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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

Good reference. It is going to slowly change things in 20 years we'll look back and a lot of things will be wildly different because of AI systems. But its rate limited by institutions and momentum and human psychology and the way things change will be somewhat unpredictable with unintended negative and positive consequences.

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"slowly change things in 20 years"

Yeah, it is not going to be slow. Progress compounds, everything is being built on top of fast computers and fast widespread internet connection. You are not at the beginning of the curve like you were in the 20th century when people didn't even know how to use a keyboard and we are already seeing widespread disruption in security.

Literally the entire premise of the article is that it's going slow everywhere but in software. To think otherwise is to be really myopic about how the rest of the world outside of tech operates. And in any case 20 years isn't that slow. The only things that happen faster that that will be things like adobe goes out of business. And let's say AI helps us develop medicine and robotics and better factories and all the other things that would have a big impact a lot faster.. just human trials could take a decade before you really see that much change. Will it have a wider impact faster than computing its self, or the internet? Maybe? Maybe not.

If a lot of jobs were still manufacturing jobs I would agree, but we are in a service economy that uses computers as the main tool. So I don't see how it won't come into effect fairly soon into other areas of work. You can't measure impact by profit alone so I don't find the article particularly interesting anyway.

I tried telling my boss "you can't measure impact by profit alone" and he said, "you're so right, we also have to think about expenses! You're fired."

I would also fire someone who doesn’t know the difference between revenue and profit.

It is like saying there is no impact on math because solving a millennium prize problem didn’t net them a profit. It is just a naive way of looking at things.

You are a demonstration that their marketing campaign is working. The reason OpenAI is focusing on math is because it is one of a very, very few domains where RLVR can be done at massive scale because large sets of problems with automatic verification can be produced and evaluated relatively cheaply. It has no value to OpenAI beyond marketing. It has negative value for mathematicians.

So far the only economically valuable activity that AI has really proven itself very capable in is coding - and its for the same reason of economical RLVR. It can do significant tasks completely end-to-end in that domain. It is very helpful in other types of tasks such as data analysis and legal research, but those things are not going to fulfill your expectations for broad economic impact.

There is simply no evidence at all for the broad claims of disruption in 1-2 years.

Seems to me like you're undervaluing the impact of software in the modern world, as if software hasn't driven massive productivity gains in every industry in the last 50 years.

Software has not driven massive productivity gains in every industry in the last 50 years.

You can't seriously believe this.

Do you think those offering professional translation service were obsessed with AI? Or chess players? The rest of the world doesn't get to decide...

"You are not at the beginning of the curve like you were in the"

Note: on an exponential, you can always say this. People will look back on today with the same "aww cute" eyes.

Both things can be true.

I expect to be surprised by specific headlines, but I don't expect "software engineer" to be any more common a job opening than "steam locomotive engineer" in 10 years time.

Conversely, I would be very surprised if the robotics startups turn out to have solved general-purpose AI models that work in the real world, both fast enough and cheap enough (currecy or joules) to be significantly labour-displacing in 10 years.

Where I'm about 50-50 on which of "AI does it" or "AI does't do it" is more surprising, is specific physics research from AI. LLMs can do a lot of hard maths, there's lots of open problems in physics due to hard maths questions. So:

  Consider the Alcubierre metric. The original is impossible. Can an LLM either design something in the same broad category which is physically instantiable but still useful (e.g. "yes it's sub-light but it manages 0.01c and you weren't getting that otherwise"), or prove this is impossible when limited to matter made from normal electrons, protons, and neutrons?

10 years? I'd be equally surprised if this is or isn't done by AI. Mainly depends on how long the growth continues looking exponential.

Progress is future knowledge. You don't know what future knowledge is, yet. When you know, it will have become present knowledge. You don't know that any particular ongoing change is progress. LOL predictions.

Disruption in security is still software field though. The topic is "the rest of the economy".

It IS going slow though. The rest of the economy will be slowly adapting it, just like they have slowly adapting other computer systems before. There simply is no use for frontier models in the real economy as of now. For the economy it's just another cost factor, a substantial one if they try to actually build something with it, that has no real benefits that results in increased productivity and revenue making. So why should anyone except AI companies adapt frontier models? They have no reason to. And it will be that way for many years to come.

Yep, and if it's anything like previous transformative technologies: the internet, and 100 years earlier the railways, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money overbuilding the wrong things along the way.

Maybe it's also rate-limited by the fact that it's not actually a silver bullet and actually needs time to find the proper place for its application as well.

Computers, of course, can be criticized in the same way.

And likewise; computers took a few decades to actually become a widespread economic force. Arguably the impact was quite small if we separate it from the internet (which of-course depends on computers).

Good insight. For a long time, the utility of a computer was tied to its ability to print something onto a sheet of paper. User interfaces came along, too, though. Especially for industrial applications. Then internet was probably the third wave. Now AI is the fourth?

Hard to describe the impact of computing as quite small compared to anything, even the internet when you go see those old room sized early IBM computers that were the first commercially viable ones for businesses. They used to have warehouses of payroll documents and armies of people to shuffle around paperwork and crunch numbers and physical people connecting phone lines. Just absolutely fantastically massive amounts of busy work.

I think it's pretty silly to try to separate the internet from computers.

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