AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/09/04/what-if-artificial-intelligence-is-just-a-normal-technology

by mooreds • 11 months ago

184 295 11 months ago

djoldman• 11 months ago

ktallett2• 11 months ago

What do they mean what if? It is similarly based to something that has existed for around 4 decades. It of course is at a higher standard of efficiency and able to search through and combine more data but it isn't new. It is just a normal technology and this was why myself and many others were shocked at the initial hype.

Eisenstein• 11 months ago

It is similarly based to something that has existed for around 4 decades.

Four decades ago was 1985. The thing is, there was a huge jump in progress from then until now. If we took something which had a nice ramped progress, like computer graphics, and instead of ramping up we went from '1985' to '2025' in progress over the course of a few months, do you think there wouldn't be a lot of hype?

ktallett2• 11 months ago

But we have ramped up slowly, it's just not been given in quite this form before. We have previously only used it in settings where accuracy is a focus.

johnbellone• 11 months ago

Four decades ago was 1985

Don't remind me.

tim3338• 11 months ago

The unusual feature of AI now as opposed to the last 4 decades is that it is approaching human intelligence. Assuming that progress continues, exceeding human intelligence will have different economic consequences to being a fair bit worse as was the case mostly.

wvbdmp2• 11 months ago

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet.

Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction, I get increasingly unnerved.

tempodox• 11 months ago

We’ll manage to make our own survival on this planet less probable, even without the help of “AI”.

johnnienaked2• 11 months ago

The cult of efficiency will end in the only perfectly efficient world--one without us.

chrisco2553• 11 months ago

I don't know what reality you're living in, but there are more people on this planet than ever in history and most of them are quite well fed.

measurablefunc5• 11 months ago

If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recommendation is to avoid non-constructive inevitability arguments using our current ignorant state of understanding of physical laws as the main premise b/c it's possible to reach any conclusion from that premise & convince yourself that the conclusion is inevitable.

¹https://gemini.google.com/share/d9b505fef250

jackphilson2• 11 months ago

Irrelevant but I like this pattern of using Gemini (or AI outputs in general) as sources. Please continue to do so and I encourage any readers to also adopt this pattern. I will also try to implement this pattern.

wvbdmp2• 11 months ago

I agree that the mere theoretical possibility isn’t sufficient for the argument, but you’re missing the much less refutable component: that the inevitability is actively driven by universal incentives of competition.

But as I alluded to earlier, we’re working towards plenty of other collapse scenarios, so who knows which we’ll realize first…

jjk166• 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure a lot of work has gone into making institutions resistant to a potential future super-Hitler. Whether those efforts will be effective or not, it is a very real concern, and it would be absurd to ignore it on the grounds of "there is probably some limit to tyranny we're not yet aware of which is not too far beyond what we've previously experienced." I would argue a lot more effort should have gone into preventing the original Hitler, whose rise to power was repeatedly met with the chorus refrain "How much worse can it get?"

imtringued2• 11 months ago

This isn't just an AI thing. There are a lot of of non-constructive ideologies like communism where simply getting rid of "oppressors" will magically unleash the promised utopia. When you give these people a constructive way to accomplish their goals, they will refuse, call you names and show their true colors. Their criticism is inherently abstract and can never have a concrete form, which also makes it untouchable by outside criticism.

ehnto• 11 months ago

I don't think LLMs are building towards an AI singularity at least.

I also wonder if we can even power an AI singularity. I guess it depends on what the technology is. But it is taking us more energy than really reasonable (in my opinion) just to produce and run frontier LLMs. LLMs are this really weird blend of stunningly powerful, yet with a very clear inadequacy in terms of sentient behaviour.

I think the easiest way to demonstrate that, is that it did not take us consuming the entirety of human textual knowledge, to form a much stronger world model.

michaelhoney• 11 months ago

True, but our "training" has been a billion years of evolution and multimodal input every waking moment of our lives. We come heavily optimised for reality.

ACCount378• 11 months ago

I see no reason why not.

There was a lot of "LLMs are fundamentally incapable of X" going around - where "X" is something that LLMs are promptly demonstrated to be at least somewhat capable of, after a few tweaks or some specialized training.

This pattern has repeated enough times to make me highly skeptical of any such claims.

It's true that LLMs have this jagged capability profile - less so than any AI before them, but much more so than humans. But that just sets up a capability overhang. Because if AI gets to "as good as humans" at its low points, the advantage at its high points is going to be crushing.

mallowdram4• 11 months ago

The singularity will involve quite a bit more complexity than binary counting, arbitrary words and images, and prediction. These were mirages that will be wiping out both Wall Street and our ecology.

ctoth• 11 months ago

What if this paper actually took things seriously?

A serious paper would start by acknowledging that every previous general-purpose technology required human oversight precisely because it couldn't perceive context, make decisions, or correct errors - capabilities that are AI's core value proposition. It would wrestle with the fundamental tension: if AI remains error-prone enough to need human supervisors, it's not transformative; if it becomes reliable enough to be transformative, those supervisory roles evaporate.

These two Princeton computer scientists, however, just spent 50 pages arguing that AI is like electricity while somehow missing that electricity never learned to fix itself, manage itself, or improve itself - which is literally the entire damn point. They're treating "humans will supervise the machines" as an iron law of economics rather than a temporary bug in the automation process that every profit-maximizing firm is racing to patch. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind when it's obvious that GPT-5 could do better than Narayanan and Kapoor did in their paper at understanding historical analogies.

simonh• 11 months ago

LLMs do have to be supervised by humans and do not perceive context or correct errors, and it’s not at all clear this is going to change any time soon. In fact it’s plausible that this is due to basic problems with the current technology. So if you’re right, sure, but I’m certainly not taking that as a given.

cubefox2• 11 months ago

They do already correct errors since OpenAI introduced its o1 model. Since then the improvements have been significant. It seems practically certain that their capabilities will keep growing rapidly. Do you think AI will suddenly stagnate such that models are not much more capable in five years than they are now? That would be absurd. Look back five years, and we are practically in the AI stone age.

nottorp• 11 months ago

because it couldn't perceive context, make decisions, or correct errors - capabilities that are AI's core value proposition

I could ask the same thing then. When will you take "AI" seriously and stop attributing the above capabilities to it?

cubefox2• 11 months ago

Exactly. People seem to want to underhype AI. It's like a chimpanzee saying: humans are just normal apes.

Delusional.

redwood2• 11 months ago

I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?).

Through this lens it's way more normal

sfpotter4• 11 months ago

Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.

GMoromisato• 11 months ago

So are LLMs. Under the covers they are just deterministic matmul.

tintor• 11 months ago

In theory, yes.

In practice, outcome of floating point computation depends on compiler optimizations, order of operations, and rounding used.

solid_fuel• 11 months ago

I understand what you're saying, but at the same time floating point numbers can only represent a fixed amount of precision. You can't, for example, represent Pi with a floating point. Or 1/3. And certain operations with floating point numbers with lots of decimals will always result in some precision being lost.

They are deterministic, and they follow clear rules, but they can't represent every number with full precision. I think that's a pretty good analogy for LLMs - they can't always represent or manipulate ideas with the same precision that a human can.

jamesjyu• 11 months ago

I think a better term is "word synthesizer"

heresie-dabord• 11 months ago

What do you think of "plausibility hallucinator"? ^_^

redwood2• 11 months ago

That focuses more on the outputs than the inputs tho. Close but needs something

marginalia_nu2• 11 months ago

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology.

Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

1c2adbc42• 11 months ago

Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call it what you will, it is what it is.

marginalia_nu2• 11 months ago

I don't particularly mind the term, it's a useful shibboleth separating the marketing and sci-fi from the takes grounded in reality.

el_nahual• 11 months ago

We have a name: Large Language Models, or "Generative" AI.

It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and it doesn't listen to instructions, but it does generate pretty good text!

OJFord• 11 months ago

It will depend on the final form the normal useful tools take, but for now it's 'LLMs', 'coding agents', etc.

bradgessler• 11 months ago

Artificial Interpolator Augmented Intelligence

exe343• 11 months ago

I think it's fine to keep the name, we just have to realise it's like magic. real magic can't be done. magic that can be done is just tricks. AI that works is just tricks.

J_McQuade• 11 months ago

Broadly Uneconomical Large Language Systems Holding Investors in Thrall.

lo_zamoyski2• 11 months ago

Statistics.

A lot of this is marketing bullshit. AFAIK, even "machine learning" was a term made up by AI researchers when the AI winter hit who wanted to keep getting a piece of that sweet grant money.

And "neural network" is just a straight up rubbish name. All it does is obscure what's actually happening and leads the proles to think it has something to do with neurons.

stillsut2• 11 months ago

"Unstructured data learners and generators" is probably the most salient distinction for how current system compare to previous "AI systems" examples (NLP, if-statements) that OP mentioned.

michaeldoron• 11 months ago

NLP is still AI - LLMs are using Natural Language Processing, and are considered artificial intelligence.

ACCount378• 11 months ago

"AI" is a wide fucking field. And it occasionally includes systems built entirely on if-else statements.

lo_zamoyski2• 11 months ago

There is no difference between AI and non-AI save for the model the observer is using to view a particular bit of computation.

danaris• 11 months ago

They still are.

Artificial Intelligence is a whole subfield of Computer Science.

Code built of nothing but if/else statements controlling the behavior of game NPCs is AI.

A* search is AI.

NLP is AI.

ML is AI.

Computer vision models are AI.

LLMs are AI.

None of these are AGI, which is what does not yet exist.

One of the big problems underlying the current hype cycle is the overloading of this term, and the hype-men's refusal to clarify that what we have now is not the same type of thing as what Neo fights in the Matrix. (In some cases, because they have genuinely bought into the idea that it is the same thing, and in all cases because they believe they will benefit from other people believing it.)

vhcr• 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

alanbernstein• 11 months ago

I think I misinterpreted your comment as not understanding the AI effect, but actually you're just summarizing it kind of concisely and sarcastically?

LLMs are one of the first technologies that makes me think the term "AI effect" needs to be updated to "AGI effect". The effect is still there, but it's undeniable that LLMs are capable of things that seem impossible with classical CS methods, so they get to retain the designation of AI.

hermitcrab5• 11 months ago

Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI.

They still are, as far as the marketing department is concerned.

jrm43• 11 months ago

One, I doubt your premise ever happens in a meaningfully true and visible way -- but perhaps more important, I'd say you're factually wrong in terms of "what is called AI?"

Among most people, you're thinking of things that were debatably AI, today we have things that are AI (again, not due to any concrete definition, simply due to accepted usage of the term.)

janalsncm2• 11 months ago

To be honest, no one can agree on what “intelligence” is. The “artificial” part is pretty easy to understand though.

bilsbie• 11 months ago

I’m guessing it will be exactly like the internet. Changes everything and changes nothing.

only-one17012• 11 months ago

lol absolutely not

only-one17012• 11 months ago

I think it’ll be like social media

daxfohl• 11 months ago

Yeah I can see it being like late 90's and early 2000's for a while. Mostly consulting companies raking in the cash setting up systems for older companies, a ton of flame-out startups, and a few new powerhouses.

Will it change everything? IDK, moving everything self-hosted to the cloud was supposed to make operations a thing of the past, but in a way it just made ops an even bigger industry than it was.

ranger207• 11 months ago

AI being normal technology would be the expected outcome, and it would be nice if it just hurried up and happened so I could stop seeing so much spam around AI actually being something much greater than normal technology

josefritzishere• 11 months ago

If you read the paper, they make a good case that AI is just a normal technology. They're a bit dissmissive, but they're not alone in that. The AI sector has been all too much hype and far too little substance.

doc_manhat• 11 months ago

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

Seems to be the referenced paper?

If so previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43697717

Kapura• 11 months ago

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

thepryz• 11 months ago

I don’t know if I would agree.

Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people the way LLM-powered bots already have. Generative AI is also starting to change the way people think, or perhaps not think, as people begin to offload critical thinking and writing tasks to agentic ai.

Swizec• 11 months ago

Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people

May I introduce you to the magic of "KPI" and "Bonus tied to performance"?

You'd be surprised how much good and bad in the world has come out of some spreadsheet showing a number to a group of promotion chasing type-a otherwise completely normal people.

Tarsul• 11 months ago

social media ruined our brains long before LLMs. Not sure if the LLM-upgrade is is all that newsworthy... Well, for AI fake videos maybe - but it could also be that soon no one believes any video they see online which would have the adverse effect and could arguably even be considered good in our current times (difficult question!).

CuriouslyC4• 11 months ago

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information it's taking in along with a learned model of you and your communication patterns, so it can accurately predict what you intend for it to do.

If you need an interface for something (e.g. viewing data, some manual process that needs your input), the agent will essentially "vibe code" whatever interface you need for what you want to do in the moment.

alexpotato• 11 months ago

The technology for this has been around for the past 10 years but it's still not a reality, what makes AI the kicker here?

e.g. Alexa for voice, REST for talking to APIs, Zapier for inter-app connectdness.

(not trying to be cynical, just pointing out that the technology to make it happen doesn't seem to be the blocker)

jrm43• 11 months ago

This isn't likely to happen for roughly the same reason Hypercard didn't become the universal way for novices to create apps.

hn_acc1• 11 months ago

So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?

I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.

micromacrofoot• 11 months ago

hah, just wait until everything you ever do online is moderated through an LLM and tell me that's not world changing

naasking6• 11 months ago

Artificial intelligence has solved protein folding. The downstream effects of that alone will be huge, and it's far from the only change coming.

player1234• 11 months ago

Hyperbole

AbstractH242• 11 months ago

The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel

From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

watwut2• 11 months ago

From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

It does not do that tho. Like, reliably doing a repeatable set of steps is a thing it is not doing.

It does fuzzy tasks well.

riku_iki2• 11 months ago

I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

I imagine people eventually would switch on some simple programming and/or language for this, and world would be way more efficient compared to spreadsheet mess

tim3338• 11 months ago

Terminator 2 would have been a dull movie if the opposition had been a spreadsheet.

aredox• 11 months ago

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on.

But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is proof that their claims aren't true.

lioeters• 11 months ago

improving itself in an exponential growth

That seems like a possibly mythical critical point, at which a phase transition will occur that makes the AI system qualitatively different from its predecessors. Exponential to the limit of infinity.

All the mad rush of companies and astronomical investments are being made to get there first, counting on this AGI to be a winner-takes-all scenario, especially if it can be harnessed to grow the company itself. The hype is even infecting governments, for economic and national interest. And maybe somewhere a mad king dreams of world domination.

utyop224• 11 months ago

What world domination though? If such a thing ever existed for example in the US, the government would move to own and control it. No firm or individual would be allowed to acquire and exercise that level of power.

jrm43• 11 months ago

This is brilliant and I can't believe I haven't heard this idea before.

maplethorpe• 11 months ago

The idea was first popularized in 1993 by Verner Vinge, who coined the term "singularity". You can read his paper here: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

utyop224• 11 months ago

Said another way, will a firm suddenly improve radically because they hired a thousand PhDs folks? Not quite.

Many things sound good on paper. But paper vs reality are very different. Things are more complex in reality.

naasking6• 11 months ago

LLMs are already superhuman at many tasks. You're also wrong about AI not accelerating AI development. There was at least one paper published this year showing just such a result. It's just beginning.

tim3338• 11 months ago

Explosions rely on having a lot of energy producing material that can suddenly go off. Even if AI starts self improving it's going to be limited by the amount of energy it can get from the power grid which is kind of maxed out at the moment. It may be exponential growth like weeds growing, ie. gradually and subject to human control, rather than like TNT detonating.

pessimizer• 11 months ago

I've come to the conclusion that it is a normal, extremely useful, dramatic improvement over web 1.0. It's going to

1) obsolete search engines powered by marketing and SEO, and give us paid search engines whose selling points are how comprehensive they are, how predictable their queries work (I miss the "grep for the web" they were back when they were useful), and how comprehensive their information sources are.

2) Eliminate the need to call somebody in the Philippines awake in the middle of the night, just for them to read you a script telling you how they can't help you fix the thing they sold you.

3) Allow people to carry local compressed copies of all written knowledge, with 90% fidelity, but with references and access to those paid search engines.

And my favorite part, which is just a footnote I guess, is that everybody can move to a Linux desktop now. The chatbots will tell you how to fix your shit when it breaks, and in a pedagogical way that will gradually give you more control and knowledge of your system than you ever thought you were capable of having. Or you can tell it that you don't care how it works, just fix it. Now's the time to switch.

That's your free business idea for today: LLM Linux support. Train it on everything you can find, tune it to be super-clippy. Charge people $5 a month. The AI that will free you from their AI.

Now we just need to annihilate web 2.0, replace it with peer-to-peer encrypted communications, and we can leave the web to the spammers and the spies.

fsloth• 11 months ago

"everybody can move to a Linux desktop now"

People use whatever UI comes with their computer. I don't think that's going to change.

tim3338• 11 months ago

That theory was tried when Walmart sold Linux computers but it didn't work. People returned them because they couldn't run their usual software - Excel and the like.

jcranmer2• 11 months ago

Well, for starters, it would make The Economist's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype.

[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...

gizajob• 11 months ago

If you back every horse in a race, you win every time.

svara• 11 months ago

I'm perfectly happy reading different, well-argued cases in a magazine even if they contradict each other.

gyomu• 11 months ago

Why would you expect opinion pieces from different people to agree with one another?

I’m curious about exploring the topics “What if the war in Ukraine ends in the next 12 months” just as much as “What if the war in Ukraine keeps going for the next 10 years”, doesn’t mean I expect both to happen.

buu700• 11 months ago

To add to your point, both article titles are questions that start with "What if". The same person could have written both and there would be no contradiction.

jaredklewis• 11 months ago

This comment reminds me of the forever present HN comments that take a form like "HN is so hypocritical. In this thread commenters are saying they love X, when just last week in a thready about Y, commenters were saying that they hated X."

kamikazeturtles• 11 months ago

All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team.

Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.

watwut2• 11 months ago

I will bite here. It is completely valid comment. It points out to the fact that seeming consensus in this thread can not be taken as a sign that there is actually a consensus.

People on HN do not engage in discussion with different opinions on certain topics and prefer to avoid disagreement on those topic.

some_guy_nobel• 11 months ago

Well, it's better the same publication publish views contradicting their past than never changing their views with new info.

Kurtz79• 11 months ago

I don’t see anything inherently wrong in a news site reporting different views on the same topic.

I wish more would do that and let me make up my own mind, instead of pursuing a specific editorial line cherry-picking what news to comment and how to spin them, which seems to be the case for most (I’m talking in general terms).

gilbetron• 11 months ago

I don't understand, that recent article is a fairly balanced take on what the title literally asks: What if? It examines what if the hype is true, or what if it is partially true. That seems like a good article. You might have a point if the article was, "The hype is true: examining how the world will now change" or something.

akomtu3• 11 months ago

Normal? AI is an alien technology to us, and we are being "normalized" to become compatible with it.

aeternum3• 11 months ago

AI actually seems far less alien than steam engines, trains, submarines, flight, and space travel.

People weren't sure if human bodies could handle moving at >50mph.

akomtu3• 11 months ago

All those steam engines, trains and submarines were steps toward what we are seeing now. AI is the logical culmination and the purpose of technology.

giardini3• 11 months ago

How about a link that works?

Neither the OP's URL nor djoldman's archive link allow access to the article!8-((

giardini3• 11 months ago

OK, now djoldman's archive link above works!

Havoc• 11 months ago

A better starting point imo is that it is a general-purpose technology. It can have a profound effect on society yet not be magic/AGI.

j45• 11 months ago

Absolutely. The first version to the world was the 3rd or 4th version of ChatGPT itself.

Some can remember the difference between iPhone 1 and 4 and where it took off with the latter.

empath75• 11 months ago

https://books.google.com/books?id=-fG_NOxltlEC&pg=PA25&dq=Co...

Computer's Aren't Pulling Their Weight (1991)

There were _so many_ articles in the late 80s and early 90s about how computers were a big waste of money. And again in the late 90s, about how the internet was a waste of money.

We aren't going to know the true consequences of AI until kids that are in high school now enter the work force. The vast majority of people are not capable of completely reordering how they work. Computers did not help Sally Secretary type faster in the 1980s. That doesn't mean they were a waste of money.

boredtofears• 11 months ago

You mean the same kids that are currently cheating their way through their education at record rates due to the same technology? Can't say I'm optimistic.

bnchrch• 11 months ago

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise
- Socrates (399 BC)
The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress
- Peter the Hermit (1274)

tim3338• 11 months ago

You could argue that in terms of human wellbeing, computers and the internet didn't make that much difference. People did ok in the 1960s.

westurner• 11 months ago

AI is probably more of an amplifier for technological change than fire or digital computers; but IDK why we would use a different model for this technology (and teams and coping with change).

Diffusion of innovations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations :

The diffusion of an innovation typically follows an S-shaped curve which often resembles a logistic function.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658336 :

[ "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" (2009) ] also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages

Transforming, Performing, Reforming, [Adjourning]

Carnal Coping Cycle: Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, and Internalization

csours• 11 months ago

If you make something cheap, then it will be cheap.

LLMs may set a record for time between specialized/luxury goods and commodity.

There may be a price floor, but it's not very high.

In My Opinion.

---

Ever think about why restaurants pay someone to wash the dishes?

In my house, I have a machine that does that.

In a restaurant, the machine is too slow, and not compatible with the rest of the system of the restaurant.

Until we hit singularity, AI has to be compatible with the rest of the system.

fragmede• 11 months ago

Restaurants have machines for washing dishes. They do pay people to do the dish washing, but commercial dishwashing machines exist, and they work differently than home machines. They're large stainless steel monsters, some with a conveyor belt, others operate vertically. They usually use high temp water rather than soap to do the cleaning.

eg https://youtu.be/Nk_0j936_DY

g42gregory2• 11 months ago

While I feel silly to take seriously something printed in The Economist, I would like to mention that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of any technology and underestimate its long-term impacts. Maybe AI will follow the same route?

65• 11 months ago

Ah yes, disgraced tabloid The Economist, no one should ever take their writing seriously!

g42gregory2• 11 months ago

I used to read it and subscribe to it, a while back. I would not technically categorize them as a tabloid. They serve a different purpose.

mmargenot4• 11 months ago

At least within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products. While many of these fail, things like agents and other approaches for handling foundation models are only expanding in use cases. Agents themselves are hardly a year old as part of common discourse on AI, though technologists have been building POCs for longer. I've been very impressed with the wave of tools along the lines of Claude Code and friends.

Maybe this will end up relegated to a single field, but from where I'm standing (from within ML / AI), the way in which greenfield projects develop now is fundamentally different as a result of these foundation models. Even if development on these models froze today, MLEs would still likely be prompted to start with feeding something to a LLM, just because it's lightning fast to stand up.

andy99• 11 months ago

Its probably cliche but I think it's both overhyped and under hyped, and for the same reason. They hype comes from "leadership" types that don't understand what LLMs actually do and so imagine all sorts of nonsense (replacing vast swaths of jobs or autonomously writing code) but don't understand how valuable a productivity enhancer and automation tool to can be. Eventually hype and reality will converge, but unlike e.g. blockchain or even some of the less bullshit "big data" and similar trends, there's no doubt that access to an LLM is a clear productivity enhancer for many jobs.

mallowdram4• 11 months ago

AI was a colossal mistake. A lazy primate's total failure of imagination. It conflated the "conduit metaphor paradox" from animal behavior with "the illusion of prediction/error prediction/error minimization" from spatiotemporal dynamical neuroscience with complete ignorance of the "arbitrary/specific" dichotomy in signaling from coordination dynamics. AI is a short cut to nowhere. It's an abrogation of responsibility in progress of signaling that required we evolve our lax signals that instead doubles down on them. CS destroys society as a way of pretend efficiency to extract value from signals. It's deeply inferior thinking.

boringg• 11 months ago

I think the payment model is still not there which is making everything blurry. Until we figure out how much people have to pay to use it and all the services built on its back it will remain challenging to figure out full value prop. That and a lot of company are going to go belly up when they have to start paying the real cost instead of growth acquisition phase.

jebarker2• 11 months ago

I don’t think a payment model can be figured out until the utility of the technology justifies the true cost of training and running the models. As you say, right now it’s all subsidized based on the belief it will become drastically more useful. If that happens I think the payment model becomes simple.

mallowdram4• 11 months ago

The immaterial units are arbitrary, so 'agents' are themselves arbitrary, ie illusory. They will not arrive except as being wet nursed infinitely. The developers neglected to notice the fatal flaw, there are specific targets but automating the arbitrary never reaches them, never. It's an egregious monumental fly in the ointment.

kragen9• 11 months ago

What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? Because I don't see the "explosive changes and development of new products" you'd expect if things like Claude Code were a major advance.

apwell23• 11 months ago

What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI?

AI slop is a product

spicyusername5• 11 months ago

At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly.

Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they mature, they will become tightly integrated into certain categories of work and remain forever.

Whether the current pricing models or stock market valuations will survive the transition to boring technology is another question.

giardini3• 11 months ago

...right into the dustbin of computing history. But possibly faster than most other technologies.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 11 months ago

"So a paper published earlier this year by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two computer scientists at Princeton University, is notable for the unfashionably sober manner in which it treats AI: as "normal technology"."

The paper:

https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d6e33a074ac9269e4511e5d...

"Differences about the future of AI are often partly rooted in differing interpretations of evidence about the present. For example, we strongly disagree with the characterization of generative AI adoption as rapid (which reinforces our assumption about the similarity of AI diffusion to past technologies)."

glitchc• 11 months ago

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

MengerSponge• 11 months ago

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

ripped_britches• 11 months ago

Nope they started an AI company and then started messing around with robotics and then landing on LLMs as a runway.

lucumo• 11 months ago

Meh. People have been calling much dumber algorithms "AI" for decades. You guys are just pedants.

ViscountPenguin• 11 months ago

I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs.

I don't think erasing history, and saying that nothing Peter Norvig worked on was "AI" makes any sense at all.

ACCount378• 11 months ago

LLMs were the first introduction to AI for a lot of people. And AI effect is as strong as it ever was.

So now, there's a lot of "not ackhtually intelligent" going around!

dybber• 11 months ago

The issue is that what is considered AI in the general population is a floating definition, with only the newest advances being called AI in media etc. Is internet search AI? Is route planning?

Technology as a term has the same problem, “technology companies” are developing the newest digital technologies.

A spoon or a pencil is also technology according to definition, but a pencil making company is not considered a technology company. There is some quote by Alan Kay about this, but can’t find it now.

I try to avoid both terms as they change meaning depending on the receiver.

AngryData• 11 months ago

I, and im willing to bet many other people, also had an issue with previous things being called AI too. Just none of it became a prevalent enough topic for many people to hear complaints about its usage because the people who were actually talking about algorithms and AI already knew the limitations of what they were talking about, unless it was marketing materials but most people ignore marketing material claims because they are almost always complete bullshit.

coldtea5• 11 months ago

I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs.

And it was fine there, because nobody, not even a layman, would mixup those with regular human intelligence (or AGI).

And laymen didn't care about those AI products or algorithms except as novelties, specicialized tools (like chess engines), or objects of ridicule (like the Clippy).

So we might be using AI as a term, but it was either as a techical term in the field, or as a vague term the average layman didn't care about much, and whose fruits would never conflate with general intelligence.

But now people attribute intelligence of the human kind to LLMs all the time, and not just laymen either.

That's the issue the parent wants to point.

goku12• 11 months ago

Intelligence doesn't imply sentience, does it? Is there an issue in calling a non-sentient system intelligent?

dcanelhas2• 11 months ago

It depends on how intelligence is defined. In the traditional AI sense it is usually "doing things that, when done by people, would be thought of as requiring intelligence". So you get things like planning, forecasting, interpreting texts falling into "AI" even though you might be using a combinatorial solver for one, curve fitting for the other and training a language model for the third. People say that this muddies the definition of AI, but it doesn't really need to be the case.

Sentience as in having some form of self-awareness, identity, personal goals, rankings of future outcomes and current states, a sense that things have "meaning" isn't part of the definition. Some argue that this lack of experience about what something feels like (I think this might be termed "qualia" but I'm not sure) is why artificial intelligence shouldn't be considered intelligence at all.

hliyan• 11 months ago

Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence.

But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence has some form on internal randomness, plus an internal world model against which such randomized output could get validated.

tim3338• 11 months ago

Using normal usage, LLMs are one type of AI (computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence) and no AI produced so far seems sentient (ability to experience feelings and sensations).

Definitions from the Wikipedia articles.

Frieren• 11 months ago

Adoption is also hampered by the fact that much knowledge is tacit and organisation-specific, data may not be in the right format and its use may be constrained by regulation.

The article mentions three times regulations as a problem. It never says what such regulations are. Is it the GDPR and the protection of people's data? Is it anti-discrimination regulations that AI bias break regularly? We do not know because the article does not say. Probably because they are knowledgeable enough to avoid publicly attacking citizens rights. But they lack the moral integrity to remove the anti-regulatory argument.

RobertEva• 11 months ago

I like the “normal tech” lens: diffusion and process change matter more than model wow. Ask a boring question—what got cheaper? If the answer is drafting text/code and a 10–30% cut in time-to-ship, that’s real; if it’s just a cool demo, it isn’t.

cainxinth• 11 months ago

Here’s what amazes me about the reaction to LLMs: they were designed to solve NLP, stunningly did so, and then immediately everyone started asking why they can’t do math well or reason like a human being.

aNoob7000• 11 months ago

Because the heads of tech companies jumped on TV and said that AGI was around the corner to basically prepare for job losses.

They just can't shut up about how AI is going to either save us all or kill us all.

lukev• 11 months ago

The VC economy depends on a hype cycle. If one doesn't exist, they'd manufacture one (see web 3.0), but LLMs were perfect.

joquarky2• 11 months ago

Well the job losses have certainly arrived.

Whether that is due to AI, WFH->offshoring, or end of ZIRP is anybody's guess.

All I know is any tech meetups I go to are full of people looking for work and the recruiters that normally stop by have vanished.

Planktonne• 11 months ago

LLMs were pitched as 'genuinely intelligent' rather than 'solving NLP'.

We had countless breathless articles about free will at the time, and though this has now decreased, the discourse is still warped by claims of 'PhD-level intelligence'.

The backlash isn't against LLMs, it's against lies.

nielsbot• 11 months ago

maybe a classic case of the sales team selling features you haven't built yet

tim3338• 11 months ago

AI might follow the path of a normal technology like the motor car which was fairly normal in itself but which had a dramatic effect on the rival solution of horses used for transport. It may have an unusual effect on humans because we are like the horses in this analogy.

tuatoru• 11 months ago

The authors themselves use the analogy of electric motors, which changed factories. But also gave us washing machines, refigerators, and vacuum cleaners, changing society. And skyscrapers, because elevators, changing cities.

Ai may be more like electricity than just electric motors. It gave us Hollywood and air travel. (Before electricity, aluminum as as expensive as platinum.)

As economists they are wedded to the idea that human wants are infinite, so as they things we do now are taken over, we will find other things to do: maybe wardrobe consultant, or interior designer, or lifestyle coach - things which only th rich can afford now, and which require a human touch. Maybe.

lae_originsto• 11 months ago

We’re working on VPM, a tool to make visuals/clips faster (AI model comparisons, quick edits, 5s video gen) → You can see a quick 2-minute how-to video here, curious what you think is missing in tools like this.

AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

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