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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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The situation reminds me of the early days of computers. There was a lot of hype. For example, I had a high school English teacher who had all of the students write a paper using a word processor. Which was very cumbersome to use and the dot matrix printout of the essay looked pretty lousy. A Schoolhouse Rock! type video came out which, as I recall, promoted the use of home PC's to store recipes. Something which really wasn't practical for computers at the time. It was very common for kids to go to computer camp in the summer.

I was going to link that Schoolhouse Rock! type video (it was called "Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips") but it was so cringe, I just couldn't bring myself to watch.

Basically the early boosters of computers were ultimately correct, it's just that apparently there is a Moore's Law of Hype which is even more potent that the Moore's Law of computer chips.

My best guess is that the situation with AI is analogous; that right now we are in the mid to late 80s.

What interests me about this is that for all of the retrospective mocking of Paul krugman's comparison of the internet to a fax machine, in terms of economic growth it didn't really change much.

For all the promise of computers, the internet, smartphones, etc. first world economic growth has been stagnant since the 2000s. Even for the US, a relative success story, real GDP per capita growth has been slower in the last 25 years then it was from 1950 to 75 or 1975 to 2000.

What do we do if AI changes much of our lives, but doesn't produce anywhere near the promised economic growth?

there is a Moore's Law of Hype

Actually it's Gartner's

And yeah it's the same with essentially every technology, the longer you live the more of these we see, and the most common failure modes for looking at this are: "it's all tulip mania, no new technology has any use" and "everything is going to change forever tomorrow, it's the end of the world as we know it".

Nothing ever happens. Except change, which is always happening, slowly.

See also Roy Amara's law (1978):

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

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