In the first few years after electric motors became a thing, one could have said the same thing. We would have just gone back to steam. If you tried to "do without them" now, society would collapse.
So the question is not if we can do without them now, it's if we can do without them in 5 to 10 years (or however long it takes for them to be fully integrated)
Just how "early stage" is that, and how much more integration does this "new technology" need to be?
AI won't be "integrated" until something similar happens, and new businesses etc. are formed that take advantage of it in a way that can't simply be reversed to the old, pre-AI paradigm. I don't know what that will look like, but someone is going to figure it out and make successful companies with entirely new paradigms that are only made possible by AI.
At some point, every single factory was designed for electric motors, and going back became unthinkable.
-edit- also, the idea that a 5 year old tech that is still rapidly changing and developing deserves quotation marks around "new technology" is hilarious to me.
Based on the way Claude has felt the last few weeks, I'd say we're about 3-6 months away from full AGI. At that point we can start truly replacing white collar workers in earnest and begin deep integration.
> At that point we can start truly replacing white collar workers in earnest and begin deep integration.
This is why AI is so deeply unpopular. Even in the "good" scenario proselytized by true believers, you still paint a bleak near-future where everyone loses their jobs.
Not true. Plenty go into the graveyard. At some point in time typewriters were everywhere. So were landline phones. Both were highly integrated into the system. They were replaced by much superior versions.
> In the first few years after electric motors became a thing, one could have said the same thing. We would have just gone back to steam. If you tried to "do without them" now, society would collapse.
Yes but there is nothing to state that the current version of LLMs is equivalent to electric motors. We could very well be in the typewriter/landline phones stage. You would need even more iterations to get something that is equivalent to electric motors.
Even electric motors themselves underwent multiple iterations to become economically viable. Lot of wasteful overhead needed to be eliminated and parts re-engineered to make it more efficient before it could be truly adopted.