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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out)

Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...

"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"

Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.

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> You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big

Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.

Email in it's first five years barely extended beyond some research universities. And is it novel? Do you see email as somehow a difficult concept to imagine?

Unix in it's first five years reworked the way operating systems performed. I'd agree it's pretty important, but I don't see how it fundamentally changed the way we perform work in multiple disciplines (in its first 5 years). Same for Linux, but even less so.

We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse. Powerful technologies can have negative effects. Email has been negatively transformative in ways as well.

Part of the reason you can erase AI so effectively with so "little" effect is that it is new.

There's only a few months left for the core technologies of LLM, the transformer, to be a decade old (counting since the "Attention is all you need"). In a decade, we have gone from pure theory of computation (Turing paper in 1936) to the first general purpose computer (ENIAC in 1945). In 1971, the first email was sent over the network (ARPANET), by the early 1980s, we were looking at nationwide deployment of email systems.

> We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse.

Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).

This is an entirely weird and bizarre conversation. The world today has network effects - specifically because of well, networking. It feels almost ridiculous comparing the impact of things like ENIAC to github because they aren't even in the same class. GIT and email (FYI, there is a predecessor to email in 1965 called MAIL) are specific implementations of systems that would have happened no matter what. GIT is awesome, email is kinda ok -- but that's beside the point.

> Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).

We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it. I was there. We could go back. It's not essential. You've lived maybe 3 years with LLMs. No kidding they could disappear. As an old person, I have no idea why you think any other technology is any different. LLMs are new, that's the big difference as I said earlier.

> Forcefully.

So.... I hate mobile apps. I hate that TVs connect to the internet. I hate that we have cameras on every corner. I hate that we have cameras that watch us while driving.

Now, tell me about how this is different than all that.

> As an old person, I can tell you something: We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it.

As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.

I'm not saying that internet or any of the others is essential (in absolute). What I'm saying is that the supposedly "transformative" aspect of AI needs free offerings, dark patterns, and a mountain of hyping to just make it worthwhile to discuss in tech circles (removing the grifting on Linkedin). For everyone else, the most impact is the enormous amount of slop.

I paid for my computer. I'm paying for my internet connection and my electricity. I'm paying for my email service. Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.

> As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.

The VCR? Hrm. What part of the world are you from? No computer and no internet? Hrm.

> Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.

It is currently being paid for by millions of companies in Microsoft products, and I can tell you that many companies are happy with it.

Microsoft honestly has done a tremendous job integrating it with some of their products, less so in others. (Excel is a disaster, Teams has been pretty good)

> "They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"

FWIW:

The simultaneous "it's stupidly weak" and "it's dangerously strong" is a well known propaganda technique.

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