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Comment by its_ethan | Hacker News Reader

> It is a sales pitch, one in which the problems of today are brushed aside or softened as issues of now, which surely, leaders in the field insist, will be solved as the technology gets better. What we see today is merely a shadow of what is coming. We just have to trust them.

I'm a believer that AI is currently over-hyped, but to me this feels applicable to a lot of things that have gone on to be revolutionary. For the smart-phone too, one of the "issues of now" was slow cellular connectivity, which made the premise of using your phone for web-browsing feel like a chore. With cellular speeds "solved" we now live in a world where smart phones are the tool the majority of people use the internet on. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/mobile-internet-traffic

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> For the smart-phone too, one of the "issues of now" was slow cellular connectivity

Nobody said "you have to buy an iPhone NOW, because in 3 years the connectivity will be good". When Steve Jobs got on that stage to show it off, he didn't ask you to trust his vision. He didn't promise you what it would do tomorrow. The sales pitch was simple, It's an iPod, a Phone, and a web browser, and importantly it did all those things. He sold it in the NOW. all that other stuff that phones became, that came later. The iPhone was first and foremost a good product in the now.

And, the first iPhone worked really, really well over WIFI.

It was good enough in the NOW, even though it didn't have an app store!

Edit: I should also add that I was a "late" adopter of the first iPhone. I didn't rush out and buy it the day it came out. I tried it in a store and made sure the web browser was useful. After a few months after hearing (almost) no complaints, when my phone has issues, I went out and bought one.

>It's an iPod, a Phone, and a web browser, and importantly it did all those things. He sold it in the NOW.

I think this is really important because it shows that the vendor knows they're meeting a real demand NOW. They're not selling hype, early access, and woo-woo future-talk in hopes of maybe eventually finding a problem for their solution.

Harder sell for products like the apple vision pro.

> Nobody said "you have to buy an iPhone NOW, because in 3 years the connectivity will be good". When Steve Jobs got on that stage to show it off, he didn't ask you to trust his vision.

I don't think anyone is telling consumers that they need to use AI now, either, unless it actually benefits them (and judging by the usage of ChatGPT, apparently many users do find it useful).

The people promising the future of AI are usually startups pitching to investors, or companies putting resources into AI, etc.

> I don't think anyone is telling consumers that they need to use AI now

I dont understand how you could say that. The very article we are discussing here is a followup to a marketing op-ed about how AI "is uniquely capable" of improving your health, yet the best answer they can provide to serious question about privacy is "maybe the laws should change".

They are directly asking the consumers to vote to change laws in a way that benefits their product, before they even know if it's an app.

> to me this feels applicable to a lot of things that have gone on to be revolutionary.

The big issue is that it's also applicable to a lot of other things.

No doubt! I err on the side of "most things are over-hyped" (see: room temp superconductor hype that lasted a week), but I try to remind myself there's a yin and yang thing going on.

Yin: "this tech will change the future"

Yang: "this is over-hyped and the promises are hot air"

It's easy to default to "yang" because it is true most of the time (especially with tech). But you gotta acknowledge that "yin" is actually right some times too.

Nuance, man, it'll get you every time.

I often like to use an analogy involving a local volcano.

The odds are incredibly strong will not explode today, but the granularity/time-periods matter, and there's a fundamental asymmetry in how we value the false-positive rate versus the false-negative rate. :P

___

"Look, I've made daily predictions for 30 years now, and they're all perfectly 100% accurate, go on your hike, it'll be fine."

"Did I say 100%? OK, fine, after today it's 99.99%, which is still awesome."

Right now, as stated, the "Yang" side as applied to AI is clearly true. Even if the tech will "change the future" it will be no less correct for us to say that current AI products are overhyped/vaporware and that AI salesmen and researchers are passing off sci-fi stories and business strategies as wise prognostication. Even if what they're saying turns out to be true, it's completely correct to say that they're just (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves) wildly guessing.

I don't really intend to bicker, but I'm a little curious about the thinking here..

Maybe it's getting too philosophical, but if you're correct because of "wildly guessing".. you're still correct. Maybe you've only been correct 2% of the time with your predictions, but that doesn't change being right or wrong in any given instance.

If someone says "it will do A" and you say "no it won't, you're passing off sci-fi as prognostication", and then it does end up doing "A", you were wrong? No? If someone's AI tech does end up "changing the future" then how would you not be incorrect if you had previously said it was vaporware?

> If someone's AI tech does end up "changing the future" then how would you not be incorrect if you had previously said it was vaporware?

"This product is vaporware" doesn't mean "This product is impossible and can never come to fruition." Vaporware is "software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy, either because it is only a concept or because it is still being written or designed."

It doesn't matter even slightly if Altman and Huffington's app will materialize and change the universe; it's still vaporware. It's just what the word means.

Don't forget the time crystal: It was overhyped in the past, as well. But there are endless details to how things could turn out, few of them expected in advance.

I don't know where I first heard this but I believe it - people often overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact.

I know Morgan Housel has written about this a decent amount, here's one article that jumped to mind: https://collabfund.com/blog/compounding-optimism/

"Technological progress is easy to underestimate because it’s so counterintuitive to see how, for example, the philosophies of a guy who invented Polaroid film would go on to inspire the iPhone. Or how an 18th-century physicist would write a notebook that would set the foundations for a modern electrical system"

From more googling, it looks like this is called "Amara's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara

Perhaps improvements in networking have been revolutionary. Not sure why "smart phones" are revolutionary. Maybe they are revolutionary in a negative way: destroying privacy, accelerating the decline of mental health in young people, etc.

I would rather have a pocked sized computer that I can fully control and a pocket-sized cellular phone, not a combination of the two that is a Silicon Valley-orchestrated Trojan Horse into the personal lives of every person who uses one. Sometimes I need to carry a computer. Sometimes I need to carry a cellular phone. Sometimes I might need to carry both. The "smart phone" destroys this basic distinction.

In the time I have been using computers, early 1980s-present, improvements in networking have never felt overhyped. But they have been revolutionary. IMHO.

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