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Comment by bbeonx | Hacker News Reader

is it?

Yes. Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive for the human race. Including the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power. Why should AI be different? I think the critics always fixate on the negatives, but ignore the potential big positives.

Depends on your point of view. Has the web been a net positive overall? If your criteria is "instant access to any information" or "catalyze more technological progress" then positive, if your criteria is "young people's mental health" or "how easy it is to control the public's perception about a certain topic" then negative in my opinion. It's all relative.

I judge it in the aggregate. Overall, we have higher standard of living than people 30 years ago.

If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.

> If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.

It's not nonsense. If you think so, provide one great technology that has been a net negative.

That's quite easy.

Fracking

Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads

Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)

Coming soon: Deep sea mining

Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.

Those are just specific applications of some technology, not comparable to AI in general.

> It's not nonsense.

Yes, it is. You cannot go "overall progress was positive" and conclude "every change was positive".

> provide one great technology that has been a net negative

nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

AI in general and LLM specifically so far

smartphones in general and social media specifically

maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

biological weapons

leaded gasoline

(I know that you already excluded "social media" as "specific applications of some technology", I disagree with it)

>nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)

>AI in general and LLM specifically so far

>smartphones in general and social media specifically

>maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall

I disagree that these are net negatives.

So we have "biological weapons" and "leaded gasoline" as accepted examples.

30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.

The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.

Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.

This is just nostalgia. Most things are objectively better today.

No. We do not. So many people are nostalgic about 30 years where you could afford basic things on minimum wage for a reason.

There are many technologies that have not been a net positive for humanity. Leaded gasoline comes to mind immediately. For many other technologies it is also hard to determine because counterfactuals are hard to reason about.

Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you think internal combustion engines were a great invention, doesn't mean AI cannot be bad for humanity.

I wouldn't say that leaded gasoline is a great technology like AI, it's a pretty niche tech. Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons. Modern civilization would be impossible without gasoline.

>Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results.

It is not perfect or guaranteed, but it can definitely be an indicator. Technological progress is the main reason for the massive standard of living increases that we have witnessed in the last ~200 years. If someone wants to argue that this trend will stop or even reverse, they need very strong arguments, IMHO.

> Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons.

This analogy is great, because your grandchildren will probably not consider gasoline to be a great technology, they'll consider it the thing that caused the wars and the famines.

> This analogy is great, because your grandchildren will probably not consider gasoline to be a great technology, they'll consider it the thing that caused the wars and the famines.

They will also realize that industrial civilization enabled by gasoline was a necessary step towards the renewable energy utopia they are living in. Developing advanced technology takes a lot of energy.

> They will also realize that industrial civilization enabled by gasoline was a necessary step towards the renewable energy utopia they are living in.

Your grandchildren won't be living in a renewable energy utopia, precisely because you believe that burning fossil fuels is necessary for advancement.

Nothing today indicates that they will be living in a renewable energy utopia. Solar panels and batteries getting cheaper is just not enough.

It is, if they get cheap enough.

I suspect your reasoning is circular if you only consider "great" technologies.

I am only considering great, consequential technologies because AI is such a great technology. Comparing it to some niche techs would result in false analogies.

Leaded gasoline to me is a very consequential technology given how much toxic lead it put into our environment.

Do you have an argument why "normal" technology can be good or bad, but "consequential" technology is always good?

> Do you have an argument why "normal" technology can be good or bad, but "consequential" technology is always good?

Because consequential technology has many applications in diverse fields. And applications of technology are more often beneficial than harmful. So if the technology is broadly useful, in aggregate the beneficial applications will outweight the harmful ones.

By that definition gasoline would not classify as a consequential technology as it's almost exclusively used in a single application (transportation).

It also already assumes that the technology is more often benefical than harmful.

Transportation fueled by fossil fuels is the foundational technology of modern civilization. It is comparable to electricity or the printing press. AI will be like this too in the future.

You're arguing against a point I never made. I agree that AI will be an important technology. I also think that it'll affect people that have to work for a living negatively (both in the short-term and assuming there is no foundational change in the structure of society, also in the long-term).

We still use leaded gasoline (100LL) in prop airplanes today, for what it’s worth.

So it’s not clearly a net-negative technology.

The fact a technology is still in use does not imply that it is not negative for humanity.

A common thing is to lump things together like a tech tree. Is it possible to conceive of a world where nuclear power is invented but not nuclear weapons? Combustion engines but not let everyone have a car and then cause cities to be planned around cars?

Long-term, sure. Short-term it is going to cause a lot of suffering.

we'll be better off - assuming we'll generate revenue on our own. LLMs have opened up an enormous new frontier of micro-SaaS opportunities. One person can now build what used to require a small team.

The real problem is zero-sum work, especially when the only moat was knowledge asymmetry that is now public knowledge.

Why would anyone use your micro SaaS when they can build their own?

Have you seen a different perspective? Cause in my informational bubble SaaS ain't doing too well since vibecoding became more common.

There's still a cost/benefit to building and maintaining a service. LLMs make it easier to build, but the cost does not scale to zero.

I'm in agreement with your claim, though if you recall some of these micro SaaSes went hyperfocused on niches. The value proposition is then smaller, with larger data liability than with some behemoth's of SaaS.

Though for the later ones, one might also ask themselves if they are worth their cost when using 20-30% of provided functionality.

Soon it doesn't require even that one person

And the saas won't be required either because people can just get these problems solved directly.

This will also make it harder to compete because it holds true for everyone, not just you. I am already, this year, seeing vibe coders put out some decent stuff on App Stores but the problem is marketing it. You no longer automatically stand out just because you have a cool app. You may not even do so with reasonable early traction via social media. And then what? Throw venture capital onto the problem? In an AI saturated world? Really?

Also the drive to innovate goes down. It took weeks for the creator of 2048 to make a low quality clone of Threes. Now people can make relatively high quality ripoffs in days, even hours.

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