Not sure where the next revolution may come from (no, 'AI' is not it).
It may be that tech will be like banking is today, still lucrative but not revolutionary/in the public eye as it was (as I understand it, banking went through it's boom in the 80s, hence Wolf of Wall Street, but I'm ready to be corrected on that).
Not sure why you say this; are you sure AI can or should be so easily dismissed out of hand without further thoughts?
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The assertion that "AI is not it" when considering the next revolution is a point of debate. While it's true that AI hasn't yet led to a socio-economic transformation on the scale of the internet or mobile technology, it is still in the early stages of its potential impact. AI and machine learning are already influencing many industries, from healthcare with predictive diagnostics to transportation with autonomous vehicles, and their capabilities are rapidly advancing.
The part below "---" above was written by ChatGPT, to help underscore my point.
Perhaps LLMs' biggest contribution to social progress will be wrecking social media, as you have kindly demonstrated. Nobody wants to talk to a machine.
"ChatGPT has 180.5 million users, generates $80 million/month revenue, and crossed over 10 billion all-time visits (1.43B visits in August 2023)"
If you can't understand why normal people like having a human like chat interface to a machine then you're a bit out of touch.
(I am amazed that "what is the luminosity of the sun?" is finally answered not with "1 solar luminosity", which it was for a while. Now, if we can get "what is my ipv4 address" to 1-box, Goog.)
The sensor under the sink can't reliably suss out "hands" vs. "not hands", though I grant its probably a fair bit simpler in its construction … but that's sort of the point, too.
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What I would call basic, simple problems in health tech that we don't need AI to fix:
… my own healthcare provider doesn't know who my GP with them is.
My insurance doesn't know if the bill has been paid or not.
My provider can't reliably determine that I am insured, or by who.
Providers & insurers can't agree on what the bill is, or what is being billed, and are not capable of figuring it out.
My insurer doesn't know what providers are in their network.
We still transfer health information over god-awful protocols like HL7v2 that just destroy my time as a dev supporting them.
… but yes, let's just keep trying to jam AI in somewhere, anywhere.
Automotive is the same: see the self-driving car that crushed a woman recently resulting in the suspension of the parent company's license. Car prices are through the roof, to the point where it's not economically practical to purchase at the moment, and so the end result is … I'm still driving, by hand.
They're advancing, I'll give them that, but I could feel far more meaningful impact in many places in my life from just the most basic of software engineering … or even just the most basic procedural changes (many of the problems above aren't even tech problems, but administrative ones).
I however am looking forward to citing this comment in 5 years just like the "Dropbox is just rsync" comment.
Much of that reaction at the political levels comes from the fact that LLMs are good at the stuff Ivy League graduates are taught. The value of grammatically correct, well-referenced blithering has dropped considerably in the last two years.
As for direct neural communication, see how text replaced voice as soon as mobile devices could do it properly - nobody phones anybody nowadays. People have a tendency to take what they want from tech, and discard the rest.
I, for one, would be all over a permanent HUD, even just for messages and biometric data (as long as I have reasonable control over what pops up). I suspect the broader market would too if the tech gets there and the glasses don't look dorky. My point isn't that we're there yet, it's that AR is more useful and has less fundamental hurdles to wide-spread adoption than AR. I can think of many practical applications that could be made possible or enhanced with AR capabilities, but I struggle to think of any for VR that aren't just games and entertainment until we figure out strong haptic feedback systems.
Regarding AI/ML - the insanely valuable step was the spreadsheet.
That seems premature. Maybe decoder transformer models aren’t it, but AI is almost absurdly broad as a field hence requires near omniscience to write off wholesale.
Can you expand on this? The pace of improvement is insane. And we've barely started training on video but that is clearly imminent with big implications for robotics and entertainment.
A couple years ago I would have guessed that it would take us decades to get where we are now. The new Copilot integration into Office 365 (I can't believe I'm saying this!) looks fantastic, and even though a lot of my coworkers are skeptical, I really like using AI to help me with dev work. It doesn't do tasks for me, but it definitely helps speeds things along.
I think there's going to be a huge demand for engineers who can help integrate AI into software, regardless of the field its used in.