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Comment by andreapaiola | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I'll say it. The news is: "AI is not that powerful or functional". Sure, can change some little things but not that much. And we are overspending on it.

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This is my expectation. “We are overspending on AI and we’re going to destroy the company and maybe the economy” is less sensational than the end of the world, but it seems much more realistic.

That or the usual moral problems with applications of the technology, as another commenter pointed out, particularly in military and policing. Bad, but not really a new revelation, unless they know of some particularly evil plans.

I really don't understand how so many are so far detached from reality. Maybe AI hasn't revolutionized much of the physical world (yet), but its impacts to the digital world are profound, sweeping, and impossible to ignore.

I feel this is a common position from people who do not want to acknowledge that society and people's ways of life will profoundly change. It's a scary proposition so I don't blame anyone for it.

I used to think that it is very important to argue and convince people who are in denial so that they can e.g. prepare for it. But nowadays I have been thinking that being convinced of this scary proposition may also lead people to behave in destructive ways (also, I would like for us to spend less on AI, perhaps because it is so powerful), so maybe it's not so bad.

I mean I'd wager even most people who utilize AI on a regular basis don't take time to ponder the implications if progress continues at the current rate.

Even if it hits the wall today and no further progress toward general AI is made for decades, as the current technology is applied in more areas and expertise with it is gained it would still have enormous social and economic impacts over the next few decades.

And the Math world, and it's coming for the Physics world. And it's still just a wee baby!

People are far better at subconsciously processing the consequences of something than they appreciate, and the consequences of the AI wave being real are so insane people just clam up and back track to "it's obviously not happening".

If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced" it, so there is something to be said for temporary denial until people working on the actual consequences have got something semi viable to deal with them in place.

> If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced"

You will need to explain that one. Becauase if economy colapses before the singularity, there will be no singularity.

There will be no datacenters, no ai, none of that super expensive stuff dependent on debt and disposable money.

I suspect the economy has already been collapsing, with or without AI, and that's only a symptom of a larger civilizational collapse. Something is fundamentally broken in the global system of politics and economy. Technologies enabled by AI will only accelerate the process to its inevitable consequence, whatever that may turn out to be, for better or worse, some kind of social transformation.

In that case - and I wish it were not true - the AI companies need to ensure that society keeps running until the next stage is prepared. How? Probably by positioning themselves as an indispensable part of government, training an army of AI agents for all purposes where human physical and metal labor can be replaced, taking control of a large chunk of the economy.

Lots of armchair psychologists in this thread.

Saying that "so many" are detached should make you think. I'm sure nobody says its not useful at all, just not THAT useful. It seems that most of the things its clearly better than a human, considering risks and real time saved, are in the end inconsequential.

The public chattered about the "electronic brains" of the 1950s-1960s, there were profound, sweeping changes that were impossible to ignore, and many professions were obsoleted. However, the profound, sweeping changes weren't where and how the futurists and influencers proclaimed they were going to be and those specialists doing work not amenable to mainframe-ization were still busily employed.

So the thoroughly obnoxious insistence by the current AI snake oil salesmen that [EDIT] that they know the where the future lies and that we must follow their guidance (calculated to benefit themselves and likely wrong anyway) or be "left behind" wears thin. Go follow your own path and leave others to follow theirs in peace.

Oh I'm sure that many of the current predictions on the future are absolutely wrong in many ways; I'm just stating the fact that the technology itself is certainly having an impact and will have a much greater impact into the future.

OK. I'm a consumer. Where are these impossible-to-ignore impacts? Most of what I'm seeing is my favorite communities getting washed away with a tidal wave of slop and "smart AI features" annoying me to death in all my favorite software. Programmers in my circles are claiming they're 10-100x more productive but I am not seeing any useful effects of this at all from the outside. Everything is just getting shittier, faster.

We're eliminating decades worth of CVEs right now. Doesn't make products more functional, sure, but secure software is incredibly important.

I will admit, lots of first passes at productizing AI itself has just been crappy chatbots strapped to applications.

My favorite personal use case so far has been homelab automation. Testing and configuring new services is incredibly easy now. I'm also using it to automate basically all the grunt work of maintenance. For any personal software you'd like, you can just ask your bot now to make it.

I get people who said things like that like year ago, but nowadays it's a laughable position. Solving millenium problem means nothing nowadays? Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?

The point is it's not AGI, and won't be for a long time.

It doesn't have to be

AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.

The automatic loom wasn’t AGI either, but it replaced a lot of jobs.

>Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?

AI solving the problem it created? Woaow, the future is now!

I’m mostly bearish on AI, but this is flat wrong. The vast majority of CVEs that have been discovered with AI assistance were in code written long before AIs arrived on the scene.

There have been improvements, yes, but their best achievements still fall short. Their math solutions costed more than a school full of mathematicians, and are still being debated. The CVEs they find still need humans to reliably patch them. Nevertheless, I know they will keep improving.

There have been huge advances this year alone, and finally some productive results, but most of the things where AIs are used right now still are a net loss.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50067098

> "arguing that they must be free to inform the public about the risks of the technology"

I mean they tell you the reason in the first paragraph? Or is reading tfa too much?

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