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Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

The very question is biased toward the idea that “something is coming”, as if we’re heading to some technological inevitability. I don’t see it happening. This whole “it’s coming” vibe is the narrative attached to the technology, it has nothing to do with the technology itself. It seems like people who buy it are trapped in the fictional reality of a very cheap advertisement, or should I say, propaganda. Your calculator now supports a new operation, this is not armageddon.

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It's not "coming", it's already here. I barely code anymore, mate. And that happened in a just a few years, imagine in a few more.

But "code" is still the core substrate of your production, right? And you probably output even more of it. So how is it that you barely code anymore? One could say you're coding way more, and way harder. And you're right: it requires a lot of hope and imagination to conceive further disruptions from this technology. From my POV, it's pretty clear that we have already hit the ceiling. Not because the underlying technology can't improve, but because a technology does not exist in a vacuum, and being one that demands orchestration and supervision, it's clear that it's bottlenecked by its environment. To put it differently, think about how much more could you do with today's version of it, if you were able to read 10x faster, sleep 10x less, and handle 10x more tasks in parallel? So how exactly are we going to create an hyperproductive dystopia if you're already leaving so much performance on the table by simply being a meat bag?

You deprecated yourself in just a few years, so what ? Sure, that's a self inflicted armageddon for yourself, this is nothing on the grand scale of things

I don't think one could have reasonably turned the tide on agriculture, factories, railroads, or electricity - and a smart person would presumably have seen a lot of the benefits years before they materialized. There's plenty of people alive today who saw most of the current landscape coming decades in advance.

Once you've used a BBS or modem, "online banking" is an obvious idea - just a very difficult one to implement until you add on decades of security and improved connectivity.

But also, the article is explicitly arguing against armageddon.

I think going from horses to cars is one thing, and going from cars to supercars is a whole other thing. We don't see F1 races and go: "Anyday now I'm going to commute to work in a fraction of the time. Cars can be so fast!". AI is not a categorical technology, it is still a component of the computer revolution, and achieving with it substantially more than we already can today would require the same extreme degree of specialization and constraint narrowing as going from urban driver to racing pilot.

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