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Comment by fugalfervor | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk.

We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you see as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.

The future isn't written yet. Your ability to predict it is an illusion. In aggregate, people whose job it is to predict large-scale economic events are worse than chance in their predictions.

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> In aggregate, people whose job it is to predict large-scale economic events are worse than chance in their predictions.

Sounds good, but isn't supported by data. Tetlock did not establish that all experts are worse than chance.

> The average expert was slightly better than chance.

-Tetlock

I am thinking of a study showing that political pundits do worse than chance at predicting the political future (this does not include election modeling, which is not punditry).

There's no realistic way to compose a statistical model for what will happen to a society when a powerful new technology is introduced. Predictors of our brave new AI world are going to be about as accurate as our pundits.

Happy to come back to this in 5 years and see whether you were right :-)

You'll note that I didn't make a prediction. Nor did I tell someone their prediction was wrong. I called into question someone's certainty about their own prediction.

> We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you see as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.

I can read between the lines.

Also, this new reality is today. You may not be seeing this in your place of business or culture yet, but for many of us, it arrived up to 2 years ago.

Good lord. The technology is nowhere near profitable and there is no clear path for it to become so. The new reality is not in any way stable.

How closely do you work with it already? How is your company retooling around it?

As mentioned elsewhere, my org is asking us to reduce usage because it is expensive and there's no evidence it improves productivity.

If that's happening at [redacted] of all places, I think it's reasonable to think that the technology may not be as transformative as predicted due to its (currently) poor performance in generating revenue.

We're profiting from its inefficiency by selling compute to other companies, especially AI startups. It's expensive and unprofitable for them and a cash cow for us. The position we're taking is bearish and somewhat more reversible than that taken by Meta, for example.

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