By something that is going to replace my job by writing better code and shipping more features at a fraction of the cost, without asking for vacation? I don't know, boss; I'm also trying to understand why I'm tired.
We'll see about that, long term. The billions and trillions being wasted right now to get the foot in the door need to be earned back somehow at some point...
"Nice company you have there, totally reliant on our AI tech. Oh by the way we gotta increase the rent again."
Doesn't really make sense as there are already open weight models that are close to frontier models, and the compute to run them isn't outrageously expensive, and every indication that it will only get cheaper over time as has been the strong trend in terms of $/outcome.
Yes. Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive for the human race. Including the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power. Why should AI be different? I think the critics always fixate on the negatives, but ignore the potential big positives.
Depends on your point of view. Has the web been a net positive overall? If your criteria is "instant access to any information" or "catalyze more technological progress" then positive, if your criteria is "young people's mental health" or "how easy it is to control the public's perception about a certain topic" then negative in my opinion. It's all relative.
Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)
Coming soon:
Deep sea mining
Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.
30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.
The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.
Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.
There are many technologies that have not been a net positive for humanity. Leaded gasoline comes to mind immediately. For many other technologies it is also hard to determine because counterfactuals are hard to reason about.
Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you think internal combustion engines were a great invention, doesn't mean AI cannot be bad for humanity.
I wouldn't say that leaded gasoline is a great technology like AI, it's a pretty niche tech. Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons. Modern civilization would be impossible without gasoline.
>Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results.
It is not perfect or guaranteed, but it can definitely be an indicator. Technological progress is the main reason for the massive standard of living increases that we have witnessed in the last ~200 years. If someone wants to argue that this trend will stop or even reverse, they need very strong arguments, IMHO.
> Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons.
This analogy is great, because your grandchildren will probably not consider gasoline to be a great technology, they'll consider it the thing that caused the wars and the famines.
> This analogy is great, because your grandchildren will probably not consider gasoline to be a great technology, they'll consider it the thing that caused the wars and the famines.
They will also realize that industrial civilization enabled by gasoline was a necessary step towards the renewable energy utopia they are living in. Developing advanced technology takes a lot of energy.
I am only considering great, consequential technologies because AI is such a great technology. Comparing it to some niche techs would result in false analogies.
> Do you have an argument why "normal" technology can be good or bad, but "consequential" technology is always good?
Because consequential technology has many applications in diverse fields. And applications of technology are more often beneficial than harmful. So if the technology is broadly useful, in aggregate the beneficial applications will outweight the harmful ones.
Transportation fueled by fossil fuels is the foundational technology of modern civilization. It is comparable to electricity or the printing press. AI will be like this too in the future.
You're arguing against a point I never made. I agree that AI will be an important technology. I also think that it'll affect people that have to work for a living negatively (both in the short-term and assuming there is no foundational change in the structure of society, also in the long-term).
A common thing is to lump things together like a tech tree. Is it possible to conceive of a world where nuclear power is invented but not nuclear weapons? Combustion engines but not let everyone have a car and then cause cities to be planned around cars?
we'll be better off - assuming we'll generate revenue on our own. LLMs have opened up an enormous new frontier of micro-SaaS opportunities. One person can now build what used to require a small team.
The real problem is zero-sum work, especially when the only moat was knowledge asymmetry that is now public knowledge.
I'm in agreement with your claim, though if you recall some of these micro SaaSes went hyperfocused on niches. The value proposition is then smaller, with larger data liability than with some behemoth's of SaaS.
Though for the later ones, one might also ask themselves if they are worth their cost when using 20-30% of provided functionality.
This will also make it harder to compete because it holds true for everyone, not just you. I am already, this year, seeing vibe coders put out some decent stuff on App Stores but the problem is marketing it. You no longer automatically stand out just because you have a cool app. You may not even do so with reasonable early traction via social media. And then what? Throw venture capital onto the problem? In an AI saturated world? Really?
Also the drive to innovate goes down. It took weeks for the creator of 2048 to make a low quality clone of Threes. Now people can make relatively high quality ripoffs in days, even hours.
Working with AI has been way more tiring than just working. Sure the productivity is up, at the cost of having to keep up many thought threads, having no calm moments, and needing to consistently dig into large unknown code cases to find weird bugs.
I’ve been on leave for a month, and am super excited (/s) to re-learn everything because all the tooling and ways to prompt “correctly” will have also changed.
Because the ability to create software has little inherent value to me and is only valuable to me because it allows me to earn enough to make this life somewhat bearable.
LLMs that can build a computer vision pipeline are a direct threat to my ability to sustain myself. At the same time, being able to prompt an LLM to build a computer vision pipeline doesn't really positively affect my life at all, because personally I don't care that much about computer vision pipelines (or frankly, any software).
> The ability to create software accelerates technological progress, which has direct and indirect benefits for everyone.
It has benefits for people with enough leverage (money and formerly labour) to obtain those benefits.
> It is true that competition could have short-term negative effect on people who sustain themselves by creating software, though.
I'm guessing that even if the unlikeliest of all unlikely things does happen and we all live off of some UBI some day, the short-term negative effects won't be "short-term" in the context of a human life.
> It has benefits for people with enough leverage (money and formerly labour) to obtain those benefits.
That's pretty much everyone. Even poor people benefit from technological progress.
> I'm guessing that even if the unlikeliest of all unlikely things does happen and we all live off of some UBI some day, the short-term negative effects won't be "short-term" in the context of a human life.
That depends on the pace of technological acceleration. It could be just a few years, or a decade. Which is why I am a pedal-to-the-metal accelerationist. The quicker we get through the short-term negative/turbulent phase towards the long-term positive phase, the better for me. If reversing is not possible, then going quicker is actually better than going slower. Let's get this shit over with.
It’s unlikely to stop here. Today is a proprietary 5T parameter model, tomorrow it’s 5 100B parameter models that each specialize to specific applications and you can run them on your phone. The direction of travel is not like you think. The real victim will be medium to large software companies that can no longer rely on the difficulty of reproducing or maintaining or hosting their software as moat.
