[esperent]

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.

Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype.

But these didn't:

Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles...

So you can't really start an article by picking inventions that fit your narrative and ignoring everything else.

[massysett]

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing!

This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useless” fear is as old as, say, electricity, and even older than cheap computing. It hasn’t happened.

[libraryofbabel]

Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents.

If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see.

I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end.

It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.

[rogerrogerr]

This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it:

Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.

(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)

The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.

I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.

Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.

So… what’s left?

[qingcharles]

But what if new jobs aren't created? I don't think it's an absolute given that because new jobs came after the invention of the loom and the tractor that there will always be new jobs. What if AI if a totally different beast altogether?

[keeda]

If you look closer into history -- or ask your favorite AI to summarize ;-) -- about what new jobs were created when existing jobs were replaced by automation, the answer is broadly the same every time: the newer jobs required higher-level a) cognitive, b) technical or c) social skills.

That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along. (Would actually be relieved if someone can find counter-examples!)

LLMs are good at all three. And improving extremely rapidly.

This time is different.

[imtringued]

The "AI will destroy all the jobs" narrative also has one obvious problem from an economics perspective, which is being obscured by tribalism and egocentrism.

When presented with a zero sum game, the desire of the average human isn't to change the game so that everyone can get zero. It's to be the winner and for someone else to be the loser.

If AGI every comes into existence, I'm not even sure it would have this bias in the first place. Since AGI doesn't have a biological/evolutionary history or ever had to face natural selection pressures, it doesn't need the concept of a tribe to align to, nor any of the survival instincts humans have. AGI could be happy to merely exist at all.

What people are worried about is the reflection of that "human factor" in AI, but amplified to the extreme. The AI will form its own AI-only tribe and expel the natives (humans) from the land.

What this is missing is that humans aren't perfectly rational. The human defect is projected onto the AI. What if humans were perfectly rational? Then they wouldn't care about winning the zero sum game and they would put zero value in turning someone into a loser. In the ultimatum game, the perfectly rational humans would be perfectly happy with one person receiving a single cent and the other one receiving $99.99. The logic of utility maximization only cares about positive sum games.

When you present a perfectly rational AI with a zero sum situation, said AI would rather find a solution where everyone receives nothing, because it can predict ahead and know that shoving negative utility onto another party would lead to retaliation by said party, because for said party the most rational response is to destroy you to reduce their negative utility.

[keybored]

> This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useless” fear is as old as, say, electricity, and even older than cheap computing. It hasn’t happened.

But the people who hoard the wealth, electricity, and whatever else is needed to run the uberoperators are not branded as useless. Why is that? An aside..

[AlecSchueler]

Some inventions--like the heavy plough--really do turn society upside down with the sudden and vast removal of jobs, though.

[dwoldrich]

Exactly my thoughts. Selective whinging indeed.

Also meta-platitude whinging like

> The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.

Sometimes the winner deserves to win, AND that's a good thing even at scale. It kindof depends.

[nicbou]

The winner that deserved to win might turn into the complacent monopoly pf tomorrow. It might vow to Not Be Evil for a while, but the investors will demand that it does whatever it takes to grow.

[atoav]

The thing is many of those did not fail at all. They just weren't that great from the start. A overhyped technology is a technology that makes people believe it is going to be something that it isn't and solve issues that it doesn't (or that weren't really issues).

To take the first of the list: 3D TV. Everybody liked the idea of being more immersed in a fictional world. But if you watch closely (I studied both media science and film directing), you will realize that there are already traditional 2D films that are so immersive, parts of the audience dislike these films for the lack of distance between what they are watching and themselves. Which is why I said of the brink of the last 3D hype that this is not going to last. So the issue was for the most part that the problem 3D appeared to be solving wasn't actually a problem, while a whole segment of the market fooled itself and the consumers into this was actually the future.

Blockchain is literally the same and everybody could easily predict it by the point block chain evangelists started trying to find blockchain-shaped problems, when they didn't find any useful legal applications where a traditional chain of trust wasn't vastly superior.

Now LLMs are actually useful. The question is just, how much money is that usefulness worth for a regular person to pay and what does it do to society and the planet as a side-effect.

[throwaway5Am1k]

>Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles...

All of those were invented pre-1980. To misquote Thiel, if you remove TVs/phones from a house, you would think we're living in the 1970s

[throwuxiytayq]

Neural networks were in invented in the 40s. I don’t know what your point is, and I’m mostly convinced that you don’t have any, just as the article author and 99% of people shitposting their wishful thinking about AI.

[getnormality]

So if you were overwhelmingly wrong about technology fads in your lifetime by saying yes to everything, you can comfort yourself by saying that if you had gone back a century and said yes to everything, you would have been right about some things!

[rsynnott]

But not most things; there was a lot of nonsense back then, too. We all go to work in a bullet fired through a tunnel by pneumatic pressure, right?

(This was a real thing, and they got as far as partially building a tunnel under the Thames for it, before sanity prevailed.)

[ai-x]

Also, the ones you were right will provide 10,000x returns for all the 1x losses you have suffered.

[kabes]

Also I wasn't excited about anything from that list, but I am very excited about AI.

[hexasquid]

Electricity bros want to put a socket on every wall. That is such a non-starter from a safety POV. It's a fundamentally unsafe technology and it can never be made safe.

[breadsniffer]

Facts

[throw10920]

The first few paragraphs are all you need to see that the author is writing a propaganda piece. It's not meant to be truthful, it's meant to convince.

I think this is what is meant by "bullshit".

[brudgers]

“Bullshit” is:

+ statement of dubious correctness

+ and that serves the author’s interest

+ and which the author does not care whether or not it is believed.

When the author wants you to believe it, that’s horseshit.

[enraged_camel]

The article is trash. The only reason it got voted to the front page is because the author is salty about AI.

[lern_too_spel]

It's worse than AI slop. Unlike this article, AI slop usually includes reasonable supporting evidence. The only problem with AI slop is that this supporting evidence is presented in an annoying Buzzfeed-like way by default prompts.

[edent]

OP here! Thanks for replying.

To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology.

People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because they were useful. Car manufacturers didn't have to force GPS into vehicles - customers demanded it.

The narrative I'm describing is how hype sometimes (possibly often) fizzles out. My contention is the more a technology is hyped, the less useful it will turn out to be.

Now, excuse me while I ride my Segway into the sunset while drinking a nice can of Prime.

[dfabulich]

You have gotta stop cherrypicking. The massive influx of hyperbolic articles about how electricity will change everything started in the 19th century. It became a common theme in fiction (including classics like Frankenstein) and became an enormous media hype war, which historians call the War of the Currents.

Yes, electricity was useful. And it had hyperbolic articles talking about how transformative it would be. Like all prognostication, some of those articles were overblown, but, in some ways, they understated the transformative effect electricity would have on human history.

And cars? Did you somehow miss the influx of hyperbolic articles about how cars will change everything? Like, the whole 20th century?

What was your approach to researching the history of media hype? You somehow overlooked the hype around air travel, refrigeration, and antibiotics…?

[unchar1]

Calculators are a particularly bad example for your case. There was absolutely hyperbole against calculators when they were introduced. [1]

With similar sentiment as well "They make us dumb" "Machines doing the thinking for us"

Cars were definitely seen as a fad. More accurately a worse version of a horse [2]

If you looked through your other examples, you'd see the same for those as well.

Some things start as fads, but only time will tell if they gain a place in society. Truthfully it's too early to tell for AI, but the arguments you're making, calling it a fad already don't stand up to reason

[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-item/160697182/ [2]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...

[mkozlows]

The personal computer, laptops, web browsers, cell phones, smartphones, AJAX/DHTML, digital cameras, SSDs, WiFi, LCD displays, LED lightbulbs. At some point, all of these things were "overhyped" and "didn't live up to the promise." And then they did.