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Hot take: Modern AI is just another tool in the long line of human inventions. It will serve humanity like all the others. All the doomers around AI are totally retarded and have lost perspective.
Human poverty and suffering were greatly reduced because of the industrial revolution. AI will continue this trend. You can have local increases in poverty, such as job losses and displacement, at the same time as global prosperity improves.
This is computers 2.0. Keep in mind that what we have here is a continuing information revolution that started with the computer. Just as the energy-based industrial revolution progressed from steam engines, to combustion, to nuclear, and jet engines.
It will be a net job and prosperity creator, just like other technologies before it. Humans are needed to guide and manage the big picture, and the need for us with our wide and long horizon context, detailed world model understanding, and compute power efficient minds, is going to supplement AI for a long time. Humans integrated into AI systems is the way.
We will now have better AI assistants, Siri 2.0, and better SW workflows with tasks automated that couldn’t be done before. It’s amazing. It is also still very limited. Long chain reliability is still quite awful. Everyday I still catch multiple, critical failure level, made-up bullshit I have to manually correct. If you actually monitor the agent behavior closely there are many mistakes that can break systems.
As someone that builds with these tools everyday, and has shipped complex autonomous robotic systems in production for years, I wouldn’t freak out yet. These agents are generally useful, yet are still limited in that they only work well with a limited and focused task. Even then, the statistical failure rate is still 1-20% depending on the task, far too high to blindly trust, which is what you need to really have super intelligent AGI. Drift is real, and no one has a real solution.
What LLMs have really done is make small companies greatly empowered. Just like how platforms like YouTube enabled small creators to take on legacy media, we are now in a situation where small builders can beat big tech, since the small AI native teams can now ship faster than bloated 1000 person organizations.
The future is bright. This new toolchain will create jobs overall. We will have more abundance. Remember that as cost goes down, utilization goes up because the added value per unit of time and energy becomes more and more favorable. It’s just math.
We can profitably ship things that would not be possible before. This is an enablement technology. It is a fundamental productivity boost across the whole economy.
Optimism is the most logical mental position to take.
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