Comment by mcswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcswell | Hacker News Reader

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"With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence."

I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did.

So if "most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence", that could mean that they ought to be.

However, I draw a somewhat different conclusion: the business that companies ranging from Newsweek to accountants to universities to companies' HR departments should see themselves in is intelligence, regardless of whether that's artificial or otherwise. The question then becomes which supplies that intelligence better: humans or LLM-type AI (or some combination thereof)? I'm not at all sure that the answer at present is LLM-AI, but it is a different question, and the answer may well be different in the near future.

There are of course other kinds of AI, as you (jampa) mention. In other words, AI is not (for now) one thing; LLMs are just one kind of AI.

This is a different way of saying, people must learn how to use a new technology. I think like cars, radio, internet or smart phones. It took a while for people to understand somethings are so disruptive, eventually it will find a way into your life in all forms.

Im guessing for someone in laundry or restaurant business it might be hard to understand how AI could change their lives. And that is true, at least at this stage in the adoption and development of AI. But eventually it will find a way into their business in some form or the other.

There are stages to this. Pretty sure the first jobs to go will be the most easiest. This is the case with Software development too. When people say writing code has gotten easier, they really are talking about projects that were already easy to build getting even more easier. Harder parts of software development are still hard. Making changes to larger code bases with a huge user base comes with problems where writing code is kind of irrelevant. There are bigger issue to address like regression, testing, stability, quality, user adoption etc etc.

Second stage is of course once the easy stuff gets too easy to build. There is little incentive to build it. With modern building techniques we aren't building infinite huts, are we? We pivoted to building sky scrapers. I do believe most of AI's automation gains will be soaked up in the first wave and there will little incentive to build easy stuff and harder stuff will have more productivity demands from people than ever before.

First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did

But all 400+ carriage maker had pivoted, would they have had a chance to survive very long? Would they have all made more money pivoting? The idea that all this is only a "lack of vision" rather than hard business choices is kind of annoying.

This. Carmaking is not viable on small scale the way carriage making is. If they all pivoted, perhaps 10 instead of 1 would have survived through 1929, the fate of all others would be the same - except staying carriage makers till the end they at least continued to extract profits, trying to all become carmakers they'd waste that money into retooling and retraining and whatnot and never made it back.

I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to making carriages, would all of those small carriage makers have been put out of business sooner?

Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, could you have profitably shipped your product to Kansas? Or would a small Kansas carriage maker have undercut you? Seen in this way, part of the reason for the success of a few large auto makers might have been the more or less simultaneous rise of the means of transporting large products by railroad.

Railroad system in the Northeast was more or less complete by 1860 and by 1880, everywhere. Miles of railway tracks in us went in reverse from ~1917 with more dismantled than built.

I believe the reason why carriage making was viable on low scale was that advantage of scale wasn't as valuable for them simply for being simpler.

Commercial endeavors exist to provide goods and services to consumer and users.

The implication of the author here is that those providing services that continue using human resources rather than AI, are potentially acting like carriage manufacturers.

Of course that assumes improvements in technology, which is not guaranteed.

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