Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

I'd say this isn't limited to technology but is a general cognitive bias of us humans. By instinct we're very short term thinkers, although with practice and effort we can look further.

My gut reaction to that commentary is that it's a misinterpretation of the time scales people are estimating.

If I say, "LLMs will soon reinvent what it means to do knowledge work," and that doesn't happen within 5 years, does it mean I overestimated the short term impact? Or does it mean that "soon" was relative?

Ultimately though, the long-term effects are impossible to estimate well. The effects of new technologies build upon each other. The first person to take a shovel to a walking path and maintain it as a flat surface certainly couldn't have imagined their ancestors would be crushed to death by two-ton SUVs on a paved road that replaced the walking path.

Despite his last 2 decades of image management it's clear Gates is not someone we want to be naming things after, especially when it's likely he's paraphrasing someone else in the first place.

It's not clear just because you say that. Gates is a visionary and a masterful executor and one of the greatest humanitarians.

It's clear because of his actions, stuff like trying to take Paul Allen's stock when he had cancer, or hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, inappropriate relationships and unwanted advances on women working for Microsoft (even well after he was married), absolutely screwing the public education system in America by pushing common core when it's never been shown to work. Microsoft didn't even write dos, they bought it when they couldn't make something themselves. His vision was apparently the same as Apples, which was rip off what had been done at Xerox.

These are all your judgements man. Please don't act like they are absolute truths or that they default to him being a terrible human or whatever you're implying. He's also saved millions of lives through his humanitarian work, don't hand wave over that.

> Gates is a visionary and a masterful executor and one of the greatest humanitarians

And these are yours. You act as though I'm not allowed to have mine?