Comment by pjc50
6 months ago
I think AI is inevitable in the way that bitcoin is now inevitable: it's not going to go away, it consumes a huge amount of energy, has various negative externalities, but a massive fanbase.
It doesn't really matter whether crypto is "useful", it has billions of dollars worth of fans. Similarly the LLM fans are not going to go away. However, there will probably be curated little oases for human-made works. We're also going to see a technique adapted from self-crashing cars: the liability human. A giant codebase is launched and a single human "takes responsibility" (whatever that ends up meaning) for the failures.
It does matter whether something is useful and I really wish people would stop making comparisons to crypto because it's an absolutely terrible comparison.
AI is certainly in a bubble right now, as with dotcoms in 1999. But AI is also delivering a lot of value right now and advancing at an incredible pace. It will become ubiquitous and at a faster pace than the Internet ultimately did.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.
> Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.
That is plain and simply false. It works just fine as a currency, and some legitimate businesses even accept it. I think it's true that Bitcoin is not particularly useful, but that's not the same as there being no non-criminal use cases.
It doesn't though. Go to your local Wal Mart, Costco, Home Depot, Target, etc. and try to make a purchase with it. Go to a local supermarket or restaurant and try to buy food with it. Stop at a gas station and try to buy fuel with it. Go to Amazon or eBay and try to make a purchase with it. Go to an airline or hotel website and try to book travel with it. Go into your Uber app and try to pay with it. Call your landlord and try to pay your rent with it. Objectively, it doesn't "work just fine as a currency" or we'd have empirical evidence of it actually being used as such in real life.