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Comment by mindwok | Hacker News Reader

Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up, give it some more time. We had smartphones in 2007, and e.g. By way of example, Uber didn't launch ridesharing until 2013, and then that still took years to seep into the public awareness.

By comparison, we're in the early years of AI. We're all still figuring out what this thing even means.

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Uber was a massive mistake on every level.

This is what is so frustrating about this whole ai thing is we aren’t learning from the mistakes of even the very recent past

Uber is a vast improvement over the previous taxi oligopolies.

I miss being able to reliably hail a taxi A LOT. Uber may be an improvement in smaller towns where cabs didn’t exist, but in bigger cities it is mostly a downgrade. Rather than walking to the curb and immediately getting a car, I’ve got to dick around with my phone and wait for a car to come to me.

Living on the south side of Chicago, it was almost impossible to hail a cab, and often times if you called for one it just wouldn’t show up. Or I’d try to hail one downtown, and be refused once I told them my destination. I’ve not had that problem once with Uber, good fucking riddance to taxis.

What's frustrating is that at the end of an event like a concert, everyone goes outside to catch an Uber/Lyft, but we then have to match driver to passenger, instead of having a line of waiting cars, each group just gets in the next available vehicle, shows the driver a QR code, instead of the mess we currently have. Why can't we do that? Taxi regulatory capture.

Taxis were terrible and I celebrate their destruction at the hands of the rideshare companies. Even now it’s still cheaper than a cab was (though those early days of VC cheap rides were great).

Uber has been great, I can get around to almost anywhere with a click of a button and have food delivered from a variety of local restaurants at any time of day.

I'm not sure why you think it was a massive mistake? The taxi industry was awful and unsafe, food delivery for many local places was either not available or poorly implemented.

Also many whole food chains didn't have proper delivery for groceries.

I agree with you, but those examples are going to fall on deaf ears. The pessimistic mindset will say that smartphones were a terrible invention that's ripping society apart, Uber is an unethical company exploiting workers, etc.

When did Uber stop being unethical? Did I miss the memo?

Because they didn't just break laws, they built an entire system to mislead law enforcement.

(How do tech people not know about Greyball??)

I think ridesharing was a net good for ordinary people even if Uber is/was unethical.

However, the counterargument falls entirely flat. "Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up". We don't have the luxury of time because AI disrupting communities and livelihoods faster than perhaps any other technology we've ever seen, with the most capital that has ever been put into any tech since the railroads.

Even if you're optimistic we'll eventually get the cancer cures and fusion reactors, doesn't it make sense from the perspective of an ordinary American to regulate the harms like the homework cheating, parasocial relationships, job losses, cyber attacks, etc., especially if it will take years to get the benefits?

Different benefits will show up at different rates. We don't need to wait for cancer cures and fusion reactors. It's already easier than ever to start a small business and use AI for things that would have been prohibitively expensive or time-consuming before. The technology is transforming how scientific research is done, how engineering is done, etc.

I don't see much evidence in the economic data that AI is disrupting livelihoods. Unemployment has been stable around 4% for a while and productivity growth has been at historically normal rates for the past 5 years. I think a more likely explanation is that AI is increasing uncertainty in some industries, which are seeing higher employee turnover, and many of those people are moving laterally into other jobs where their skills are more likely to be useful.

I don't think anyone in this thread has argued against mitigating harms. The OP was about current capabilities and the perceived lack of benefits for the average person.

To be clear, I don't disagree with your sentiment that the disruptiveness of AI is causing a lot of grief. But magnitude of disruption is not an indicator of magnitude of benefit (or lack thereof).

Some of the most disruptive periods in history brought about the greatest long term improvements in society. This is the price we pay for changing how things are done, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. We don't know which one it is for AI yet.

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