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Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

Devin's Law: every defense of AI which rests on "it will get better, trust me" is in many ways indistinguishable from 2010s crypto hype or "level 5 self driving is right around the corner"

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1) Predicting the future is hard, but so far everyone who was saying that it would get better turned out to be right. It is getting better 2) Waymo exists

3) That doesn't mean flying cars will within your lifetime

I don't think anyone is saying it can't or won't get better, but the question is how much better, on what timescale, and are there fundamental parts of the problem which will remain extraordinarily difficult to improve?

The comment I was responding to suggested a guarantee of an "order of magnitude" jump right around the corner. There is no guarantee of this, and if you view doomers as fools for having doubts, then we ought to look upon the folks who are sure of this sort of progress in the same way.

Your original comment was about self-driving cars, not flying ones. If you wanted unattainable goalposts you should’ve started with that, not ended with it.

Waymo does not claim level 5 self-driving, and you don't have a level 4 in your driveway, so there was no moving of goalposts.

Then say that, instead of bringing up flying cars, which is moving them, explicitly.

Respectfully, I disagree with the way you're characterizing my comment. I was demonstrating that just because you have a level 4 Waymo doesn't mean flying cars are right around the corner. This is again a reference to the original comment I was replying to, the one that suggested of course we're going to get an order of magnitude improvement.

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