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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

Can’t wait for this stuff to have quality of life increases for the average person. So far all I see is that AI has made owning a computer more expensive, made some jobs redundant, increased spam and distrust with questionable authenticity of content and of course made some Americans very rich.

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Not everyone works for Evil Corp. I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives. AI has allowed my team to get much more done than we would have otherwise which improves the quality of life of the people in my community.

So I would like to counter your cynicism with a “YMMV” depending on who you work for.

I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives.

What does "support" mean in this context?

Examples?

HN doesn’t like when you ask for those.

Remember, this is the propaganda arm of a VC. Proof is a hindrance to the hype that drives value.

> AI has allowed my team to get much more done

We often hear this. Likewise to get things done faster. And to get things done cheaper.

Almost never to get things done beteer.

Are you just automating lab reporting and results faster? That doesn’t exactly improve the health of others, a faster lab does not cure an ailment or provide a better cure.

Like cool my lung xray only took minutes to determine if I have a lesion instead of a week or a few days, but I still have cancer.

For some people, getting lung cancer reported a week earlier will save their lives.

More importantly, if you can screen for cancer in a way that takes minutes instead of a week, imagine how accessible this technology will become.

Faster scans means more scans. More scans means getting scans earlier and tracking abnormalities on scans over time. This can lead to earlier intervention, which means you get treatment for the cancer when it’s stage 2 instead of stage 3 or 4, which maybe is the difference between living a full life and dying young.

It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from:

- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"

- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)

- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).

- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.

- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".

- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.

If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.

I'm just barely old enough to have experienced a couple waves of technology being introduced and creating these sorts of life optimizations. It almost never actually improves quality of life. It just makes life more optimized, and since everyone else is doing the exact same optimization as you, that optimization goes from novel and fun to table stakes to a basic necessity to compete and function in society professionally, at which point it's really nothing but pure efficiency, not genuine improvement in relative happiness.

1. Do frontier lab LLMs make your rent cheaper? Groceries? Healthcare?

2. Do LLMs reduce the loneliness epidemic?

3. Do they reduce population aging in almost all counties around the world?

4. Do they reduce political polarization?

5. Do they bolster democracies?

6. Do they decelerate climate change and general environmental destruction?

7. Do they accelerate sustainability and the circular economy (not circular financing!)?

8. Do they reduce the workweek and give people more free time for family and hobbies?

Etc, etc.

I would hold off on calling anything a "superpower" unless it solves the hard problems in life. Heck, computers and even the internet barely score better than LLMs when measured against the important things in life.

Actually, you are right. We are working with different definitions of quality of life.

The QoL improvement from LLM is somewhere in the ballpark of going from dumb phones to smart phones for an average person (able-bodied, local to the area etc). It's nowhere near Haber-process or penicillin.

> do they make your rent cheaper

Well maybe not the LLMs, but AI and robotics have a lot of potential here.

https://youtu.be/bsNTv8t239Y

It's still the early days though. Try again in 15 years!

> 8. Do they reduce the workweek

Sure. Often to zero.

I'm talking statistically, not what happens for a lucky few.

Keynes was hoping that our workweek would be 20h/week by now, through technological advancement. Instead places like the US are thinking about adopting 9/9/6 and some US states are legalizing child labor again.

> what happens for a lucky few.

I'm talking about the unlucky.

Ah, the opposite angle. Yeah.

>the LLM in YouTube

Where can I find this one?

I have a janky pipeline built on top of yt-dlp and I've been wondering how many more years until they make it so I don't have to do that anymore.

(Though sometimes I'll ask Gemini — the YouTube integration is the only reason I use it these days.)

> perfect two-way communication

That's a surprise. E.g. I've found these bots pretty poor at body language.

> "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?"

Really? You tell the bot the chapter quantity?

If it doesn't help average people, why do millions of them pay for it?

So if millions of people pay for something it must be helping average people but if 10s of millions of average people express concerns about a thing than what? I would assume since you were happy to go with the will of the people when it supported your argument, you would be in complete support of actually regulating ai and addressing the many concerns of society at large?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-fear-ai-permanent...

I'm fine with regulating AI. I'd note that saying something in a poll is cheap talk whereas paying 20$ a month is not. But I can understand e.g. that people may derive value from their cars, whilst simultaneously being concerned about global warming and traffic jams.

Ask DraftKings?

You'd need this argument to be a lot more concrete as to why AI is like gambling.

I actually have seen comparisons of using AI to a gacha game (quotas per time block, elements of chance, sycophancy in the output leading towards addiction or even psychosis in rare cases).

But I don't think the argument needs to be "AI is like gambling". The argument only needs to be "humans often behave irrationally and even self-destructively".

This is not the argument. It's not a comparison to gambling but a comparison to something that does not materially improve a person's life. Economic expenditure does not equate to human benefit. This is the original argument, and the onus is on THAT person to explain why people spending for AI actually benefit, not the other way around.

Perhaps you can ask Claude to explain it to you.

I think it’s widely accepted that most things are bought because they satisfy people’s needs or wants. Sure, there are exceptions, like drugs or gambling. Is there any reason to think AI is one of them?

Drugs, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, vaping, ultra processed foods, social media, luxury goods/conspicuous consumption, etc.

A lot of humans are incredibly bad at allocating money.

Gambling has consistently ranked above family for many in human history, so while it hurts a third party, the people involved genuinely believe in it.

addiction? get lured in with the promises of enhanced productivity and knowledge asking, leave with half your brain rotted and a $200/month subscription

Downvoters mind to explain?

Boring doom and gloom.

AI probably did not take your job yet. How many AI queries did you use last month, and how much time has it saved compared to digging through the web?

Only reading the first sentence maybe?

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