Comment by rsynnott
3 days ago
> Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with several VCs who confidently claim that companies won’t need to hire anyone in the next year or two because AI will handle everything.
An important part of being a VC appears to be the ability to believe anything, no matter how stupid, as long as it is currently on-trend, then to abandon it as if it had never existed when fashions change (for instance, see the blockchain craze, which was shortly followed by a distinct NFT craze that was just the blockchain one resprayed). I would not take what _VCs_ say as any particular guide to reality.
> Even Bill Gates recently said we might all be out of work soon and won’t need to do anything in an "age of abundance."
This would be the same Bill Gates who was claiming in the late 90s that by the early noughties our primary means of interfacing with our computers would be by talking to them, yes? I mean, again, you've got to consider the source.
I was sceptical about the VCs to start with but the Bill Gates quote made me really question it all! Thanks for sharing the story about him predicting voice as primary means of interfacing with computers.
In fairness it wasn't _just_ him (or Microsoft); everyone was very, very excited about voice in the late 90s.
Meanwhile, today, almost 30 years after Dragon NaturallySpeaking (which was kind of in the ChatGPT role; it seemed so magic that everyone thought everything was about to change), voice recognition is finally just about good enough that it can be used for unimportant things. Though personally I still wouldn't trust it to control my computer.
Interesting thought experiment. I think accuracy is table stakes for a voice control system, I think the bigger challenge for adoption is discoverablility. It's hard to know what the exact syntax the voice prompt expects and everyone is different. I do wonder if LLMs and their ability to parse natural language will rapidly unlock that type of thing because they're a lot more flexible about how you command them