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Comment by Kapura | Hacker News Reader

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

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I don’t know if I would agree.

Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people the way LLM-powered bots already have. Generative AI is also starting to change the way people think, or perhaps not think, as people begin to offload critical thinking and writing tasks to agentic ai.

> Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people

May I introduce you to the magic of "KPI" and "Bonus tied to performance"?

You'd be surprised how much good and bad in the world has come out of some spreadsheet showing a number to a group of promotion chasing type-a otherwise completely normal people.

social media ruined our brains long before LLMs. Not sure if the LLM-upgrade is is all that newsworthy... Well, for AI fake videos maybe - but it could also be that soon no one believes any video they see online which would have the adverse effect and could arguably even be considered good in our current times (difficult question!).

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information it's taking in along with a learned model of you and your communication patterns, so it can accurately predict what you intend for it to do.

If you need an interface for something (e.g. viewing data, some manual process that needs your input), the agent will essentially "vibe code" whatever interface you need for what you want to do in the moment.

The technology for this has been around for the past 10 years but it's still not a reality, what makes AI the kicker here?

e.g. Alexa for voice, REST for talking to APIs, Zapier for inter-app connectdness.

(not trying to be cynical, just pointing out that the technology to make it happen doesn't seem to be the blocker)

Alexa is trash. If you have to basically hold an agent's hand through something or it either fails or does something catastrophic nobody's going to use or trust it.

REST is actually a huge enabler for agents for sure, I think agents are going to drive everyone to have at least an API, if not a MCP, because if I can't use your app via my agent and I have to manually screw around in your UI, and your competitor lets my agent do work so I can just delegate via voice commands, who do you think is getting my business?

This isn't likely to happen for roughly the same reason Hypercard didn't become the universal way for novices to create apps.

I probably spend 80% of my time in front of a computer driving agents, challenge accepted :)

Marshall McLuhan called, he said to ask yourself, who's driving who?

"We shape our tools, and therefore, our tools shape us."

Ironically the outro of a YouTube video I just watched. I'm just a few hundred ms of latency away from being a cyborg.

So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?

I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.

Consider that a subset of us programmer types pride themselves on never moving their hands off the keyboard. They are already "wired in" so to speak.

The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel

From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

> From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

It does not do that tho. Like, reliably doing a repeatable set of steps is a thing it is not doing.

It does fuzzy tasks well.

> I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

I imagine people eventually would switch on some simple programming and/or language for this, and world would be way more efficient compared to spreadsheet mess

Spreadsheets are basically the OG low code platform

Artificial intelligence has solved protein folding. The downstream effects of that alone will be huge, and it's far from the only change coming.

Hyperbole

What's hyperbolic, that protein folding is solved, or that it's going to be significant?

Terminator 2 would have been a dull movie if the opposition had been a spreadsheet.

hah, just wait until everything you ever do online is moderated through an LLM and tell me that's not world changing

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