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Comment by 65 | Hacker News Reader

I find this kind of writing so unbelievably annoying, it's unreadable.

People who write as though not only can they predict the future, but they're so arrogantly certain of it that they write long, scary sounding articles about it.

Guess what? This random guy has no idea what will happen in less than 5 years, no one has any idea. I'd bet AI won't, in fact, dominate the animation industry. Am I certain of it? No, because at least I have some humility.

Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is full of shit.

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Unfortunately, this style of writing makes the article perform better on Twitter and Reddit (where it benefits to wrangle the scared or passionate) or aggregates like HackerNews, where people get to tear it apart.

Your choice is this, or SEO farm bot posts (perhaps ironically).

>People who write as though not only can they predict the future

Well, many people can and have, with reasonable arguments that panned out 20, 30 and even 100 years later. It's not metaphysical prediction, like an oracle, it's just reading trends.

>Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is full of shit.

In any case, we didn't learn anything about what will or will not happen in this comment, or about the feasibility of predicting the future even. But we did learn that you strongly dislike the idea that it's possible.

Also, as if "5 years" is some big leap in predicting an industry change, or technology trend. E.g. I could tell you already in 2007 than in 5 years touch-based smartphones like iPhone will dominate. I could you in 1995 that this "world wide web" thing will go huge.

That kind of prediction is basically what any businessman does when they make an investment in infrastructure or direction that will pay for itself in 5 years or more...

Or fusion and flying cars are 20 years away. Some predictions come true. Plenty of others don't. The web was going to replace brick and mortar stores in the late 90s, and books and magazines were going no longer going to be printed in the 2010s, which still hasn't come true, even though a lot of shopping is done online and digital material is read now. Which is probably a better kind of prediction for how things will play out. More stuff gets automated by AI, but people still have jobs using those AI tools, since automation leads to doing more things.

> I could tell you already in 2007 than in 5 years touch-based smartphones like iPhone will dominate. I could you in 1995 that this "world wide web" thing will go huge.

Did you? And more pointedly, any more specific than “huge” and “dominate”?

Yes, I did. Even going into the business, getting my own company and so on.

>any more specific than “huge” and “dominate”

Like? What the list price for AMZ and APPLE stock would be in 2022? Or what color socks would Zuckerberg wear?

Not to mention, that if you dismiss a prediction as "dominate" as vague enough to be easy to come true, then you've already made my point: that's exactly what the TFA predicts.

There seems to be a (small) subgroup of txt2img/img2img enthusiastic people who have had gripes trying to relate to or reason with existing artists and their identities(gender, ethnicity, language, etc.) and to me this sits in line with those.

It’s also annoying because it distracts from the very real consequences of consolidation. People treat AI replacing jobs as if it’s a binary thing “AI can fully replace an animator or it can’t”, which is basically never how it works.

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