Comment by conartist6
8 hours ago
Aren't the AI users the Amish here?
They've stopped technological progress. I tell you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
I'm not even talking about holographic game consoles or FTL travel. Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
You're saying there's nothing left to invent. I think that explains a lot of the complacency around considering AI to be the last ever frontier for progress. I obviously don't agree. I've gone looking into "why don't we have better version control" and the answer is definitely not that we already have all we could want.
It might not count as innovation in the last four years because the groundwork was laid decades ago, but in the last four years Waymo evolved to the point where it can drive on the highways.
And this is progress, how?
All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
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I'd love to have speech-to-text on my iPhone that actually worked without needing to proofread and edit.
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
But the AI still progressing at a rapid rate is also software.
If your database gets bigger does the software get better too?
It is progressing, yes, but it subsumed the productivity of humans.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?