I can list so many things that were hyped up the same way 10 years ago that still aren’t revolutionising the world today.
Maybe it will get super good really fast. Or maybe it’s the next self driving trucks or 3D tv where solving the last of the problems is much harder than the first 90%.
Chatbots in front of customer care agents.
Every previous AI hype-train (Eliza did not replace therapists)
Battery though, we have seen the price (USD/KWh) go down every year, and the energy density (KWh/kg) increase every year.
Research articles are usually things that take years to trickle down into the mass production. And by then the hopes or lab results no longer translate, or they've evolved into improvements and savings that are harder to link back to their original source.
The problem with it is that it is being marketed as the do-all productivity enhancer. It is not. There are some fields in which it excels, but are all rather very specific (think summarizing a long document).
Something like "Find me documents that talk about achieving x using y process". If it finds a few irrelevant ones or misses some, its ok and still provided value by searching far more things than you ever could manually.
Why would those getting good enough happen sooner than people expected? I'd assume those will get good enough at roughly the rate pessimists expected, at least if we look historically that seems like a good bet, these things move really really slowly once you try to apply it to the real world in practice.
Would you call an AI bot to fix your heater? I would not. There's no substitute for artisanship.
AI is different than previous generation of disruptions, because its primary target will be software industry itself. ChatGPT has replaced stackoverflow and Google for me.
Even if AI can't carry out serious tasks, it can still have better form than humans, it would be an improvement for customer support compared to what some companies are doing today (almost nothing). We still need humans to escalate to, when AI is useless.
I hope instead of leading to layoffs AI will lead to competition on quality, diversity, price or customizability. Raising the bar for everyone, instead of replacing us. Is there any reason a company would prefer lowering costs to competing for market share with AI? There's more upside to increasing profits than reducing costs.
AI
The other area that really worries me is government. I think they're the most likely to get sold on AI as a cost cutting measure, we'll all suffer as a result, and there won't be any recourse.
I can't believe how many people are willing to hand the world over to a bunch of non-deterministic, opaque boxes. Being an outlier is going to suck in the future.
We’re at AI’s 80s brick cell phone stage right now, there’s a lot of improvement to come.
Software engineering is a field in which many revel in its perceived complexity, the 'status' that comes with doing a job that brings so much to the table, yet is not understood by the average person.
Now, all of a sudden, there is a tool that is starting to bite into that and it is very easy to dismiss it using phrases such as "half broken garbage".
For now AI in this context is often just another piece of such tooling and people using it may experience for example github copilot or the like spit out faulty blocks of code most of the time when it's not doing something cookiecutter. When you then know full well it needs to improve till it's almost correct 100% of the time and do a whole lot more then yeah people are going to be dismissive for a good while longer.
Not the AIs we have today, I don't even think the initial AGI will be smart enough to significantly simplify current processes, it would need to be much smarter than the humans it replaces to do that.
If you program entirely by copy and pasting from stack overflow, sure you should be worried. But despite that being a meme, most people do more than that.