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Comment by roxolotl | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely couldn’t agree more. Incredibly useful tools are, in fact, incredibly useful. These discussions get clouded though when we intentionally ignore what’s being said by those doing the investing. The inevitability here isn’t that they’ll save 30% of dev time and we’ll get better software with less employees. It’s that come 2030, hell there’s that 2027 paper even, LLMs will be more effective than people at most tasks. Maybe at some point that’ll happen but looking at other normal technology[0] it takes decades.

0: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

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Looking at the rollout of the internet, it did take decades. There was a lot of nonsensical hype in the dotcom era, most famously pets.com taking out an ad during the Superbowl. Most of those companies burned through their VC and went out of business. Yet here we are today. It's totally normal to get your pet food from chewy.com and modern life without the internet is unimaginable.

Today we see a clear path toward machines that can take on most of the intellectual labor that humans do. Scott Alexander's 2027 time frame seems optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you feel about the outcome). But by say 2037? The only way that vision of the future doesn't come true is economic collapse that puts us back to 20th century technology. Focusing on whether the technology is LLMs or diffusion models or whatever is splitting hairs.

Timelines are relevant though. Inevitability is only a useful proposition if the timeline is constrained. It is inevitable that the earth will be swallowed by the sun but rightfully no one gives a shit. I think most people, even the author of this piece, aside from those who believe there's something fundamental about human intelligence that isn't reproducible, would say AI is inevitable on a long enough timeline. The arguments being made though are that AI is inevitable in the short term. Is 12 years short term? Maybe?

Regardless though when we break down the timelines we start to enable useful conversations. It's one thing to argue with a frame of "over X period of time Y will happen". It's another to say "it's inevitable so get on board". This piece, myself, and many others are frustrated by the latter.

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