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Comment by finolex1 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps improvements might fizzle out, but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. The AI models we are using today are the worst that models will ever be in the future. We can't base our valuations on our current experiences with AI today.

5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical.

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> 5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA dates from 1964.

> but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't.

A lot of smart people _always_ seem to think <insert tech> won't fizzle out.

Where have they been wrong?

Cryptocurrency? NFTs? The Metaverse? Google Glass? Betamax?

> Betamax?

Please. My dad voted with his wallet for… Video 2000.

(He also advised me to buy Lloyds shares when they were about x10 their current price).

Hmm...I didn't understand the comment to be about specific products, so I'd take Glass and Betamax off the list.

I really don't think crypto or VR or AR are going to fizzle, I think they're just early in their overall lifecycle. I absolutely think that in ten or twenty years those categories will be much larger than today.

You're kidding, right?

Not really...crypto is the biggest one that people cite, but the crypto ecosystem seems to be humming along. It hasn't taken over the world, but it also hasn't really fizzled imo. I haven't really paid attention to whether VCs are still investing there.

I guess maybe VR is another one? But that's another example of a slowly growing ecosystem.

I think mostly the people who think some piece of hot tech is going to take over the world aren't usually wrong, they're just early.

Depends on your definition of "fizzle out". If you mean "not dominate the future, but be relegated to merely a niche tech", then:

Ruby on Rails. Modula-2. Every JavaScript framework since ever. Supersonic passenger flight. Space tourism. Emitter-coupled logic. Gallium arsenide (still has my vote for a name for a speed-metal band). Musk's Boring Company. I'm sure I could go on with some more thought.

I didn't understand the comment to be about specific products, but more overall categories. I think space tourism is likely going to be a huge category, it's just decades away still. I don't know about supersonic passenger flight or building tunnels everywhere. It may never be worth it for those categories.

But regardless, I don't think that many people really thought Musk was going to build much with Boring. I certainly didn't.

And has anyone in the last three decades (other than Boom's hapless investors) thought that supersonic passenger flight was going to be huge?

Sure, hard to tell either way. That's kinda how bubbles happen in the first place, because if we really knew how valuable something was, it would already have the price to reflect that.

But it's also why Lord Kelvin claimed in 1895 "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible"* and in 1897 that "radio has no future".

* don't ask me why birds were not a proof by example; we have the same problem today with regards to human brains being proof by example that human level intelligence is possible.

Great examples.

It seems like one of the defining characteristics of a paradigm-shifting technology is that a lot of smart people dismiss it at first. The skepticism and cynicism I see about AI from the HN crowd (of all places) is such a great example. I use AI every day as both a user and developer and it's an incredible gamechanger. It's pretty surprising to me how incurious and conservative many HN commentators appear to be, but maybe it shouldn't. I'm guessing the median age on this site of the active commenters is now in the mid 30s or early 40s.

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