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Comment by ninetyninenine | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's fear.

It's more of a cultural thing of something getting extremely popular too quick.

When something rises to an absurd amount of popularity really quickly it becomes stupid. People like to talk shit about it. It happens with bands and crocs.

People have forgotten just how revolutionary the LLM. The hype is justified.

I'm telling you if somebody next week invents cheap space cars with lightspeed drives that cost only 4$... within a year those space cars will be referred to as junk and overhyped by the very people who use it everyday.

That's how humans are.

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I still disagree. People SHOULD be afraid of AI. Not just because it might turn the world into paperclips, but because it can already do this blog author's job almost as good as he can, but at arbitrarily larger volume and 1000's of times faster. It is very likely that in a year or two it will be better than him at his 'witty' and 'cutting' shallow commentary, but even if it's only 85% as good it will be available way way sooner and on every single topic you can imagine. He's toast. A lot of us are toast.

Edit: AI doesn't make Stephen King redundant, AI isn't better than the best humans, or even close. Lets assume it never will be that good (not a good assumption but lets assume.) Most of us are very mediocre, even at things we make our living at. Most software engineers are poor or mediocre (a statistical tautology) and AI is better than a lot of them already. Most authors aren't very good and nobody will remember their work, but they can still find work and get paid for it. A huge fraction of those jobs are just going to go away.

I'm afraid of it in a very abstract way. I'm sure the danger is real but I feel most people just aren't that scared.

It's like global warming. Global warming will probably make a lot of us toast. Yet I still drive a gas guzzling car and I'm not screaming out of my mind.

It's totally irrational and even I'm like that. Do you sort of get what I'm saying?

Yea I get what you're saying. I think your global warming analogy is :chef's kiss:. I think AI has within it the looming artificial god. Buuut there's also a much shorter term risk that global warming doesn't have, which is that you might just not be able to do work that anyone will be willing to pay for starting about 2 years from now if you are an artist, or designer, or internet blog author that isn't famous, computer programmer? We don't know, but a lot of people will no longer be able to sell their labor that can right now. A lot of people will have to find a new niche for themselves and they probably are quite comfortable in their current niche, and they worked hard to make it for themselves.

Not sure if I'm ready to buy into the "be afraid" mentality yet.

But what articles like this often seem to just completely gloss over is that while, yes, AI might not today be the force that makes every single short-story writer redundant, tech like this seldom goes backwards in capability and instead tends to get better... Cumulative small improvements for, say, 10-15 years does wonders, like the advent of the Internet showed.

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