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Comment by SquibblesRedux | Hacker News Reader

I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty.

If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

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>For all trains to be self-driving

Given that we have self-driving cars, isn't this easier if someone really wanted? I guess compared to cars the marginal savings is not worth it though.

We do have self driving trains! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste... however I think the ask of ‘all’ trains to be self driving is sadly still a while away yet

It hasn't even been four years since ChatGPT was released. Arguably coding agents didn't even get very useful until Opus 4.5, which was less than a year ago. Why would the bar for progress and usefulness be that a brand new technology solves all of humanity's problems overnight?

I mean I’m waiting for like any quality software or media produced by AI. I have yet to see a piece of software, a game, graphic, blog post, small video clip, or song that was produced with AI that’s good. I always use that Coca Cola ad as an example; millions of dollars spent to make an AI ad and they even did a ton of manual post production and it sucked. With all the millions of bloggers and influencers and content creators out there with a huge incentive to make higher quality content to beat their competition, you’d think there would be one piece of content produced with AI that was great.

This is an element of the delusion. The koolaid drinkers will all tell you that we're on the edge of AGI, but if you ask them for simple examples of breakthroughs made by current AI, they can name none. The entire thing absolutely wreaks of mass psychosis.

Would the recent AI-aided math proofs count as breakthroughs?

Prepare for moving goalposts. In 50 years people will still doubt that AI can create anything novel and worthwhile, while they are going to rely mostly on the things that didn't exist before AI, in nutrition, medicine, technology, communication, entertainment. They will see them as, normal, common and simple extensions of the previous developments, pushed mindlessly a bit forward by stochastic parrots.

Claiming that AI will be valuable in 50 years is you moving the goalposts back 50 years. It’s a strawman argument, no one is saying it won’t be valuable in 50 years

They're saying it's obviously valuable and useful now, but some people absolutely refuse to acknowledge it. And in 50 years, there will still be a contingent who insists that AI is useless garbage, even as it's responsible for creating and maintaining every aspect of their daily lives.

Yes. That's exactly what I had in mind. Thank you.

> no one is saying it won’t be valuable in 50 years

Plenty of people are saying that. That AI is fundamentally a bubbl and nothing will ever come out of it and we shouldn't pursue it.

You're likely using a ton of software that was written by AI that you don't even know about.

You only notice the sloppy ones.

>For flying cars for everyone

thanks, but no. There is a trivial reason this needs to stay in "The Jetsons" territory.

cancer is more than one thing. probably wont happen until we can manipulate the "binary" of life at will and we're very far from that. maybe a few years of ASI would get there depending on compute

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