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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

"How is this not obvious to everyone? As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. "

It's a type of recent change blindness. Because for the last few years there are seemingly impossible breakthroughs every few months. Literally, things everyone said would take 30 or 100 years, happen within months. It is really easy to think this will continue. The new normal. Really, we haven't seen it slow down at all, so why would we expect the miracles to stop all of a sudden?

It seems like accelerating, and decelerating, are both fair game as future directions at this point.

So it is nice that the paper put some weight behind the argument that this could all grind to a halt for a lot of different reasons beyond the hype.

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> Literally, things everyone said would take 30 or 100 years, happen within months.

"Everyone"? Plenty of people in the 50s said we'd have sentient humanoid robots before the year 2000. And flying cars. Sure, many people underestimate the rate of change. But techno-optimists have consistently overestimated it, and they still do.

I was sloppy. I didn't mean to include science fiction authors, or extreme futurists.

"everyone", being, a typical average of realistic predictions.

In the 90's. I remember people talking about voice recognition will take 50 years. Let alone understanding. Now this is an easy base line feature.

Let alone protein folding.

> I didn't mean to include science fiction authors, or extreme futurists.

Science fiction authors are quite influential, and I don't think they were the only ones either. I expect that plenty of actual scientists had similar views. It wasn't extreme.

> In the 90's. I remember people talking about voice recognition will take 50 years.

Sure. Who? How many people said that? How many people said the opposite? If we're doing anecdotes, I remember that circa 2010 it was a fairly normal belief that fully self-driving cars would be widespread by 2020. I mean, I thought they would.

Point is, many people say many different things, there's never been any widespread agreement about what the future holds. They underestimate, they overestimate, but mostly reality moves sideways in directions nobody thought of and which are somehow simultaneously way more impressive and way less impressive than our expectations.

Technically correct. But kind of backs every argument into a corner. I'm assuming also, anything like a paper with data, can also be questioned in the same way. Don't object, I've seen that done. So basically, don't talk about anything, because anything you say is contradicted by something somewhere. Everything is True, Everything is False, everything is subjective. There is no reality. Every person has there own point of reference that is completely subjective and invalid.

> I'm assuming also, anything like a paper with data, can also be questioned in the same way. Don't object, I've seen that done.

Unless you've seen me do it, I don't see why I can't object. What a strange thing to say.

Look. You've supported your argument with vibes and anecdotes, so I'm offering contradicting vibes and anecdotes of my own. All that means is that it's not as obvious as you thought, and it is worth digging deeper (or not, it's not that important). A paper with data would certainly make a stronger argument. And of course it can be questioned, but it cannot be questioned in the same way. That you've "seen it done" is irrelevant.

Fair but there's two things I think need to be added

1) predictions are usually made assuming either constant effort or continued growth. They will be extremely conservative when the environment changes and you start dumping trillions of dollars into solving those problems.

2) while there's been real progress that doesn't mean it isn't being over sold. We do need to differentiate the signal from the noise

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