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Comment by cootsnuck | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call it a "middle" road rather a "nuanced" road (or even a "grounded" road IMO).

If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? And how so?

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I think our tendency to call nuanced, principled positions as "middle" encourages an inherent "hierarchy of ideas" which often leads to applying some sort of...valence to opinions and discourse. And I worry that makes it easier for people to "take sides" on topics which leads to more superficial, myopic, and repetitive takes that are much more about those "sides" than they are about the pertinent evidence, facts, reality, whatever.

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>If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")?

That's pretty clear. We already have two "sides": AI is the latest useless tech boondoggle that consumes vast quantities of money and energy while not actually doing anything of value vs. AI is the dawn of a new era of human existence that will fundamentally change all aspects of our world (possibly with the additional "and lead to the AGI Singularity").

No this is not the middle that should be considered.

Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty powerful/useful, but it's not a godlike something because it's not everywhere, all the time, at once. It will change the world, but over a pretty long timespan and it will feel like normal technology. It will be used for evil and good.

You might be in a bubble, there are a lot of people who consider AI to be useless. It seems you do not take them seriously writing it off as fringe, which is why you consider the discussion to be between evil vs benevolent. And to be clear, my personal view on current LLM is closer to this article. But “all AI is useless” is still part of the discussion, not that it’s literally useless but that its use cases are so minor and/or inferior to existing techniques compared to its resource usage that it’s functionally useless.

Edit: I guess I see the discussion along two axes: Impact magnitude (useless vs just a tool vs god-like) and Impact valence (evil/negative vs neutral vs benevolent/positive) - this article is middle ground for the former axis, magnitude

I'll echo the other reply: This seems like a bubble.

I come across the AI-skeptical perspective in my real life frequently.

I only really run into the "god AI" perspective here / among other people working in software.

My social groups are almost exclusively non-techie. I am regularly exposed to networks that are very, very far away from HN. I assure you, there are people think AI is useless and purely harmful (in the sense of creating "slop," wasting electricity and water, etc. not evil AI). And there are a lot of them.

To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.

So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)

When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)

We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.

You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody" considers AI useless.

There are a huge number of non-technical people who see its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing derivative (and often incorrect) slop.

There are an enormous number of people such as myself that work in tech and believe the same exact thing.

At the end of the way we dont need to argue about this. The truth should be empirically knowable. If it's as useful as people say, it will show up in the GDP numbers (I wonder what's taking it so long...).

You have captured everything that is annoying about talking about ai/ml/statistics and everything related these days. I’m happy to forget those two sides exist and try and see application of these tools to various problem spaces.

The middle of that is recognizing that AI is transformative technology that is here to stay, but is also hyped into a frenzy, a la the dot com bubble.

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