness is a pretty accurate score for me.
> force multiplayer
So a kind of Star Wars game?
> As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.
AI is extremely useful and 95% USELESS at the same time. LLM based chat AI systems are a poor version of all the things that are AI.
notice they never tell you exactly what the fuck they are doing
Apparently "being transformed" has "been transformed" because most things look a hell of a lot like the same thing these days.
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