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Comment by seizethecheese | Hacker News Reader

> the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd.

I’m certain I would not have believed a Fable transcript, or an Opus 4.8 or a GPT 5.5 one, for that matter. Is it so hard to imagine ourselves back then?

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Ilya Sutskever said in 2017, whilst building OpenAI:

> Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots.

There was a viral YouTube video from 2014 called Humans Need Not Apply [1], which made a very strong argument that mass unemployment was right around the corner.

I actually think people from the past would be surprised at how slow AI has progressed in the end. Although the domains where it's turned out to be most effective - code, images, videos, music, etc. - would probably surprise them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Seriously. At that point it was a stuff of science fiction with the early models being on level of Markov chains. Today they are more helpful that the computer in Start Trek.

I remember an episode of TNG were Riker was instructing the computer to come up with an algorithm to search the surrounding space with certain sensor in a specific pattern, I don't remember the exact words but it was something like a sphere with growing radius with the enterprise at the center. we now, basically, have that, except for the space ship.

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