Comment by hackyhacky
9 days ago
Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.
The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc
> It took decades
It took one September. Then as soon as you could take payments on the internet the rest was inevitable and in _clear_ demand. People got on long waiting lists just to get the technology in their homes.
> no new advances in technology
The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct. There was two corresponding exponential processes that vastly changed the available rate of adoption. This wasn't at all like cars being introduced into society. This was a monumental shift.
I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist. In fact the inverse is true. They're not reducing power budgets fast enough to even imagine that they're anywhere near AGI, and even if they were, that they'd ever be able to sustainably power it.
> the current state is upending jobs
The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet because it was so disruptive to their business model. This is quite the opposite. We don't have a labor crisis, we have a retention crisis, because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor. We can wax on and off about technology, and perceptrons, and training techniques, or power budgets, but this fundamental fact seems the hardest to ignore.
If they're wrong this all collapses. If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.
> It took one September.
It's the classic "slowly, then suddenly" paradigm. It took decades to get to that one September. Then years more before we all had internet in our pocket.
> The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct.
Can you explain how Moore's law is relevant to the rise of the internet? People didn't start buying couches online because their home computer lacked sufficient compute power.
> I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist.
LLMs have seen enormous growth in power over the last 3 years. Nothing else comes close. I think they'll continue to get better, but critically: even if LLMs stay exactly as powerful as they are today, it's enough to disrupt society. IMHO we're already at AGI.
> The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet
Some did, some didn't. As in any cultural shift, there were winners and losers. In this shift, too, there will be winner and losers. The panicked spending on data centers right now is a symptom of the desire to be on the right side of that.
> because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor.
Companies have never wanted to pay fair value for labor. That's a fundamental attribute of companies, arising as a consequence of the system of incentives provided in capitalism. In the past, there have been opportunities for labor to fight back: government regulation, unions. This time that won't help.
> If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.
Why would you think that anyone would want you to write prompts?
what September?
This is an allusion to the old days, before the internet became a popular phenomenon. It used to be, that every September a bunch of "newbies" (college student who just access to an internet connection for the first time) would log in and make a mess of things. Then, in the late nineties when it really took off, everybody logged in and made a mess of things. This is this the "eternal september." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years.
Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society.
Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007.
I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.
I worry that if the reality lives up to investors dreams it will be massively disruptive for society which will lead us down dark paths. On the other hand if it _doesn't_ live up to their dreams, then there is so much invested in that dream financially that it will lead to massive societal disruption when the public is left holding the bag, which will also lead us down dark paths.
It's already made it impossible to trust half of the content i read online.
Whenever i use search terms to ask a specific question these days theres usually a page of slop dedicated to the answer which appears top for relevancy.
Once i realize it is slop i realize the relevant information could be hallicinated so i cant trust it.
At the same time im seeing a huge upswing in probable human created content being accused of being slop.
We're seeing a tragedy of the information commons play out on an enormous scale at hyperspeed.
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I think corporations can definitely transform society in the near future. I don't think it will be a positive transformation, but it will be a transformation.
Most of all, AI will exacerbate the lack of trust in people and institutions that was kicked into high gear by the internet. It will be easy and cheap to convince large numbers of people about almost anything.
As a young adult in 2007, what cliff were we close to?
The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.
We were pretty close to a collapse of the existing financial system. Maybe we’d be better off now if it happened, but the interim devastation would have been costly.
It felt like the entire global financial system had a chance of collapsing.
We weren't that far away from ATMs refusing to hand out cash, banks limiting withdrawals from accounts (if your bank hadn't already gone under), and a subsequent complete collapse of the financial system. The only thing that saved us from that was an extraordinary intervention by governments, something I am not sure they would be capable of doing today.
I'm still not buying that AI will change society anywhere as much as the internet or smart phones for the matter.
The internet made it so that you can share and access information in a few minute if not seconds.
Smart phones build on the internet by making this sharing and access of information could done from anywhere and by anyone.
AI seems occupies the same space as google in the broader internet ecosystem.I dont know what AI provides me that a few hours of Google searches. It makes information retrieval faster, but that was the never the hard part. The hard part was understanding the information, so that you're able to apply it to your particalar situation.
Being able to write to-do apps X1000 faster is not innovation!
You are assuming that the change can only happen in the west.
The rest of the world has mostly been experiencing industrialisation, and was only indirectly affected by the great crash.
If there is a transformation in the rest of the world the west cannot escape it.
A lot of people in the west seem to have their heads in the sand, very much like when Japan and China tried to ignore the west.
China is the world's second biggest economy by nominal GDP, India the fourth. We have a globalised economy where everything is interlinked.
When I look at my own country it has proven to be open to change. There are people alive today who remember Christianity now we swear in a gay prime minister.
In that sense Western countries have proven that they are intellectualy very nimble.
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> Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.
99% of people only ever use proprietary networks from FAANG corporations. That's not "the internet", that's an evolution of CompuServe and AOL.
We got TCP/IP and the "web-browser" as a standard UI toolkit stack out of it, but the idea of the world wide web is completely dead.
Shockingly rare how few realize this. It's a series of mega cities interconnected by ghost towns out here.
yeah, this is a good point, transition and transformation to new technologies takes time. I'm not sure I agree the current state is upending things though. It's forcing some adaption for sure, but the status quo remains.
It also took years for the Internet to be usable by most folks. It was hard, expensive and unpractical for decades.
Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.
Allow me to clarify: I'm not wishing for change. I am an AI pessimist. I think our society is not prepared to deal with what's about to happen. You're right: AI is the key to the enshitification of everything, most of all trust.
Governments and companies have been pushing for identity management that connects your real life identity with your digital one for quite some time. With AI I believe that's not only a bad thing, maybe unavoidable now.