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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

OP here! Thanks for replying.

To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology.

People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because they were useful. Car manufacturers didn't have to force GPS into vehicles - customers demanded it.

The narrative I'm describing is how hype sometimes (possibly often) fizzles out. My contention is the more a technology is hyped, the less useful it will turn out to be.

Now, excuse me while I ride my Segway into the sunset while drinking a nice can of Prime.

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You have gotta stop cherrypicking. The massive influx of hyperbolic articles about how electricity will change everything started in the 19th century. It became a common theme in fiction (including classics like Frankenstein) and became an enormous media hype war, which historians call the War of the Currents.

Yes, electricity was useful. And it had hyperbolic articles talking about how transformative it would be. Like all prognostication, some of those articles were overblown, but, in some ways, they understated the transformative effect electricity would have on human history.

And cars? Did you somehow miss the influx of hyperbolic articles about how cars will change everything? Like, the whole 20th century?

What was your approach to researching the history of media hype? You somehow overlooked the hype around air travel, refrigeration, and antibiotics…?

There was a great deal of hype around the atom changing everything, but electricity was just too slow to see such breathless anticipation takeoff.

200 years ago the was some hype around how electricity caused mussel contractions in dead flesh, but unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media etc etc.

Public street lights long predated light bulbs as did both indoor and outdoor Gas lighting 1802 vs 1880’s was just a long time. People were burn, grew up, had kids, and become old between the first electric lighting and the first practical electric bulb. People definitely appreciated the improvement to air quality etc, but the tech simply wasn’t that novel. Rural electrification was definitely promoted but not because what it did was some unknown frontier.

Similarly electric motors had a lot of competition, even today there’s people buying pneumatic shop tools.

> unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle

It absolutely is. Frankenstein is a seminal work of science-fiction horror, and the mysterious power of electricity to change everything is what made it so chilling to its readers in the 19th century.

> it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media

The media is considerably different now from in 1818, thanks, in significant part, to the power of electricity. I assure you, when the electrical telegraph came on the scene, people were hyped.

Of course, much of that hype was on paper printed on printing presses, so it was, in some sense, "incomparable" to the hype possible on cable television, or the hype that's now possible with online social media.

But if your argument is "Yeah, electricity was kinda hyped, but, you know, not all that hyped, so it proves my point that the more the hype, the less the impact," you have some more research to do. Please just Google "War of the Currents" for a minute.

> It absolutely is.

It was published as Fiction. The vast majority of people didn’t think it was anymore realistic than Interstellar etc.

There’s plenty of stories where we cure cancer, but the 50% improvement in cancer treatments over the last 40 years just doesn’t get much hype because it’s so slow. It’s hard to get excited about the idea cancer may be gone in 200 years because while that will be awesome for people alive then it doesn’t do anything for the people I know.

> electric telegraph came online people where hyped.

Objectively it got way more of a meh reaction than you’d think simply based on the timelines involved.

France was happy to continue using its network of optical telegraphs long after the electrical telegraph became a practical thing. Transatlantic telegraphs got hyped up somewhat, but again the technology took so long from the first serious attempt to a practical working system people understood the limitations inherent to having such limited bandwidth between the contents.

Obviously new technology gets attention because it’s a net improvement, being able to send messages across the US much faster was useful. But hype is different, it’s focused on second order effects not what it does but what will change. The original iPhone isn’t just another cellphone that also takes pictures, it’s “the internet in your pocket.”

The electrical telegraph was integral to the growth and consolidation of the British Empire. Britain acquired more colonies and held on to them for longer than the other European powers partly due to its naval might, but also due to far superior bureaucratic and communications technology.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying.

Technology can be quite useful directly and have significant second order effect, hype is about the second order effects being overblown. Second order effects are difficult to predict when something is actually novel, will LLM’s make programming obsolete is harder to answer in 2023 than 2063.

Home automation like dishwashers really did meaningfully impact how much effort was needed to keep a home livable, but we didn’t predict the kind of helicopter parenting that happened because of more free time especially after smaller families became common. Thus a great majority of incorrect predictions where just hype.

The faster new technology becomes widespread the harder it is to predict those second order effects and thus more hype you see.

You can find similar hype articles about the Palm Pilot, then all the neighsayers who said most people wouldn't want and had no need for computer in their pocket. And yet here we are.

> then all the neighsayers who said most people wouldn't want and had no need for computer in their pocket

Mmm..they didn't, at that time.

That we grew to be dependent on the computer in the pocket does not mean that it was a necessity at any point.

Calculators are a particularly bad example for your case. There was absolutely hyperbole against calculators when they were introduced. [1]

With similar sentiment as well "They make us dumb" "Machines doing the thinking for us"

Cars were definitely seen as a fad. More accurately a worse version of a horse [2]

If you looked through your other examples, you'd see the same for those as well.

Some things start as fads, but only time will tell if they gain a place in society. Truthfully it's too early to tell for AI, but the arguments you're making, calling it a fad already don't stand up to reason

[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-item/160697182/ [2]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...

LLMs will absolutely will have a place. There is no question about it. But it will be doing searching for us, not thinking.

The flip side to this is that a lot of jobs today that appear to require "thinking" is actually just doing looking up aka "search"..

Searching for the optimal solution...

The personal computer, laptops, web browsers, cell phones, smartphones, AJAX/DHTML, digital cameras, SSDs, WiFi, LCD displays, LED lightbulbs. At some point, all of these things were "overhyped" and "didn't live up to the promise." And then they did.

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