Comment by sublinear
1 day ago
> The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
I suppose if you break your glasses, squirt real hard, and drop down about 30 IQ points, then sure.
We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.
What we all see irrefutably happening is some new people are just barely able to do slightly more than they used to. That's the impact we'd expect from a better search engine and a better "I'm feeling lucky" button which, of course, is what this era of AI is.
> We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.
Yes, absolutely. This is a very far future. But that future is (maybe, possibly, hopefully) coming, unlike this other future which is absolutely never coming.
Why "hopefully"?
Having AI "do the task directly" sounds just as miserable as anything else people keep insisting is the future. We can't rely on probabilistic methods. We will still need humans in the loop to pin down the deterministic parts and also the parts we intended (often the same, but not always).
What else did you have in mind?
Humanity has dreamed of being able to control computers by having actual conversations for the last 80 years or so based on nearly all sci-fi movies ever released, and that dream is finally becoming reality. And it's not a coincidence - talking is the most natural, the most human way to interact with a computer, and the only reason we haven't done that successfully before was technical limitations. By which I mean, if not for technical limitations, we'd have been talking to our computers a long freaking time ago. Wait, how old is Siri now?
If AI keeps getting better, then it is inevitable that voice conversations will become the dominant way in which mostbpeople use most computers for most tasks most of the time. It's just part of human nature and there's no way around it. The only way this doesn't happen is if AI never becomes good enough to support it.
Personally, I'm not a fan of voice input. But I want AI to get better. And the future where voice conversations work well enough to be used as the main HCI method is inevitably also the future where voice conversations are used as the main HCI method by most people. I'm hopeful for technological progress, that's all. It's just that you cannot have this progress but not have people take advantage of it in this exact way.
Compare it to the future where most people vibe code their own apps, which has zero chance of happening no matter how good AI gets.