[chronci739]

> This is something that will happen.

Not in our lifetime.

The iPhone came out less than 20 years ago.

And what, you scan QR codes at restaurants with iphones?

[TeMPOraL]

You do. And so does your non-technical mother (or a friend of your mother).

The impact of the iPhone and its competitors is felt everywhere, it diffused into every domain of people's lives. Think: the whole of social media was pretty much enabled by smartphones.

Or a more pedestrian, random example: every day I go to the office, I see endless store managers, restaurant managers, etc. walking around their store, making photos to upload to HQ. But this is merely a symptom - the actual consequence is the change in busines structure. It's because smartphones make this easy, that it makes franchise and subcontracted businesses more viable, because it's easier for the HQ to micromanage more semi-independent subordinates.

There are many, many more examples like this everywhere you look. Which is why I'm inclined to agree with Karpathy: computers, iPhones, LLMs, are all the same thing - it's just the more notable manifestations of how we've been staying on 2% growth exponential curve for many hundreds of years now, and why we'll continue to stay on this curve.

But the caveat is: that curve is getting steep enough that the world is starting to transform faster than we can handle.

[ben_w]

The iPhone came out less than 20 years ago, and now I:

• Don't get out my debit card while shopping.

• Don't get lost exploring a new city.

• Have zero-cost video calls with anyone I want.

• Use most spare moments of my time — walking to the shops, or on public transport, or while hiking in the countryside — learning something new. When I'm not too damp for the capacitive touch screen, that can be interactive lessons, not just passive; but even for the passive consumption, mobile internet beats pre-loaded content on an MP3 player.

• Have a real-time augmented-reality translator, for the German I've not yet learned while living in Berlin, and all the other languages I don't (or barely) know while travelling outside the country.

[asadotzler]

• Don't get out my debit card while shopping.

You take out your phone though. How is taking your phone out of your pocket, logging in, and tapping it on a terminal significantly different from pulling a credit card or cash from your pocket and tapping the terminal or handing it to the checker?

• Don't get lost exploring a new city. You're young, I guess. We had GPS in cars well before iPhone. GPS navigation in cars was taking off mid-90s to mid-2000s. I had a Garmin in 2002.

• Have zero-cost video calls with anyone I want. I was doing that on my laptop and desktop before iPhone. Heck, I was doing free video conferencing with European friends in 1995.

• Use most spare moments of my time I did much of this filling in empty times on my laptops years before iPhone but you are right, not as much of it as with smartphones. Cramming my day full of even more noise, however, rather than having more breaks from it, feels like devolution to me.

• Have a real-time augmented-reality translator This is an improvement over pocket electronic translators I was using in Japan in the early 2000s, but really the improvements are mostly in fidelity and usability, not in function.

Don't get me wrong, smartphones changed a lot, but it seems like you're eliding at least a decade of pre-iphone advancements here and focusing on when these tasks became easy and in everyone's hands, rather than when the tasks actually became possible and were in reasonably widespread use. You're not a youngster like many here, so I can't attribute that to naivete and that leaves me thinking haste was at work here. Happy to hear back why I'm wrong and willing to change my mind on any of these.

[modeless]

If robots "only" have an iPhone-sized impact on the world I think that would be surprising but also still a huge deal worth caring about.