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Comment by socmag | Hacker News Reader

Let's skip forward a few years and look for the HN post regarding when precisely the dawn of the AI-influenced age occurred.

Since I'm pretty sure it already happened, and quite some time ago, depending on your metric.

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I'm not sure it's the same scale. AI has the potential to change human lives quite a bit, even expand humanities reach. Our actions since 1950 though have altered the earth's climate. Steel comes in 2 forms Pre-1945 steel, and new steel. In less than 100 years we have left an unmistakable mark on the planet. It affects everything. AI will be most impactful to humans.

In case you are curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

"Surely this Pentium is so powerful AI is just a year away!" we all thought in the early 1990s.

AI is already here working away on Hacker News and in millions of other places every single day. The internet was the greatest gift the genome ever received.

To be clear I meant real AI indistinguishable from a human when conversing with it.

An Epoch is a division of geological time and needs to be reflected by something that is visible in the geological record. That's why the article mentions nuclear testing, chicken bones and soot from factories and power plants. It seems like AI would be something that could be very difficult to distinguish in the geological record, at least based on what we know now.

Nice article though.

Worth noting that this article is overlooking the definition of our mark on the planet in terms of a geological age. ;-)

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