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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Because it is not clear if it is coming right at us or not, precisely.

Have you ever looked at predictions from big consulting companies like McKinsey and the likes? "This new field with unlock a market of 30 billions in the next 5 years", that kind of crap?

In the fields where I worked, I used to take those predictions seriously (after all, they know better than I do, right?). What I realized is that they just don't have a damn clue. I can't blame them for failing: predicting the future is an unsolved problem. But making that kind of money by telling that kind of crap should honestly not be legal.

All that to say, some things are clearly coming right at us (ahem, climate change), some aren't (AI, for instance).

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Could it be that the events at work have been coloring your perception by said consulting companies? Such companies are getting paid for making bold predictions, I would think. Of course Openai and MS as well get paid to say similar things. But this time the eating (usage) of the AI pudding already has the proof partly established. At least that is for me the sign to see it coming.

> But this time the eating (usage) of the AI pudding already has the proof partly established.

I don't know, I don't see it this way. Bitcoin at the very beginning was an impressive piece of technology (still is), but it clearly did more harm than good.

Autonomous cars had some very impressive demos, and don't seem to have evolved much in a few years (it's impressive, but not good enough).

AI is making very impressive demos now, but it's not changing the world (what seems to work really well right now is to generate convincing disinformation at scale, which is not good).

To me it's all the same: impressive demo, but what matters is not the first 80%, it's the last 20. Everyone seems to be building infrastructure around what AI will become. Just like people built entire companies betting on the fact that cryptocurrencies would become global (they have not), or that blockchain would be useful outside from cryptocurrencies (it is not). Or like people built entire companies around "the new world with autonomous vehicles".

>Autonomous cars had some very impressive demos, and don't seem to have evolved much in a few years

The problem is we got autonomous cars backwards. We needed multimodal GPT first. GPT-4 can look at a picture can tell you what's happening very clearly. Now, chain this together really fast and you have something that could be used for driving. I'm making no bets on when the hardware/models will be fast/cheap/power efficient enough to support this.

>but it's not changing the world

Eh, no, it is changed the world in a vast number of ways, but not spread very equally. On the scientific/AI side a whole bunch of "20 years away" and "We may never accomplish" have been changed to "now". On the language side things GPT has put any translation service on notice. Summerizers too.

I've never been a crypto fan. I believe there are purposes for it, but at the same time I have a bank that does all the same things.

What I do (did?) not have is an AI that actually solve real life problems that I run into now, and that's something that is both highly useful, and something that many people are willing to pay for.

lol, you may be right, but it’s both hilarious and terrifying to imagine that the future of self driving cars is effectively one person in the passenger seat verbally describing the road ahead to a blindfolded driver.

Self driving cars are not fully autonomous yet. It took longer than expected/promised, but we are only a few years away from that. Mind that technology in cars on average is 10 years behind on technology in advanced consumer products like cell phones, because of safety regulations and number of components involved. Some componies try to shortcut that lag with mixed results. But it is just lag. Delivery bots are a fact today already.

> but we are only a few years away from that.

Again, that's a belief :). Could totally be that they never become a thing, and nobody would be surprised.

They have been "only a few years away" for over a decade. Delivery bots are not a fact today, they are not reliable on any scale of any practical sort without having humans in the loop.

https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/

> It took longer than expected/promised, but we are only a few years away from that.

It took longer than the likes of Tesla said, but it certainly hasn't been taking longer than a whole lot of people expected.

My prediction is that we're much more than a few years away from it becoming a reality in the way people imagine.

This time it isn't a bunch of empty suits from McKinsey saying it. It's the technologists that built the Internet and smartphones.

By all means keep your own estimates of what the world will look like in 10 years and act accordingly, but I'm trusting my own technologist's judgement on this one.

Historically speaking, technologists are no better at predicting the future than empty suits are.

That’s obviously false; they built the future at every juncture, usually to protests from the status quo.

I’m excluding the desk jockey pundits from the argument, of course.

I think you missed the point. We are talking about predicting the future, not building it.

> keep your own estimates

I am not estimating anything. I'm saying that there is no way to know where it will go. You are the one doing what the empty suits did: you are predicting something based on your beliefs only.

Not that you can't do it: everyone can believe what they want. But it would be wise to realize that it's a belief, even if you are a technologist.

Technologists predicted we'd have AGI by 1980. Assuming their claims are accurate is pretty naive.

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