[massysett]

Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.

[K0balt]

It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.

No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.

Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.

They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.

Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.

Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.

[jodrellblank]

You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative?

That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?

[nancyminusone]

>You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI.

If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a good chance the country you live in wouldn't either. If you don't believe the effect is large, go to the farthest uncontacted place on earth and take out a CO2 meter.

[Cthulhu_]

There's potential there (with the pocket-PhDs), the question is whether it'll actually make a measurable difference in the long run. I mean I'm sure it will make a difference, the question is whether it's what they say it will be, and whether it'll be financially viable. At the current burn rate of the AI companies, it isn't - before long the first ones will have to give up. They won't die, they'll be subsumed into their competitors.

Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume.

Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?

This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use.

I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.

[estimator7292]

An actual artificial intelligence? Yes, total paradigm shift. Not even a shift, we'd launch the old paradigm into the sun.

LLMs and modern day """AI"""? Don't kid yourself.