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I think crypto isn't such a good analogy. I never saw anyone get value out of crypto qua crypto. As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.
Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research. I think the hype is still kind of overdone, but only because the hype is so strong that only the immanent eschaton could live up to it and because it's not clear how much of a directly-related ecosystem there will be for third parties.
I have mixed feelings about AI; I have concerns about it being used to automate military decisions that should require human moral judgment (the traditional Terminator-style concern over computer command and control), and also the potential for deepfaking and manufacturing false content to mislead or manipulate. The latter has already been used in new and more sophisticated scams, and I worry about what a nation-state-level actor could do with that kind of power. Economic disruption is there as a genuine possibility, and that's difficult, but I'd prefer if people expressed that possibility directly as a livelihood threat rather than trying to launder the (genuinely sympathetic) concern into environmentalism or moral grandstanding about human creativity or interpretations of IP law in which AI training is assumed-illegal.
I've rarely actually heard someone say, "I don't like AI because doing my job without it gives me satisfaction and a good-paying job, and the introduction of AI into the workplace makes me feel like I'm losing the livelihood I prefer." Instead, I typically hear things like "AI was developed by stealing the intellectual property of hardworking people in order to enrich the billionaires and ELON MUSK and DONALD TRUMP," part of the large egregore of "all my enemies are evil rich fascists."
People would rather be angry than admit vulnerability. Our discussions over issues of social importance would be strikingly improved if people were willing to admit when their principles are self-serving -- which there's nothing wrong with, everyone deserves to advocate for themselves -- instead of trying to convert everything into an argument in which justice, law, the hand of God, and the long arc of history all militate against whoever you think is opposing your interests.
I don't agree with the environmental or land-use concerns for the most part, and it strikes me as degrowth corporate-hate and NIMBYism rather than principled objections. Energy use is not automatically immoral. I'm disappointed in the ways in which AI's demand for silicon is draining the consumer market of computer components and I worry about the impact on individual people's ability to control the means of technological production, but at least so far, this is offset to me by the increase in the ability to interface with computers using natural language.
The kind of generalized AI hate I see out there, online, occasionally in person, is hard for me to wrap my head around. I'm in the 10% of Americans who are more excited than concerned about AI. Generative AI has been great for me, in ways similar to what it's been for you. I enjoy using it. I get value out of it. I think AI slop memes are funny sometimes. I don't like when it's used to write personal messages or fill out marketing boilerplate copy, but I don't hate AI text as a general principle, especially if it's used to bolster and not replace human effort and creativity. And I dislike the invective and contempt that valid uses of AI generate in critics far, far more than I dislike the silliness or laziness of uses of AI that are in poor taste. That's the self-interested vulnerability of my own: I don't want a tool that has expanded my capability to become socially radioactive.
I don't know enough about AI to comment with any level of expertise on the research frontier. But I do have a skeptical prior towards the idea that this generation of AI will produce genuinely generalized AI that can meaningfully, affordably, and trustworthily replace human oversight. But we've gone farther with agentic AI use than I would have expected, so I might be wrong about that.
I agree with pretty much all of this.
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Minor point, this seems to be the wrong way round. The asset aspect is the boring (if hyped) part, and the proposal to do financial transactions without a trusted party (which can easily coerced to block some transactions by the feds) was the innovation. Of course, this freedom to do transactions has mostly been used in darknet marketplaces and for ransomware, but that's humans for you.
I will grant you that the anarcho-libertarian utopia promised by the blockchain has not happened, though. 'crypto' is 99% get-rich-quick scams, and the 1% are probably mostly ransomware and the like, with 0.01% being nerds buying acid or donating to wikileaks. Legal crypto exchanges are very much centralized, and banking laws in the US are probably broad enough that the feds can jail you for decades if you put substantial amounts of your money through a mix or otherwise annoy them.
And gen-AI is definitely the bigger deal, sure. It might take six or eight orders of magnitudes more money to train a LLM than it takes to train an individual human, but my feeling is that if we assume that the tech will keep the current intelligence level and and simply improve on the execution, that is already enough to make the mean white collar worker obsolete. Heck, I have a PhD-level education and consider a future where I am reduced to wearing AR goggles and connecting cables to where some AI decides they should go while it takes care of the software tasks far more efficiently than I ever could distinctly possible.
This is not to say that the AI bubble bursting is not also possible. I mean, investors in the late 90s were not wrong about everything -- the internet did have an enormous effect on commerce. It was more the specifics which they were wrong about, like if pets.com would ever become profitable.
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For complex tasks though, or for cutting down the massive overhead? I just think for most of the use cases I keep coming across, AI is nothing more than a fancy lawnmower that saves you time to cut the grass, but doesn’t do anything revolutionary for you.
That line gets fuzzy.
I can't talk work examples, but a hobbyist thing I've been crunching for the last two weeks is building a couple small educational robots.
That's not revolutionary, in the sense of completely breaking the field. It's something I've even done before at smaller scales: the first DIY educational robot kit I provided for a summer camp is almost a decade old now. But it's the sort of thing that's a massive time investment, especially when you're looking at a new microcontroller architecture or building something far from the standard line-follower or simple ESP32 websocket racer. Figuring out chip documentation, finding actual sane BoM materials instead of the wacky versions people go with at unit size 10k, managing errata, sanity-checking EMI, it's a nontrivial effort at even the smallest scale. On that side, AI's probably dropped it from a month of nights-and-weekends to a week or two, and probably made it better or surfaced information I would have missed otherwise.
(though even there, being able to actually find and translate information has encouraged me to go a lot broader than I did in 2018: there's been a few chips and targets I can genuinely evaluate five or ten options now, where before it'd just be a matter of finding anything not-EOL.)
The harder part is where I want to sell these things. People did that, pre-AI, don't get me wrong. But it was insurmountable to me, and probably insurmountable at my expected business scale. The actual build and development costs are trivial compared to the compliance costs, just figuring out the order of magnitude of the compliance costs meant hiring an expert, and worst of all, there's a lot of landmines I knew about even then which could invalidate a lot of your past efforts all at once, and others I didn't.
That's not, pointedly, revolutionary to the world. But it's revolutionary for my use case.
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As Napoleon once said, quantity has a quality all its own.
My private project is a graphics thing for ricing. To get what I wanted, I would have had to become proficient in desktop compositing, OpenGL, wayland, and several disciplines around graphics and rendering. Then I would have had to write several thousand lines of fairly finicky boilerplate, including several false starts and bad assumptions.
If I were retired and had the time and the energy, I could do that. In practice, though, switching from 5% ideas 95% grind to 60% ideas 30% reading 10% grind means that it’s fun and I’m a good chunk of the way there after maybe three good evenings of work. Without AI that just wouldn’t have happened and it would go into the bin of ‘someday’.
For my startup, again, AI is not a superintelligence but it sirfaces good papers, explains the maths when I get stuck, implements diagnostics in minutes that would take me hours. It’s not like having a Nobel winner in my pocket, it’s like having a textbook that can talk to me and a bunch of PhD students on Speed. Very senior people in very serious organisations are using it for proof of concepts and your projects.
TLDR: no individual thing it does is truly revolutionary except maybe the maths from my perspective, but I find the ease and quality and speed with which it does it is revolutionary in aggregate.
That just proves the point though. That also holds true for most things in the industrial world. The gap for me stems not from it providing no value, but how it differentiates itself from everything else that achieves the same thing in its respective domain. There’s one of two categories the tech falls into:
AI making existing technologies easier to use and increase productivity.
AI inventing new tools, technologies, methods, routines and research.
The problem I have with so many people who love to talk up the AI ladder is they use 1 as a way to argue for 2. 1 has been the whole long read of technological and economic progress since humanity has existed. There’s nothing “new” about that. I’m glad in your case it’s lowered the barrier to entry for you, but I don’t see that as a strongly given “new inroad” for the tech itself.
I think that's a broadly artificial separation. In my opinion the vast majority of new tools / technologies / methods / routines / research come from some combination of:
I have observed AI doing (2) and it makes (1) and (3) considerably easier.
If my project works it will be an entirely new way of doing desktops, and I guess it was my idea not the AI's, which is maybe what you mean? But I got a lot of the techniques from another area and 90% of the design is the AI's suggestion and uses techniques I'd never heard of, so it's still more complicated. I'm quite happy for the top-level what to stay my job and leave the how to the machine, of course.
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