“Revolution”? More like devolution.
Just look at some large-format advertisements at the local level, as some print shops have started to use AI slop and thus eliminating the need to hire an experienced illustrator.
Fortunately, some people are already fighting back to oppose the devolution, committing themselves to the Butlerian Jihad.
I’ve still not heard a convincing argument explaining how these companies are going to make enough money to offset the billions they’ve spent on R&D and hardware.
It’s strange really, if I was an investor that would be the first question I’d ask but I guess VCs are smarter than I am.
The same way they do in every other bubble.
- the bubble pops, most companies fail. Mostly bankruptcies, massive layoffs but also huge tax writeoffs
- of the surviving companies, a couple strike the jackpot.
Most of that huge overall investment is lost, but everyone wants to be in on the one or two that succeed, and those specific investments could have huge returns
How do they succeed though?
I’m not seeing the market for LLMs in any meaningful roles given they are prone to saying things that aren’t true. Would you hire someone who does good work 90% of the time and for the rest, tells you the work is done, when it’s not, or worse.
So far, there hasn’t been an AI revolution, any more than there was a Segway or an NFT revolution.
Right? Like if all the hype was true I’d expect this golden age of software at the drop of a hat.
Instead all we get is still minor inconvenience and dark patterns that no one wants.
For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.
100 years ago people believed that productivity will rise so much, that we will work for 20 hours week, yet here we are.
It’s like global malnutrition/hunger, it’s not that we don’t have enough food (I believe total global calorie per capita per day output might be significantly above the recommended 2,500 or so calories); it’s the distribution where the problem lies.
We absolutely have the resources to solve those distribution issues, there just isn’t an economic incentive to allocate them that way.
Except we still can’t solve this in the US, where that distribution is orders of magnitude easier
We can, the ruling class just chooses not to
Which to OPs point is a socio-political problem. We have the technology and means to distribute it globally, or ensure it’s created closer to the need, it’s just not being done.
In reality things are becoming more scarce because of AI and I‘m afraid we‘ve only scratched the surface. And all that when we barely have any actual use cases for it.
There has been a computer revolution for sure
There has been a mobile phone revolution, absolutely
There was even a social media revolution, changed the way we interact
AI, though, so far has been just “the next it fad” in the 2-5 year cycle, like NFT before it, like Crypto currencies before that, and what was it before that? Web 3.0, then before that there was… Trying to remember… cloud computing? Each of these fads had minor to no influence.in how we did things, and for AI we only just added in stupidity of writing documents with AI which completely misses the point why we write those documents to begin with
I was with you up to “cloud computing”. That bubble was a huge success that has really revolutionized how software is provided
- well known winners include AWS, Google, Microsoft but there are many more depending how you define cloud computing
- also some huge flops
AI has a lot of mindshare and has demonstrated contributions in several areas. For example, ai slop you see on YouTube is making some people money. As a coder I do find it sometimes a useful tool, and I can definitely see the near future where it’s a required skill, and no, if you just ask it to spit out slop you’re not getting anything but slop ). I don’t see how it’s going away. However it doesn’t (yet?) live up to its hype nor is there (yet?) a profitable business for providers.
Meanwhile the crypto and NFT bubbles were pyramid schemes that only ever made money from themselves. Web 3.0 probably looks useful to its proponents but was only ever a niche that no one else cared about
The AI fad is a lot more like the Internet fad than the crypto fad. I think once the bubble pops (like the .com bubble 25 years ago) some use-cases will definitely remain. But yeah, we definitely are in a bubble.
AI is a lot closer to a revolution than to a bust. It’s already likely going to remain an established tool for software development and process automation.
It still remains to be seen if a company can be a single person managing an army of agents can actually become a sustainable company. This would be an industrial revolution on steroids type change that’s honestly terrifying.
An equally or even more likely scenario is we get most of the way there, but it only reduces the need for developer type jobs by 20-50%. From here lots of things could happen. The job market could stay somewhat stable as while companies hire less people, there are more smaller companies with direct hires as the barrier is massively reduced. The job market drastically shrinks and software becomes a less attractive discipline compared to other types of engineering or office work. An industry wide Cobol type situation happens as those that survive the job losses retire and laid off workers have moved on to other industries and no junior positions exist.
im iffy on the social media thing. I would call it a type of stagnation. its not really improving anything. honestly the enshitification is kinda worse than stagntion. smarphones seemed incredible when the iphone and android first came out.
Software engineers use AI. Software engineers make software. Software runs all the shit. Generative AI has definitely lead to a revolution, regardless of how we feel about it. It’s not revolutionary like the internet was, nor like the steam press, nor like toast, but… maybe it’s revolutionary like … I don’t know … browsers in phones?
Not to mention AI is helping us understand how consciousness works better. Not because it actually resembles consciousness, but because it doesn’t while many people thought it would. This realization helps us develop our language and understanding better… now we distinguish between different kinds of intelligence more, and certainly understand better that you can have intelligence without consciousness. That’s a philosophical revolution.
Honestly, the technology is cool. The clout around it is ass. How the technology is being used is ass. What behaviors the technology is incentivizing is ass. But as a matter of fact, that it’s possible at all to exploit natural redundancy in language to the point of producing generative machines — that by itself is quite cool.
How can it usher in a thing that’s been going on for at LEAST the last 15 years?
But they promised me that the Regurgitation Engine would solve all problems!
I’m not sure there’s any more depressing climax I could imagine to this story:
While the talk of eradicating friction or even rents suggests a “freeing up” of capital for more productive investment, given services would follow manufacturing into a realm of hyperproductive overcapacity, there would seem to be no upside to the euthanasia of the rentier in this instance.
Rather than “free up” business, this development would destroy it. Capital may well be a parasite, but in the absence of revolutionary pressure it is still work-producing. Our jobs might be bullsh-t, but without them there is only unemployment and (even more) poverty.
For most people it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art
- Ursula K Le Guin
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
And art is being destroyed by AI
Those are very different things though.
And one can argue that how people imagine the end of the world is probably shaped works of art/media.
Yea … it’s the bit I don’t get why people don’t care about this more.
If we’re replaced, there’s nothing really left for us in the terms of the way we’ve conceived our whole world for centuries. Sure maybe we go native again or something, but let’s be real, that is a massively tough transition even if it’s viable.
It’s even more bleak than that. Politically, the bargaining power of the masses is from the labor they contribute. As soon as the need of human labor is gone, there is absolutely no reason for those with power to heed the will of the populus. You can say open revolt, but if we’re talking a situation where any significant portion of the military is automated, uprisings are no longer a concern.
AI revolution, not likely. more like AI age of degeneracy.
Speedrunning the Idiocracy future while we offload cognition to a black box.
