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Comment by Cyphase | Hacker News Reader

If you get away from roads you wouldn't realize engines exist. Also, the internet is (part of) the real world.

Sure and there’s endless AI generated blog spam from “journalists” saying LLMs are amazing and they’re going to replace our jobs etc… but get away from the tech bubble and you’ll see we’re so far away from that. Full self driving when? Autonomous house keepers when? Even self checkout still has to have human help most of the time and didn’t reduce jobs much. Call me a skeptic but HN is way too optimistic about this stuff.

Replacing all jobs except LLM developers? I’ll tell my hairdresser

If we could predict "when", that would make the investment decisions much easier.

But we do have a huge number of examples of jobs disappearing thanks to machines — even the term "computer" used to refer to a job.

More recently and specifically to LLMs, such losses were already being reported around this time last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-lost-in-may-because-of-...

In a world where openAI exists, it really does require an almost breathtaking lack of imagination to be a skeptic.

Or you’ve been around the block long enough to recognize hype and know when your imagination may be wrong. Imagination isn’t infallible.

Right, that entire internet think was complete hype, didn't go anywhere. BTW, can you fax me the menu for today?

And that motorized auto transport, it never went anywhere, it required roads. I mean, who would ever think we'd cover a huge portion of our land in these straight lines. Now, don't mind me, I'm going to go saddle up the horse and hope I don't catch dysentery on the way into town.

I don't think anybody's denying that revolutions happen. It's just that the number of technologies that actually turned out to be revolutionary are dwarfed by the number of things that looked revolutionary and then weren't. Remember when every television was definitely going to be using glasses-free 3D? People have actually built flying cars and robot butlers, yet the Jetsons is still largely wishful thinking. The Kinect actually shipped, yet today we play games mostly with handheld controllers. AI probably has at least some substance, but there's a non-zero amount of hype too. I don't think either extreme of outcome is a foregone conclusion.

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