History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better. People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
I feel like the power loom is a better comparison. It put hand weavers out of business over a short timespan, while revolutionizing how clothing is produced. It certainly empowered a lot of jobs surrounding clothing, until clothing was completely commoditization and is now a lot less well designed simply as a function of clothing as a category being a much cheaper product now
AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.
Its the rate of change.
To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.
Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.
As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.
I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.
Trains. Building railroads made everything faster, including building faster trains, which facilitated making cars and trucks, which facilitated airplanes, etc.
Fairly sure that even today if you memory wipe all knowledge of trains and train building (including road trains, like in Australia) and vaporize all railroads, locomotives, rail wagons, train stations, etc, it would set us back 50 years.
New inventions eventually benefiting the society has always been accompanied by new jobs being created on top of those inventions, a culture of trust built upon mastering those inventions and a market being formulated around demand and supply cycle for those inventions. It is different now[1], because we neither see incentives being created for humans to operate/manage AI-led jobs (because utilizing such a thing is far more unfavorable than outsourcing due to economic incentives, duh) nor a foreseeable market stability for ever such thing to occur.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Technofeudalism-Killed-Capitalism-Yan...
I don't know how that isn't obvious to all the "AI is just a tool" people.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.
AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.
When the atomic bomb was invented they didn’t hand one for free to everyone, and no one had access to sending their thoughts to everyone else in world.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented
That is a terrible comparison with no useful parallels. You can’t in god faith suggest something is going to have a desired effect because something completely unrelated did too. You could just as well have compared it to asbestos.
Without another breakthrough like LLM, we risked that it would simply be close to impossible to make significant progress by the time the mathematicians finish being specialized in a field.