Usefulness as of today, approximately. That is, that the massive interest and investment is not all speculation.

The massive interest and investment is about its usefulness (or profitability) in the future, not as of today, almost by definition! It's necessarily mostly speculative.

War. The first use of technology is always war. In the year 780 [sic] and today.

No, the first application of steam engines was pumping water from deep coal mines

And kragen's comment wasn't even about the first application. Forgive me for being cynical while an American city is being attacked to the sound of cheers, seemingly because people have just had it too good. We just don't fucking learn.

That is too simplistic. Plenty of new technology saw civilian use first, such as photography, X-ray, telephone, moveable type, smartphones or smallpox inoculation. Even FPV drones were mostly an over-the-counter toy for nerds until 2022.

Now civilian use only, that would be different, few technologies are civilian-only, with no possible military use. But war as the first use is not as frequent case as you assert.

What a nonsensical argument. Improved locomotion was an obvious result of steam engines. What followed from that could be reasonably predicted.

With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before. Messaging can be controlled. Given that the main drivers of this technology (zuck, nadella, altman, and others) have chosen to make befellows of autocrats what follows is surely not a surprise.

Well, for the first 90 or so years, they were mostly used for draining water from mines.

The locomotion thing might not have been as obvious at the time as it is in hindsight.

The water from mines was then put into canals, which floated canal boats loaded with coal from the mines into towns. This cheap energy allowed the populations of towns to grow, and soon later powered factories in those towns.

The trains thing did come a bit later, but the steam engines were already causing a revolution.

That's funny.

Also nonsense. The canal boats were replaced by steam railways. A hundred years later. The water in the canals came from regular sources, by gravity.

It took decades to even get steam engines that turned a shaft (as opposed to rocking a beam up and down).

You're confused and not even contradicting what I said. Read it again.

Steam engines (which rocked a bar, not rotated a shaft) were put to use draining water out of coal mines. They were powered by that same coal, and the water they pumped out was put right into the canals (where else would you put it?). This made coal cheaper, which in turn allowed more people to move from the country to the cities because cities were no longer reliant on firewood. Growing urban populations was demanded and supported by growing industry in those cities.

My whole point is that all of these factors complimented each other, they created a feedback loop that was the industrial revolution. Trains came later, after the industrial revolution was already well underway. That's what I said already.

Perhaps I misread. I took your comment to imply that the dewatering pumps were used to fill the canals, thus providing transportation infrastructure.

My original comment was in response to the statement that improved locomotion was an obvious consequence of the steam engine.

I contend that is was not obvious. The first walking beam engines were more like buildings, built in place (largely of masonry) and not portable at all.

The steam engine certainly revolutionized transportation, however I doubt that Newcomen or even Watt looked at their work and thought "this is going to change shipping forever".

Like I said, it took a generation to get to revolving shaft, and then another to get to revolution.

Today is probably like that with regard to AI. The pace of change is much faster now, but we still have no idea what the world will be like after this tech matures.

> With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before.

And code, personalised lessons, essays, gardening advice, recipes, meme pictures, clip art, degree-level STEM, …

Even legal advice, to the extent that lawyers have to be reminded to pay more attention to the results to make sure it's not made something up. It can and does give medical diagnosis, but I have yet to see a news story where a doctor had to be reminded of the same.

Now, I don't claim that any given actor in this space is "nice" or "moral". Even saying the right words don't make it so, as evidenced by e.g. Musk signing the Pause AI letter while building his data centres and developing his humanoid robots.

People say Altman gives them bad vibes? Well, they said that about Musk and I didn't see it until way too late, so now I believe them about Altman.

But the tech is way broader than just propaganda. It's also propaganda.

> > With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before.

> And code, personalised lessons, essays, gardening advice, recipes, meme pictures, clip art, degree-level STEM, …

> Even legal advice...

You don't think that lessons can be misinformation? Legal advice? Meme pictures?

Even degree-level STEM, code, and gardening advice can be "misinformation" within their own fields.

I'm saying the category of things LLMs do is *significantly broader* than misinformation, and not *limited to* misinformation.

Even within the domain of "how can this go horribly wrong?", even limited to assistance rather than full automation, and even while constrained to the truth, there's a lot of business value (and in at least some of those cases, a lot of potential harm) simply due to their capacity to automate tasks up to the level of a student or a graduate.

But for businesses? The only reason that the opportunity isn't already "net cost (pay + insurance + employer-paid taxes) of every junior desk job on the planet" is that they're competing with each other and the free models are kinda OK, so the price they can charge is already racing to no profit.

Steam engines move stuff. That was obvious from the start. How that was applied became complex beyond imagination.

LLMs cheaply produce plausible and persuasive BS. This is what they've done from the start. Exactly how that ability will be applied we don't know, but it doesn't take a lot to see that the Venn Diagram of 'cheap & effective BS' and 'public good' does not have a great deal of overlap.

I guess you weren't around in the 2000's when every kid in school was taught not to trust information from random internet sources. Even Wikipedia was often not allowed by teachers as a reference, and probably still isn't. Society faced this problem already with the internet in general. Were or are you opposed to the internet in general, and especially the freedom for random people to publish what they like?

Wikipedia is and never will be a good reference source, regardless of the accuracy of the information on it, because it is an encyclopedia. Everything on it is secondhand of the primary source. What you can be referencing is the primary sources that wikipedia is sourced from though.

It wasn't obvious in 1780 if you could build a steam engine that would be reliable and small enough to move itself, for example. Or if you can produce enough steel rails to build a real railway network. It took 50 years of progress to find out that steam-powered railway was indeed viable.

(For a modern parallel - we haven't built a small, portable nuclear reactor ever. The closest you get are nuclear-powered submarines, but no nuclear trucks.)

This seems like a lack of perspective on your part. Why would AIs primary usefulness be substantially different than any other software? Steam engines don't really factor into this.

To be fair most technological leaps tend to be turned towards coercing others pretty fast so pretty safe bet