Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?
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shkspr.mobi
Advertising, and especially the technological improvements to advertising, are a threat. If you are of reasonable intelligence, trying to ignore this threat, or write it off as funding "a lot of good things", will cause cognitive dissonance and you will find yourself feeling "like a crotchety old man" in the face of new technology, even if you are not honest with yourself as to why.
I think Doug was reasonably self-aware, and would probably write, today, about how his wisdom about technophobia did not age well.
Now that we are getting to the era of maximized add revenue there is no more need for social engagement on facebook or for search results on google. Things are changing into pure manipulation now.
It is like radio first gave people new songs to sing but then they forgot all of their own songs. Every village and every porch had its own songs.
The winning implementation of technology seems to depend much more on how much noise it makes vs how sensible it is. With each upgrade we can move further away from the sensible.
If a husky can run 40 miles, if we have fine batteries and fine electric motors, why should we not do our commute with hybrid carts partially pulled by dogs? We have quite reasonable small gen sets, pedal vehicles, at times there is sunlight and there is wind to use? There are so many possible combinations of those 6, how do we tell they are not viable with Musk holding the megaphone? With the complexity of combining those it would take quite a bit of time and effort to perfect.
The TV was the ultimate opportunity to bring 1000 channels of education to the masses. We could have done reasonable tests and examination over the phone long ago. But if you can extract money from the TV audience and have people pay rent for phone lines - why bother? We could have spend those hundreds million movie budgets on nice courses which would have given us a huge spectrum of employability with much higher wages AND a much more sophisticated voter.
I don't expect the manipulation industry to stop any time soon. With the AI generated imaging it is more likely to reach an ultimate form where those who desire it can directly write desires into people.
Why his boring stuff is actually cool:
Block chain is cool, I agree that we haven't figured out what to do with it. In the papers you read about NFTs and using too much energy. But if you listen to interviews with Vitalik Buterin instead you can realize that there are smart people trying to figure out what to do with this cool new thing. (I hold no crypto btw).
I remember the first VR too. They've fixed a lot of the problems. I've had amazing artistic experiences just sitting in a little tiny apartment in Hong Kong. Beat Saber is fun, and different from other video games. Flight simulator is much better with it. I don't get the Meta/Zuckerberg media push, but if you avoid taking journalists seriously then it is a cool new thing. Also I'm more excited about AR than VR, will love to have the world annotated.
Self driving cars are amazing. After about 15 minutes using a Tesla on the Highway, you realize you don't have to monitor it. You get to relax and be a passenger. It works pretty well in towns too, but you have to monitor it. Again don't listen to journalists and it seems like a miracle.
I don't like voice assistants either, but it's cool that they kinda work. Five year old kids can play songs they like.
I don't understand 5G in phones either. But! It turns out that it's a great way to get internet service in your house. Now you have a competitor to your awful cable company. Even if you never use it, your price for high speed internet will go down. When sonic fiber optic came to my neighborhood in SF, I couldn't get it. But my cable internet bill came down $25 per month and they upgraded the speed.
Anyway stop reading dumb cynical journalists, experience things for yourself and you will age gracefully.
The algorithms don't have to be perfect to stop a sleepy driver from slamming into a minivan.
That's one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. Being "pretty well served by public transport" and uninterested in that improvement is self-absorbed.
Going on about how it's useless in a public forum? Yes. That's the inflection point and Adams pointed it out because it's narcissistic and sad. If you can't empathize enough to care about all the people self-driving will help, who aren't you, then you've lost something.
This claim is the part of self-driving cars that has become boring. People keep making it, but they never specify when, nor do we get any information about whether full-self-driving is really that big a safety leap over the automatic braking and lane assist that we have already had for a decade or more. Meanwhile there remains no appreciable effect on the slope of the graph for annual deaths per vehicle miles traveled.
No, but if they don’t stop for a stopped emergency vehicle, or do stop for no obvious reason, then drivers are stuck closely monitoring the car at all times waiting to take control without warning.
Which, to my mind, is worse than just being in control at all times.
There will reach a point, likely soon, where on a damage per million kilometres level, a self-driver is safer than an average human, and eventually a good human driver. But I worry it will take years and years extra to get self-driving legally approved, because people will hang up on the corner cases where the best human drivers under ideal circumstances could avoid an incident the self-driver fails.
I sort of hope the insurance industry will take the vanguard here, because they can see the "claims per million kilometres" number and get less hung up on the "my specific individual experience was bad" anecdata.
This is feat that many people are incapable of, including a sizeable portion of those with driver's licences. And it is still improving on a regular basis.
After four hours driving a Tesla on the highway, I realized that I absolutely have to monitor it. The UI warnings about paying attention aren't just for legal; the car can lull you into a sense of security and then make dangerous decisions that require an attentive driver to fix.
The car's capabilities are great. People's decisions to relax too much behind the wheel is bad.
It is probably the hype that’s the least favorable part that eventually tires us, all the noise… Undoubtedly, technology keeps on improving across the spectrum incrementally or in larger spurts. After a certain age though (mid 40s) I fail to be excited at every new announcement, I guess I started to care about other things…
The other day I downloaded an app that scans a lego pile and comes up ‘creations’ out of those parts. I decided to play with my 4 year old. A bad pattern fooled me into paying for it as I was in a rush and pressed the wront button, though no actual credit card is attached to my iOS identity. Regardless of dark patterns, I eventually went on with the free version which crashed a few times when I came to the realization that I don’t frigging need this, my kid and I don’t need to tie an app to our creative play, we could do much better without.
Back in the day Id go along with this type of thing but Im less and less inclined to and instead lean on classical technology like pen and paper for note taking and so on. Im excited about technology about the technology on the horizon line but I try to live my life without tying too much into it unnecessarily.
Even worse is when there's a technical person with more pull than you who's built an identity around being "an X professional", where X is some overhyped-and-unimpressive-for-general-use thing. You end up feeling like fucking Cassandra: able to perfectly predict the future, but everyone who matters ignores you.
The author (and I'm assuming a lot of people on HN, myself included) came up when the Internet and Personal Computing was growing. The next technology that people are excited about probably isn't the latest in Personal Computing/Internet, it's something else altogether. I'm in the same bubble you guys are, so I'm not sure what that is. Maybe it's Energy (lots of Solid Hydrogen articles and/or Clean Energy). Maybe it's something else altogether...
"And if you were alive around the year 1900, you’d probably equate modern tech with electricity, much the way we today equate modern tech with computers, smart phones and the internet. Edison and Tesla were their Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The idea of powering transportation with a fiery engine dated back to the earliest locomotives almost 100 years earlier, which would seem about as modern to a person in 1900 as black-and-white silent films seem to us today. By 1900, you weren’t supposed to have to deal with how the energy sausage is really made anymore—the burning fire happened in some remote generator now, allowing consumers to only have to interact with the silent, clean, convenient magical butler—electricity."
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-li...
Douglas Adams inflection point is not real. It's the result of an author having fun with his audience very much in the same way horologists make fun of their followers.
- The problem is intrinsically hard --> fun regardless
- The problem is hard but we're pretending it isn't --> maddening
- The problem isn't that hard (anymore) but the code/gizmo was rushed out or is pointlessly convoluted --> enraging.
Is this a reference to something in the article? I've never heard of horologists having followers, let alone being smug enough to mock them. I'm sure the best can make their craft sound very interesting, their are probably some YouTube rabbit holes there...
I remember new toys coming out every few months...CUseeMe, Pointcast, Palm Pilots, etc...lots of people doing lots of interesting things when things were developable.
I get some of that same vibe around AI image generation today, but also a lot more disambiguation. You type a command, 60 million lines of code happen, and now you have a serverless webapp on the internet.
Even if ML models hit an unexpected scaling problem, they're still very very useful. Extremely disruptive, too. Then again, it could be ages before we figure out how to put them to the best use.
But, if you want my take on it, there's a lot of hype and not much substance there.
There's a good article at https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-googleai-just-snooker-...
I'm on team "What a time to be alive".
Stunning trees in isolation are impressive and awe-inspiring, but note that the rest of the trees in the forest are made up of just the same stuff and composed in extremely similar ways!
ML shows not that computers can be smart, but that smarts is just a matter of statistics + abstraction. In this way no "intelligent" being is any more impressive, just more complex and fine-tuned.
What?
The stagnant pop music industry probably doesn't help, though.
There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever.
Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?
I suggest Barton Turn.
Facebook was an obvious yawn even in 2005.
Far too often in the tech press there's supposedly independent articles that are just warmed over press releases. So you don't just get hype about technology X but the breathless hyperbole or marketing copy. That's bad enough but then people get tribalistic about that marketing copy. They repeat the "this will change everything" mantras and inject that into any discussion of technology X, or even unrelated discussions of technology Y.
It's tiring and frustrating. When it was magazine articles you could put it down and the marketing copy went away. Now it's every other person in a thread bleating out lines from press releases, often not even realizing they're doing so.
Until NLP can create a short-term memory model to retain info on prior utterances, Alexa's comprehension will be limited to self-contained single phrases -- spells and incantations.
Wonder what's blocking that from being applied to systems like Alexa.
You (Amazon) don't want your precious little bot say random things that land you in the press. And oh, GPT-3 will.
Point two is that models that can be goaded to a specific place. So you'll need to account for that too, or... oh look, press.
Point 3 is that they're trained on the Internet at large, and you don't want that in your house :)
It's a lot easier to converse gracefully than to add useful info to a conversation.
This is essentially what has made past intelligent assistants so dysfunctional (like Microsoft's Clippy). They couldn't model cognitive concepts like 'relevant', 'interesting', or 'necessary' relative to the active topic.
Transformers can fit about 4000 tokens in the context window. That's a lot of dialogue rounds. The problem is these models are too expensive to offer at scale.
We almost never get to see the latest AI in big corporation products. It is always AI from a couple generations ago that is cheaper to run. When we get the latest and greatest, like GPT-3 and DallE, then it's super expensive to use, not free.
"Doing the impossible behind schedule"
You input a full phrase and the search is processed, trying to guess what you exactly meant. Alexa apps only get more latitude by allowing series of phrases.
But looking at Google Search, we see that even with all the money research and devs in the world that model stays fundamentally limited and only properly works for the simplest tasks.
Beyond that you’d need precise feedback on what Alexa is doing, and ability to micro adjust accordingly. Like when talking to someone and adjusting our sentences mid-speech as we realize the person in front of us isn’t properly understanding what we’re saying.
FSD's feasibility has been overhyped by Musk for years. It's not an impossible technology but it's also not one you can just bang together with some shitty webcams hoping AI will somehow make everything right.
Technology doesn't improve on its own. It's developed by people that have motivations and limited by engineering prowess and physics. Tesla's FSD is still hype because they're incentivized to get your check for FSD and hand you an IOU. Amazon's current offering is an advertising/surveillance vehicle that does those jobs so they're not incentivized to improve it.
Some things just suck. And the products of some eras, wher marketeers and hype-men take the lead, suck more than others...
- self-driving cars are just chauffeurs for ppl without money for real chauffeur
- same with Alexa as virtual secretary
Doing tasks that used to require human labor in an automated fashion.
Won what? By what metric?
He’s just ignoring things because he doesn’t care anymore.
Certainly not the deviantart artists who had their art stolen and sold as NFTs or the artists who drew the Bored Apes one of whom described her compensation as "definitely not ideal"[1]. Most small artists who I've heard talk on podcasts about NFTs say it's a pretty raw deal because minting costs money with no guarantee of returns.
I think the largest beneficiaries of NFTs are speculators and businesses. The art and artists seem to largely be a means to an end in this space.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vn5b/bored-ape-yacht-club-...
And yes it did that because for digital artists it was quite hard to monetise before NFTs. You had to find an art gallery to authenticate your work and signature. There were gatekeepers. Now you just Authenticate your own work on the blockchain and sell it.
I follow multiple artists who have sold the their work and made 100k to 1million usd. That’s good for art and it’s good for them. Thus it’s changed the art world.
I can provide multiple examples of artists who were once working in corporate jobs and were amazing and are now very successful NFT artists if you’d like.
And that is not the edge case - that is the mainstream - is artists who couldn’t sell their work before now can and they’re making money.
The fraud cases are unfortunate and I’m pretty sure there is an automated way to remove it. Why it hasn’t been done is a mystery to me but I’m sure it will get done eventually.