On the contrary, the loop is:

1. "Computers will never be able to X, as that requires imagination and intuitive thinking"

2. "X is at least 50 years away"

3. Press release: Computers do X (last I saw: Diplomacy (the game not the job), interpretation of medical scans)

4. "X isn't real AI, it's just brute force search/a big database/a glorified Markov chain/linear algebra" (LLMs and diffusion models go here, self driving cars)

5. Computers better at X than most/all humans, but still improved by having human collaborators (Go is either here or 6, IIRC also some variations of Poker, Starcraft, half the Amstrad back catalog)

6. Computers only made worse by having a human trying to help (Chess goes here)

You conveniently left out the media hype cycles

The hype cycles are not relevant.

Now do flying cars, self driving cars, brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots...

For every piece of tech that exceeded people's expectations, there are five more that never got out of science fiction books despite decades of continuous investment and constant media hype.

> flying cars,

Helicopters. Also a bajillion startups that charge 100k, currently iterations are basically human sized quadcopters.

Not sure how relevant any of that is though, as I was specifically writing about AI…

> self driving cars,

I tagged #4 already

> brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots.

All #2, IMO, with a few that might count as a #3 technically but not being good enough to deserve it.

I'd say that none of these have been proved to be impossible but they're hard in a different way than a lot of the developments we're used to because of Moore's Law.

That isn't the loop. A lot of predictions about computers have turned out wrong.

The biggest one in my lifetime was the belief that social media would bring the world together, create world peace, and spread economic prosperity.

Usually the technologies that surprise us were predicted by nobody. They just show up.

Go watch "2001: A Space Odyssey". Then go watch some music videos from 2001. You will get a better idea about how accurate these predictions are.

Even GPT is not at all what anyone predicted before the late 2010s, when we started seeing Transformers scaling up and improving rapidly with more data.

Now that we've cottoned onto that trend, it's all anyone talks about. Which is going to make it extra funny when it doesn't deliver what so many predict.

This kind of gets me, too. I'm seeing a lot of this "skeptics said we couldn't do this, but we did," but really? Predictions seem to have largely been wildly unrealistic. The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade. Clarke and Kubrick thought we'd have computers that resisted being turned off and could autonomously control spacecraft (and that we'd have human missions to Jupiter and a permanent station on the moon) 22 years ago, which we still don't have. Back to the Future II thoguht we'd have antigravity in 2015.

I recently did a full X-Files rewatch and the first episode involving AI comes up in season one, when a computer programmed to handle internal building security and temperature control becomes sentient, decides it doesn't want to be turned off or do what its system administrator tells it to any more, and decides to start killing people in the building, via cleverly calculated means that make the deaths look accidental. Scully, the skeptic in this situation, insists this kind of technology is decades away. Here we are, decades later, and I don't see anything with a capability anywhere close to defying its programming and carrying out murder plots that look like accidents.

It feels like people are being fooled into a single decade's worth of legitimately rapid and unexpected advances in autonomous game play and text generation and now acting like the entire history of computing and AI has been tech consistently exceeding expectations, but that has definitely not been true over any appreciable long term.

Most of your examples are literally works of fiction.

The possible exception:

> The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade.

I can't find a reference for (just tried searching, a few variations, no hits where they made that claim).

I've never seen back to the future but the concept of a hover skateboard still sounds pretty cool.

It never happened, but we got the Segway and those little balancing single-wheel skateboards.

>That isn't the loop.

Unfortunately, you're right, that isn't the loop. Any new tech is also the novel weapon of tomorrow. I can't even think of a counter-example.

I'm jealous of your username, zero.

> social media would bring the world together, create world peace, and spread economic prosperity.

I don't it'll happen, but it's a little early to declare yourself the winner.

Fair enough. Give it a couple more decades to play out completely.

> As the AI improves over time, it progressively becomes much better at these things than their employees.

> People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening.

I agree with that, but I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee. I think the real risk is that it replaces employees, regardless of whether or not it's better, because it's cheaper. It'll be like the first tier of tech support, but without an option for escalation.

My personal opinion is that is dumb, oversold garbage and people are falling for it because it's good at grammar and spelling. I base that on asking it about things where I know there are common misunderstandings with authoritative clarification. The dumb loud people confidently repeat incorrect claims in large volumes while the authoritative sources are silently bewildered at the stupidity. From what I've seen AI is trained on data produced, at least in part, by the "dumb loud masses" and it's "knowledge" is based on quantity over quality.

As it about the ZFS scrub of death which is a mass mania of idiocy and it'll gladly tell you all about it. Or ask it what the validation methods are for TLS certificates and it'll happily regurgitate the common knowledge of DV, OV, and EV even though the official docs [1] definitively state it's DV, IV, OV, and EV in section 7.1.2.7.1.

It's unreliable and perpetuates misinformation because, AFAIK, it treats most of the input information equally and that's not how things work. I don't remember who, but I remember seeing a famous marketer from the 70s or 80s (?) talking about how most of their success came from realizing that "visibility is credibility". That's true, and unfortunate because we're ignoring a lot of intelligent people that aren't willing to engage in a shouting match to get their voice heard while the dumbest, loudest half of the population is having their viewpoints used to train the LLMs that people are going to rely on for information discovery.

The really scary part is that, based on what I've seen, people that do contract work for the government seem to be very eager to replace their workforce (costs) with AI (not costs). Just wait until you need to deal with the government for something and the whole process is like having an argument with a super Redditor.

1. https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...

> I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee.

As long as they are less intelligent than us, they probably won't spiral out of control. The real risk is that they get substantially smarter than us. Gorillas can't control us, because we are smarter. We don't even actively dislike them, but they are nonetheless threatened with extinction. We do not want to be in the role of the gorillas.

We’re trying our hardest to put ourselves in that position though ha, we’re unusual. Maybe we just love drama and this is the next chapter of that.

I have a feeling a gorilla wouldn’t pwn itself this hard, but who knows.

> People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening.

You probably would have said the same thing about something like ChatGPT a few years ago. Pure science fiction! Nowhere near happening!

Tech's hype artists didn't predict ChatGPT either. Hype artists predict the ambitious futures found in sci-fi novels, but these futures are not what actually occur.

Only the people actually inventing the future, things like AlphaGo and GPT, have a limited crystal ball into the future.

Tech pundits on LinkedIn and Twitter and HN have rarely if ever gotten anything right about what exactly the future will look like, and I expect that pattern to continue.

To be fair though, I still don’t think ChatGPT is the AI we expected to be talking too. The talking AI was a Hal 9000, current an LLM isn’t that and it might never be. Time will tell I guess.

Personally I think there is a hidden special property of ChatGPT-4 that makes it so unreal. It talks and because it talks, we can say this: “I bet you never thought that would happen, we’re close to solving all problems.”.

Not discounting the talking bit but if it washed dishes or even those that just generate images, we’d be less convinced the AI is about to take over. Someone once commented, why don’t we worry about stable diffusion taking over the world. I have to say I do agree a little because being trained on image data must help it build some type of world model too. We just don’t worry about that though.