AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

https://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2026/04/07/ai-end-digital-wave-technology-innovation-perez/

by surprisetalk • 3 months ago

187 274 3 months ago

thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com

jmstfv• 3 months ago

tangentially related, but as someone who built multiple internet businesses -- mostly unsuccessful, some mildly successful -- I barely have any new ideas to work on.

I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.

Cilvic• 3 months ago

I can relate to this, in the past I felt like I could write down pages of projects to try if only I had time. Now my mind immediately goes towards "do I want to manage this long term after the initial spark".

DougN7• 3 months ago

That made me wonder, honestly, if AI can build it, could AI manage it too?

Zealotux• 3 months ago

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

zemo2• 3 months ago

full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it

jerf• 3 months ago

AI is in spitting distance of being able to do that too.

foldU• 3 months ago

This sounds like a really unpleasant shopping experience to me.

addandsubtract2• 3 months ago

This whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.

littlexsparkee• 3 months ago

I applied there but the gamified, urgent dynamic of the shopping experience rubs me the wrong way, it's stacked against the user

ori_b• 3 months ago

We're racing to build hell.

roxolotl• 3 months ago

A hell that’s been widely documented in fiction as well. That’s the part that’s so wild to me about this. None of this was unseen. Across every medium the extreme commercialization and general collapse of the social contract due to AI has been described and a lot of the authors have been largely prophetic.

dw_arthur• 3 months ago

We have been since we bound consumption to the internet. All of this was inevitable after that.

coldpie3• 3 months ago

I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the street to the library, and checked out a goddamn book.

I was already getting disillusioned with the Internet as a learning resource during the SEO spam era, but the AI era has completely destroyed it.

TheOtherHobbes3• 3 months ago

For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait.

Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)

augustk• 3 months ago

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

csomar• 3 months ago

This was my experience as well trying to buy a charger. You can't trust anything. For brands that have their own store, some have such a bad experience that it's easier and less stressful to go to the store and buy directly from there.

thatjoeoverthr• 3 months ago

It's threatening to "unwind" the entire digital sector back to 1990. Online shopping damaged, job interviews done in person, essays by hand, exams proctored. Cover letters obsolete. There could be a "cognitive waterline" effect where older people who can't tell will continue living in an AI-generated bubble. Cover letters already are generated on demand specifically because people still claim to require them, even though we know they're not real anymore.

Could be an advantage to knowing this because you can step around it.

_You_ know it's AI, so you go in person to a store. Likewise, next time you hire, you can simply refuse to accept "cover letters".

anon22981• 3 months ago

I still write my cover letters myself. :( Though I do refine them with LLMs, but instruct to retain the tone and the feel of the writing.

randcraw3• 3 months ago

Clothes are a good example of what ails online shopping. When you physically visit a clothing store, you chose it knowing the quality and style of that merchant -- you thereby filter out a huge fraction of the market that you want to exclude from your search.

But online (because the available search criteria are so imprecise) your search brings up every possible form of clothing, especially the stuff that's a commodity (or hyped by major e-merchants) -- cheap, popular with 25 year olds, colorless, largely disposable. It's hopeless unless you yourself are a commodity -- indiscriminating, predictable, and totally average.

theshrike793• 3 months ago

From what I'm following the GenZ and GenA crowd, there are specific subcultures who are moving more to local stuff. DVDs, "cyberdecks", actual mp3 players with no streaming, Plex/Jellyfin setups, etc...

The world is, at least partially, healing.

bearjaws• 3 months ago

I could totally see it, recently there has been a social club opened near me and it has 100+ people attending weekly. All younger, 20-30 year olds in their early career.

Separately, I have a local camera repair shop and my friend told me its 2 months backlog to get your film based camera worked on.

Ultimately if the deal we get online is infinite tracking, infinite scrolling and infinite enshittification, real life start to sound a whole lot better.

Forgeties795• 3 months ago

Going to the local movie rental shop with my kids is the highlight of my week. What a bizarre sentence to write in 2026 but it’s absolutely 1000% better than modern streaming (outside of my Plex setup).

I gladly pay the (modest/token) late fees to help keep them open at this point. If someone set up a local arcade man…I’d be in heaven ha

HWR_142• 3 months ago

I gladly pay the (modest/token) late fees to help keep them open at this point

Keeping movies longer and paying late fees may be hurting them more than helping them. It's entirely possible that the late fees are underpriced to avoid scaring away customers. New customers going away disappointed they movie they want wasn't returned on time hurts them more than your late fees help.

jemmyw• 3 months ago

The question it raises is if this is the fake surge, the one we see, what is the real one we don't see? Renewable energy comes to mind. Robotics too but maybe that's too tied up with AI.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 months ago

I think robotics will be the next surge for sure. But I don't think it's really tied up with the LLM stuff either and it could be decades away.

In the end, it'll probably require something like model-based RL like Yann LeCun talks about and that's totally different to the LLMs.

pixl978• 3 months ago

Eh, robotics is going through explosive growth right now with the same computing power that's being used on LLMs. You can take human motion capture of a task, dump it in a robotics simulator for a few hours and get a model that can operate autonomously better than something that would have taken a half a year to teach just a few years back.

whizzter• 3 months ago

Space (Space-X showed that reusable rockets are feasible), Programmable health (Covid vaccine and remember that mRNA curing that dog?),etc.

Sadly, I think there's a risk we might also be heading towards a dark age with few advances since fundamental research has been squeezed away for being unprofitable or hobbled by a industrialized publishing/review-system for a while now and we've been coasting along on profitable applications rather than (expensive) breakthroughts in basics.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 3 months ago

I firmly believe that Renewable energy, the Solar+battery+EV stack, not LLMs, really is the biggest technology transformation of our times. Renewable energy really is surging, just it's on a longer timeline and unlike LLMs, it doesn't benefit venture capitalists to hype it. In fact many existing sectors deliberately downplay it. But we are in the middle of it.

Robotics? lights-out operations in automated factories are already a thing, so I don't know if they're the "next thing".

mRNA vaccines? Sure, they're a huge medical advance. With great potential, in that area. But it's just an area.

Space? Maybe, if we get past LEO, find something useful to do there, and don't succumb to Kessler syndrome.

pixl978• 3 months ago

Robotics? lights-out operations in automated factories are already a thing, so I don't know if they're the "next thing".

Eh, I do think this is kind of underestimating the changes in robotics that are occurring. LLMs incorporated with other ML kernels extend the capabilities a long way. That and the amount of computing power now usable to train robotics is far far larger.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 months ago

The theory doesn't seem to make much sense to me - like why can't there be simultaneous technological revolutions? And why would they last an arbitrary 50-60 years?

People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off.

That could do with a solid citation tbh. The anti-AI people are really vocal on social media but personally I like having the AI results given how awful navigating the modern internet has become with all the cookie banners and anti-Ad Blocker popups etc.

Honestly, the LLMs seem like the most transformative technology we've had since the release of the iPhone.

parrellel• 3 months ago

I mean when I needed to look up something I used to just google it.

Now, with the advent of LLMs I've had to pull out my old textbooks from storage.

tom_• 3 months ago

50-60 years is far from arbitrary: it's very roughly two generations (plus a bit of extra time, to ensure the process takes). 50-60 years gives enough time for a generation to grow up and reach adulthood who have never known anything other than the post-revolution state.

dasil003• 3 months ago

It seems really premature to talk about AI being the end of anything. What’s at an end stage is adoption of smart phones and monetizing human attention. That’s been the fuel that powered the last quarter century of tech gains, and while still huge in absolute terms it has been running out of steam as a growth engine and facing cultural pushback (eg. Social media lawsuits) for a while.

AI so far has really only shown massive utility for programming. It has broad potential across almost all knowledge work, but it’s unclear how much of that can be fulfilled in practice. There are huge technical, UX and social hurdles. Integrating middle brow chatbots everywhere is not the end game.

neals2• 3 months ago

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

embedding-shape5• 3 months ago

Really? How long you've been a developer? I've been almost exclusively doing "agent coding" for the last year + some months, been a professional developer for a decade or something. Tried just now to write some random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually" and seems my muscle memory works just as well as two years ago.

I'm wondering if this is something that hits new developers faster than more experienced ones?

mathgeek• 3 months ago

Probably depends on the individual. Senior developer here and I've always offloaded boilerplate and other "easy to google" things to search engines and now AI. Just how my brain and memory work. Anything I haven't used recently isn't worth keeping (in my subconscious mind's opinion anyway).

farresito• 3 months ago

I'm wondering if this is something that hits new developers faster than more experienced ones?

Almost certainly, at least according to Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve.

intended2• 3 months ago

It a side effect of using AI.

People using AI for tasks (essay writing in the MIT study linked below) showed lower ownership, brain connectivity, and ability to quote their work accurately.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

There was a MSFT and Carnegie Mellon study that saw a link between AI use, confidence in ones skills, confidence in AI, and critical thinking. The takeaway for me is that people are getting into “AI take the wheel” scenarios when using GenAI and not thinking about the task. This affects people novices more than experts.

If you managed to do critical thinking, and had relegated sufficient code to muscle memory, perhaps you aren’t as impacted.

askonomm• 3 months ago

Same for me. Been fully agentic for half a year or so, still remember the myriad of programming languages and things just as well if there's no AI present at all. Hard to shake 15 years of experience that quick, unless maybe that experience never fully cemented?

Maybe the difference between actually knowing stuff vs surface level? I know a lot of devs just know how to glue stuff together, not really how to make anything, so I'd imagine those devs lose their skills much faster.

eru2• 3 months ago

I can tell you that I can still code Python and Haskell just fine (I did those in vim without bothering to set up any language assistance), but Rust I only ever did with AI and IDE and compiler assistance.

juvoly• 3 months ago

Experience isn't the problem. I have 20+ years of C++ development, built commercial software in Java, Rust, Python, played with assembly, Erlang, Prolog, Basic.

Played with these coding agents for the last couple weeks and instantly noticed the brainrot when I was staring at an empty vim screen trying to type a skeleton helloworld in C.

Luckily the right idioms came back after couple of hours, but the experience gave me a big scare.

hansmayer5• 3 months ago

random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually"

Right, sounds very credible to me. What did you write, an addition function in each of those?

alexjplant• 3 months ago

I recently had to write a coding interview question for candidates at my current job. I wrote the outline and had Claude generate synthetic data for it. I then wrote the solution without assistance to make sure it was viable (and because I wouldn't ask somebody to do something I wouldn't myself). I had no trouble getting it done in 20 minutes in a language that I haven't used actively in around a year and a half.

I do still write stuff manually frequently - I often spend 5 minutes writing structs or function signatures to make sure that the LLM won't misunderstand or make something up. Maybe that's why I haven't lost it.

dukky• 3 months ago

I thought this comment was going the opposite way - previously no internet/googling but now you can run a local model and figure things out without the need for internet at all

wanderingstan3• 3 months ago

Mine as well. 2 years ago my mind was blown that I could code in a language I didn’t know (scala) while on a log train ride with no internet (Amtrak) using a local model on a laptop. Couldn’t believe it.

pablogiuffrida• 3 months ago

probably a junior/semi sr developer?

himata41133• 3 months ago

I haven't written complex code for so long I forgot how I used to type && on my keyboard. Wild times.

jasonlotito• 3 months ago

Others have addressed other aspects of this, but I want to address this:

I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff.

I don't know exactly what you mean by boilerplate stuff, but honestly, that's stuff we should have automated away prior to AI. We should not be writing boilerplate.

I'd highly encourage you to take the time to automate this stuff away. Not even with AI, but with scripts you can run to automate boilerplate generation. (Assuming you can't move it to a library/framework).

bdangubic3• 3 months ago

I read the "boilerplate" in that comment as "basic" meaning "I don't know how to center a div" or "I do not know how to remove duplicates from a collection"

DrewADesign• 3 months ago

Jeez, I never remembered boilerplate stuff anyway. Losing grasp of your commonly used, slightly more involved code idioms in your key languages would probably be where I’d draw the ‘be concerned’ line. Like if I get into a car after years of only using public transit, I wouldn’t be too worried if I couldn’t immediately use a standard transmission smoothly. If I no longer could intuitively interact with urban traffic or merge onto a highway, I’d be a lot more concerned.

bandrami3• 3 months ago

So many use cases for LLMs I've read leave me asking "did none of you have a working text editor?"

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

Lisp macros had pretty much solved the boiler plate problem decades ago.

dleslie• 3 months ago

All skill degrade with disuse. For example, here in Canada we have observed a literacy and numeracy skills curve that peaks with post-secondary education and declines with retirement.[0]

Use it or lose it, as it were.

0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/dq241...

MattRix2• 3 months ago

That is one factor, but it’s not the whole thing. The other key element is “cognitive offloading” where your brain stops doing stuff when it thinks it is redundant.

This is similar to the photo-taking impairment effect where people will remember an event more poorly if they took photos at the event. Their brain basically subconsciously decides it doesn’t need to remember the event because the camera will remember the event instead.

dwedge2• 3 months ago

Will you do anything differently knowing this? Does the risk of LLMs being unaffordable to you in the near future make you wary about losing the skills?

olmo23• 3 months ago

I don't think it would take very long to regain those skills either.

joseda-hg• 3 months ago

Open Models are currently within reach for most of the kind of writing I do I still decide what and why it generates what it does, I just don't do it manually

I'm not super worried, either I still do the last leg of the work, or I go back an abstraction level with my prompts and work there

XCSme• 3 months ago

I guess writing code is now like creating punch-cards for old computers. Or even more recently, as writing ASM instead of using a higher level language like C. Now we simply write our "code" in a higher language, natural language, and the LLM is the compiler.

TheRoque• 3 months ago

I cringe every time I read this "punch card" narrative. We are not at this stage at all. You are comparing deterministic stuff and LLMs which are not deterministic and may or may not give you what you want. In fact I personally barely use autonomous Agents in my brownfield codebase because they generate so much unmaintainable slop.

bigfishrunning• 3 months ago

Except that compiler is a non-deterministic pull of a slot-machine handle. No thanks, I'll keep my programming skills; COBOL programmers command a huge salary in 2026, soon all competent programmers will.

bilekas2• 3 months ago

Now we simply write our "code" in a higher language, natural language, and the LLM is the compiler.

No we don't and we never should actually, compilers need to be deterministic.

acedTrex3• 3 months ago

This is not what a compiler is in any sense.

fendy30023• 3 months ago

In my 7th years of professionally programming node, not even once I remember the express or html boilerplate, neither is the router definition or middleware. Yet I can code normally provided there's internet accessible. It's simply not worth remembering, logic and architecture worth more IMO

malfist• 3 months ago

Einstein famously refused to learn people's phone numbers, stating that he could look them up in the phonebook whenever he needed it.

I don't think there is that much value in memorizing rarely used, easily looked up information.

1718627440• 3 months ago

I remember the "HTML boilerplate", because I don't see it as boilerplate. I don't memorize it, I reconstruct it from the base concepts.

Yet I can code normally provided there's internet accessible.

I'm the opposite. Yes I need my computer to test things fully, but I'm able to code on paper. I want my computer to be a complete sufficient node, so I mostly install documentation and my computer is mostly not connected to the internet, unless I actively enable it to do a specific thing.

bandrami3• 3 months ago

This conversation keeps missing me because I don't think I've typed out boilerplate in like 20 years.

Were people actually physically typing every character of the software they were writing before a couple of years ago?

danelski• 3 months ago

Couple of years ago I was (as a human being, not my career span) 20. Spare for the usual StackOverflow / blog snippets, that was my experience and I suppose most of those just starting out. I think it's very recent to have fresh grads that barely type code themselves.

sph3• 3 months ago

Interesting. I don’t think my brother has written boilerplate in 20 years either. He’s a chef.

I on the other hand am a software engineer, so writing code is part of the job title.

paulryanrogers• 3 months ago

Yes. Until the RSI sets in. Then you learn copy-paste, templating, abstracting and aliases real fast!

neals2• 3 months ago

Yes, I write a lot of things in notepad++ actually, every single character. It really feels like a craft and gives me the same joy as others experience with woodworking or gardening.

desireco42• 3 months ago

Honestly, you shouldn't be working on a plane. This thing where people are plugged in all the time is just insane.

Yes, you lost some abilities. Install local model so you have someone to talk to while you are on the plane ;)

acedTrex3• 3 months ago

If this was me you couldn't waterboard this info out of me.

marliechiller• 3 months ago

Why? Is this is because of shame or fear of losing your job?

I_am_tiberius• 3 months ago

Soon everyone will run local models for simple stuff like that.

falcor84• 3 months ago

Maybe it's my memory issues, but I personally could never remember basic boilerplate. 30 years ago I would spend half of my time in Borland's help menu coupled with grepping through man pages. These days I use LLMs, including ollama when on a plane. I don't feel worse off.

aworks• 3 months ago

It was a long time ago but I attended a session by IBM at an OO conference. The speaker's claim was that the half-life of programming language knowledge was 6 months i.e. if not reinforced, that how fast it goes.

I learned the Q array language five years ago and then didn't touch it for six months. I was surprised how little I remembered when I tried to resume.

rafterydj• 3 months ago

For my money, while surely it must have been jarring, that experience would seem to say that on-device LLMs are more important programming tools than package repositories.

As another commenter said, the affordability of LLM subscriptions (or, as others are predicting, the lack thereof) is the primary concern, not the technology itself stealing away your skills.

I am far from the definitive voice in the does-AI-use-corrupt-your-thinking conversation, and I don't want to be. I don't want LLMs to replace my thinking as much as the next person, but I also don't want to shun anything useful that can be gained from these tools.

All that said, I do feel that perhaps "dumber" LLMs that work on-device first will allow us to get further and be better, more reliable tools overall.

nprateem• 3 months ago

I haven't been able to code without reading a sample of code for years before AI. Maybe it's just what happens when you're polyglot but I remember thinking even stupid things like how to declare a class in whatever lang I had to see. But once I saw a sample of code I'd get back into it. Then there's stuff I never committed to memory, like the nonsensical dance of reading from a file in go, or whatever.

So I don't think this is all AI tbh.

sph3• 3 months ago

Good news for us Luddites. Keep it up.

simianwords5• 3 months ago

I keep seeing this repeated but isn’t it a good thing you don’t remember boilerplate? This is not information that deserves to be memorised.

The fact that this is being called out is strange.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding.

I do use AI daily to help me enhance code but then... I also very regularly turn off, physically, the link between a sub-LAN at home and the Internet and I still can work. It's incredibly relaxing to work on code without being connected 24/7. Other machines (like kid's Nintendo switch) can still access the Internet: but my machines for developing are cut off. And as I've got a little infra at home (Proxmox / VMs), I have quite a few services without needing to be connected to the entire world: for example I've got a pastebin, a Git server, a backuping procedure, all 100% functional without needing to be connected to the net (well 99% for the backuping procedure as the encrypted backup files won't be synch'ed with remote servers until the connection is operational).

Sure it's not a "laptop on a plane", but it's also not "24/7 dependent on Sam Altman or Anthropic".

I'll probably enhance my setup at some point with a local Gemma model too.

And all this is not mutually exclusive with my Anthropic subscription: at the flick of a switch (which is right in front of me), my sub-LAN can access the Internet again.

m3kw9• 3 months ago

boiler plate stuff will be like assembly code in the past, you won't need to use it.

asxndu• 3 months ago

I wrote about this and the response from most friends was mostly dismissive.[0]

The early this year, in my country (Uganda) the entire internet was shutdown during elections for close to 1 week.

A lot of devs in the country couldn't do anything during that period.

So much, some actually claimed the moved to nearby Nairobi Kenya.

https://asindu.xyz/a-single-reason-to-not-vibe-code/

xtracto• 3 months ago

I'm old enough to have programmed C in IBM/PC with the book Turbo C/C++ [1] at my desk side as reference, around 1993.

I remember at that time, my "mentor" suggested to memorize all the "keywords" from C (which were few). But given my bad memory I had to constantly look at the book.

Aaah how times have changed.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1601323M/Turbo_C_C

luxcem• 3 months ago

I thought the same but I tried to create a small Django project with APIs, small React frontend from scratch, no LLM, no autocomplete, just a text editor. I was surprised it was all still there after a couple of hours. Not sure it's a skill that useful today, it feels like remembering your multiplication table.

negura2• 3 months ago

anecdata that is an apropos to the actual submission is somehow at the top of the thread with 100 (now +1) replies

awongh4• 3 months ago

I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things:

1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around

but- it will also be

2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities

The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the losses of the former. History says these transitions aren't easy on society.

But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?

hnthrow0287345• 3 months ago

That it's all about cost-cutting?

Cost cutting has less uncertainty than making something new, so they do that first. If something else comes along, then great.

This is also why the people should make the transition as difficult as possible for companies doing layoffs when the companies are paying proportionally very little in taxes compared to the people they are laying off.

damnesian• 3 months ago

Hard to understand, when essential human nature is so predictable? Sure, we will do novel things with it. But society in the main will use to it exploit labor. same as it ever was.

anthonypasq3• 3 months ago

are you under the impression life was better before capitalism?

simianwords5• 3 months ago

“Exploit labour” is just outdated Marxism. No self respecting economist believes this kind of rhetoric anymore but it only exists amongst west coded leftist.

It’s a sort of cynical fatalism to think everything is exploitation — directly coming from Marx.

It’s not exploitation to mutually agree on a deal. Most of population know this except Marxists!

dodu_4• 3 months ago

do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech?

Yes. It's a mostly shitty but very fast and relatively inexpensive replacement for things that already exist.

Give your best example of something that is novel, ie isn't just replacing existing processes at scale.

It's been 3 and a half years now since the initial hype wave. Maybe I genuinely missed the novel trillion dollar use case that isn't just labor disruption.

vjvjvjvjghv• 3 months ago

"Yes. It's a mostly shitty but very fast and relatively inexpensive replacement for things that already exist."

Wouldn't that apply to most technological advances? Cars, computers, cell phones.

jenniferhooley2• 3 months ago

I think that most people are pretty short-sighted about the utility cases right now (which is understandable given the negative feelings about a lot of what's currently going on).

There are a lot of really useful things that were impossible before. But none of these use cases are "easy," and they all take years of engineering to implement. So, all we see right now are trashy, vibe-code style "startups" rather than the actual useful stuff that will come over the years from experienced architects and engineers who can properly utilize this technology to build real products.

I'm someone who feels very frustrated with most of the chatter around AI - especially the CEOs desperate to devalue human labor and replace it - but I am personally building something utilizing AI that would have been impossible without it. But yeah, it's no walk in the park, and I've been working on it for three years and will likely be working on it for another year before it's remotely ready for the public.

When I started, the inference was too slow, the costs were too high, and the thinking-power was too poor to actually pull it off. I just hypothesized that it would all be ready by the time I launch the product. Which it finally is, as of a few months ago.

girvo• 3 months ago

It’s pretty decent for natural language -> query language tasks

But also you don’t need SOTA frontier models for that!

awongh4• 3 months ago

The most obvious thing is bio-tech, protein folding, drug discovery, etc. As in, things that have an actual positive effect on humanity (not just dollars).

I don't really get people who are dismissive about this aspect of AI- my original question wasn't about cost-efficiency of developing these things, but just that the technology itself is creating things that wouldn't have been possible before. It seems hard to refute.

Whether or not it's worth the cost is a different debate entirely- about how tech trees are developed and what the second order effects of technology are. There are so many examples- the computer itself, nuclear power, etc. I think AI is probably on the same order as these.

throwaway613746• 3 months ago

It's been a few years and I have yet to see a single novel thing come out of it. Even chatbots weren't novel when ChatGPT came out.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

It's disingenuous to say ChatGPT is not novel relative to older chatbots. The capabilities of ChatGPT compared to what came before were astonishing and continued to improve at a rapid rate.

butlike3• 3 months ago

So now the ancillary question from your example is: "Is hand-spun cotton better than industrialized polyester?"

TeMPOraL4• 3 months ago

Define better. Fast fashion sucks, but hand-spun cotton won't give you Kevlar or modern wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials for your furniture or... <insert half thousand different things adjacent to modern textile production>.

It's always win some, lose some with the economy, but technology itself opens previously impossible capabilities.

awongh4• 3 months ago

If you're implying that hand-spun cotton is better, that's an easy question to answer- people used to spend a huge amount of their income on clothing, also spending a huge amount of time washing it. Industrialization made clothing so much cheaper that it's now completely disposable. There's plenty of reasons why that's not a bad thing.

One reason people forget that "good quality" shoes existed was that you could only afford to buy one pair ever, not that things were made better, necessarily. (or could be both, but that replacing a pair of shoes was a financial hardship, because hand-made things, even back then, were expensive).

Even if you're against fast fasion I don't think anyone wants a pair of shoes to cost $10,000.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

What's the AI equivalent of industrialized polyester in your analogy?

From a consumer perspective, AI isn't really producing any new products with real market demand. Chatbots are fun, but there's no indication consumers are willing to pay for them.

isodev• 3 months ago

AI pessimism is hard to understand

Well, it really isn’t. First, this entire post makes two assumptions: 1) that AI adds more value to the process than it removes and 2) that it’s sustainable.

It’s not pessimism to want to validate these first.

Are AI “gains” really transformative or simply random opportunities for automation which we can achieve by other means anyway?

Can the world continue to afford “AI as a service” long enough for the gains to result in improvements that make it sustainable? Are we dooming our kids to a hellishly warm planet with no clear plan how to fix it?

It’s not pessimism, just simple project management if you ask me.

fridder• 3 months ago

Also I think over the past few years/decade the tech sector has lost any benefit of the doubt that everything that comes out of it is a "good thing".

packetlost3• 3 months ago

Are AI “gains” really transformative

They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context.

Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but the needle doesn't move much on the harder stuff. Without some sort of "memory" or continuous feedback system, these models don't learn from mistakes or successes which means humans have to be the cost function.

Maybe it's just because I'm burnt out or have a miner RSI at the moment, but it definitely saves me a bit of time as long as I don't generate a huge pile and actually read (almost) everything the models generate. The newer models are good at following instructions and pattern matching on needs if you can stub things out and/or write down specs to define what needs to happen. I'd say my hit rate is maybe 70%

sweezyjeezy5• 3 months ago

Well this is HN so a lot of us are pretty terrified of your 1). We went from 'you have a good job for the next couple of decades' to 'your job is at extreme risk for disruption from AI' in the space of like 5 years. Personally I have a family, I'm a bit old to retrain, but I never worked at a high-comp FAANG or anything so I can't just focus on painting unless my government helps me (note - not US/China). That's extremely anxiety-inducing, that a vague promise of novel new things does not come close to compensating.

Jcampuzano2• 3 months ago

I'm 33 and I feel sort of lucky that I'll still potentially have time to retrain. I'm fully prepared to within the next 5 years or so (and potentially much less) I'll probably need to retrain into a trade or something to stay relevant in any sort of field.

Many people claim its going to become a tool we use alongside our daily work, but its clear to me thats not how anybody managing a company sees it, and even these AI labs that previously tried to emphasize how much its going to augment existing workforces are pushing being able to do more with less.

Most companies are holding onto their workforce only begrudgingly while the tools advance and they still need humans for "something", not because they're doing us some sort of favor.

The way I see it unless you have specialized knowledge, you are at risk of replacement within the next few years.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?

The cost cutting is the only revenue producing models for the AI companies so far. It's being pitched as a way for corporations to fire a lot of employees and save money.

Revenue for the consumer facing products is not very impressive. Consumers are mostly satisfied with the free versions and very resistant to adding yet another channel to shove advertising at them.

jillesvangurp3• 3 months ago

Change is a constant in history. Stuff happens, and then we adjust. Big changes may result in short term confusion, anger, etc. All the classic signs of the five stages of grief basically.

If you step back a little, a lot of people simply don't see the forest for the trees and they start imagining bad outcomes and then panic over those. Understandable but not that productive.

If you look at past changes where that was the case you can see some patterns. People project both utopian and dystopian views and there's a certain amount of hysteria and hype around both views. But neither of those usually play out as people hope/predict. The inability to look beyond the status quo and redefine the future in terms of it is very common. It's the whole cars vs. faster horses thing. I call this an imagination deficit. It usually sorts itself out over time as people find out different ways to adjust and the rest of society just adjusts itself around that. Usually this also involves stuff few people predicted. But until that happens, there's uncertainty, chaos, and also opportunity.

With AI, there's going to be a need for some adjustment. Whether people like it or not, a lot of what we do will likely end up being quite easy to automate. And that raises the question what we'll do instead.

Of course, the flip side of automating stuff is that it lowers the value of that stuff. That actually moderates the rollout of this stuff and has diminishing returns. We'll automate all the easy and expensive stuff first. And that will keep us busy for a while. Ultimately we'll pay less for this stuff and do more of it. But that just means we start looking for more valuable stuff to do and buy. We'll effectively move the goal posts and raise the ambition. That's where the economical growth will come from.

This adjustment process is obviously going to be painful for some people. But the good news is that it won't happen overnight. We'll have time to learn new things and figure out what we can do that is actually valuable to others. Most things don't happen at the speed the most optimistic person wants things to happen. Just looking at inference cost and energy, there are some real constraints on what we can do at scale short term. And energy cost just went up by quite a lot. Lots of new challenges where AI isn't the easy answer just yet.

dinfinity3• 3 months ago

We are the horses, though.

At some point those became almost fully obsolete in a productive economical sense (they're just fancy toys now, basically). No 'raising the ambition' is ever going to change that. They are what they are and they can do what they can do.

I don't know about you, but if the something in "we'll find something to do" is becoming a toy for AI or very rich people, I'm not exactly hopeful about the future.

bluefirebrand2• 3 months ago

But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?

I frankly do not care how much novel stuff is "unlocked" with AI tech if it means I become unemployable due to it replacing all of my skills

cheesecompiler• 3 months ago

the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context

This is a burden of proof inversion: historically new technology has not resulted in optimistic outcomes. Quality of life improvements were side effects of capital accruing. AI optimism is the naïve option that requires justification.

ryandrake4• 3 months ago

Both 1) and 2) represent value almost entirely captured by businesses / business owners, and not captured by workers. For 1) the economic boost is captured by business while the losses are captured by workers. For 2) in theory, some new ideas will be created by individual people who get lucky and grow them into their own businesses, but if history is an accurate guide, most of the benefits of new inventions and technology will be captured by existing players.

lofaszvanitt• 3 months ago

The problem is, at the moment llms are not capable of proper brainstorming. And humans are quite shit in coming up with unique ideas. The great bottleneck is still money and dissemination of given product (marketing). So nothing changes. Just the usual capitalist thing where humans will be squeezed even further and revenue funneled from more entities to fewer ones.

techteach00• 3 months ago

I sort of agree with the premise of the article. I ask myself, did more non-technical people pick up AI chat bots when they were invented than picked up personal computers in the late 70s/early 80's? I think probably. From my conversations with others.

Forgeties795• 3 months ago

Part of this is because we aren’t paying the actual cost of these chatbots. If ChatGPT wasn’t essentially free for casual users then we’d definitely see a much smaller/slower adoption rate. I wonder if a single person using them, even paying for tokens, isn’t substantially subsidized. Probably not but I’m speculating.

If 3D printers could’ve given usage away for years directly in our homes then I bet we would’ve seen wider adoption there too.

zozbot234• 3 months ago

Chat bots can run on your local hardware these days, even mobile phone hardware. That's effectively free.

elAhmo• 3 months ago

Well, we are not paying for Gmail, Youtube, TikTok either, all sorts of other services that are free as well.

cowl• 3 months ago

personal computers in early 70s/80s were a considerable investment for little to no gain and especially no force pushed FOMO.

it costs you nothing to install/adopt an AI chat bot and it's being force fed to everyone at head turning loss in order to justify the push.

BirAdam• 3 months ago

The very first personal computers came out in 1972. In 1978, we got several. The PC came out in 1981. The computer boom didn't begin until 1992.

My wife is absolutely not technical, and she began using ChatGPT before me.

This is to say, I believe you to be correct here. The LLM adoption rate is many times the computer adoption rate. Non-technical people are immediately seeing the benefit of LLMs where they did not with computers in the 1970s.

aswegs8• 3 months ago

Could

lkm0• 3 months ago

These economic frameworks sure look like pareidolia to me

tomhillson2• 3 months ago

if this could last till a point where AI have actual automation ability, it's not a tool for humans anymore. it could have a identity and start to evolve literally. i don't understand why some people consider AI as tech revolution. maybe i'm into sf, but AI can be something other than just a tool.

cyclopeanutopia• 3 months ago

Surprising number of people here and in tech general lacks any imagination.

tomhillson2• 3 months ago

cuz youre focused on individual matters. it's the entire system, big picture. what human can do alone.

a-dub• 3 months ago

this perez model thing completely misses the communications revolutions of the telegraph, radio and television not to mention demonopolization of bell.

Then came AI, revealing new dynamics. ChatGPT’s breakthrough didn’t come from a garage startup but from OpenAI,

i thought the transformer and large language models came from google research.

There’s also social pushback—in the UK the campaigns against big ringroad schemes started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And perhaps we’re seeing some of that about AI. The U.S. map of local pushback against data centres from Data Center Watch covers the whole of the country, in red states and blue. People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off.

the us had the highway revolts. in most cities where the revolts succeeded it is widely heralded today as a success.

the data center hate is interesting. i think many people are just learning what data centers are. but that said, they've come to represent something different in recent years. previously they were part of the infrastructure that made industry hum, now public messaging from tech leaders and academics is along the lines of "this is how your livelihood is going to be replaced" while the institutions that are supposed to provide any sort of backstop are being dismantled or slashed to pieces by crazypants trumpist politics. i think focusing the energy on the tangible like mundane buildings is interesting, but the hate makes a lot of sense.

addressing the core thesis, i'd argue that ai is not the next step in the 70s digital technological wave (especially considering the future of ai compute is probably hybrid digital-analog systems), but rather is something fundamentally new that also changes how technology interacts with society and how economics itself will function.

previous systems helped, these systems can do. that's a fundamental change and one that may not be compatible with our existing economic systems of social sorting and mobility. the big question in my mind is: if it succeeds, will we desperately try to hold onto the old system (which essentially would be a disaster that freezes everyone in place and creates a permanent underclass) or will we evolve to a new, yet to be defined, system? and if so, how will the transition look?

barrkel4• 3 months ago

The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article.

I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software.

There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and signing up prodigious amounts of recurring revenue every month.

nerptastic• 3 months ago

Anthropic today, who next week? If locally run models ever get to the point where they can reliably solve... 85% of what the frontier cloud models can do, I think many would be willing to accept slightly less problem solving ability and just run the thing locally.

All hypothetical, but if compute + AI research continues at pace, in 5 years we should see extremely good local models.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

Yes it's not clear to me that AI companies have a defensible moat against open models.

sdsd• 3 months ago

As a user of local models, it's well above 85% already. I use frontier models at work and local models for home use because my day to day tasks are well within what DeepSeek can handle.

surgical_fire• 3 months ago

As far as I know Anthropic still bleeds money, as Open AI also does.

They will keep bleeding money by the way.

barrkel4• 3 months ago

I don't believe the marginal customer of Claude Code is loss-making.

petra• 3 months ago

The question is whether robotics will look like a some number of platforms with little development to adapt to different scenarios, or a million types of machines that are highly fit for purpose.

Because the first situation won't create that many jobs. The second one might.

barrkel4• 3 months ago

I expect hybrids. Something general has to be adaptable for what will be an expensive capital purchase.

The human form factor - torso up anyway - is probably easier to bootstrap on a general basis; keyed off of human data. But I don't like the failure modes of bipedal robots - imagine a robot flailing around trying to regain balance, in any setting with humans around.

I'm no expert of course, just pontificating.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article.

True but in common parlance "AI" has come to mean LLMs.

Software is eating the world

The premise of the article is software ATE the world and there isn't much left to eat that hasn't been eaten.

madaxe_again• 3 months ago

I chuckled at:

> At the early stage of a surge, investment tends to be patchy and not fully understood—the sector exists but it is not completely legible yet.

He says this in the context that AI clearly doesn’t fit this pattern, as the investment has been enormous.

I feel like he and everyone else has a scale problem, due to the tendency to equate AI to LLMs - the investment is patchy and not fully understood - I really don’t think we’ve seen anything more than the pretremors at this point - as the scale of the change is just as incomprehensible to the world at large now as it was when the steam engine was just a slightly better way of getting water out of a mine than a donkey.

barrkel4• 3 months ago

Software hasn't eaten all it could, in my book, and AI makes a lot more stuff legible to software.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

It could also be a huge bubble like everyone seems to agree about.

LunicLynx• 3 months ago

And with robots, this also applies to the physical world.

alexwebb2• 3 months ago

I view this post as primarily pattern-matching and storytelling. But I think there’s a buried truth there, and that they were nibbling at the edges of it when they started talking about the overlapping stages.

There are some very interesting information network theories that present information growth as a continually evolving and expanding graph, something like a virus inherent to the universe’s structure, as a natural counterpoint to entropy. And in that view, atomic bonds and cells and towns and railroads and network connections and model weights are all the same sort of thing, the same phenomenon, manifesting in different substrates at different levels of the shared graph.

To me, that’s a much better and deeper explanation that connects the dots, and offers more predictive power about what’s next.

Highly recommend the book Why Information Grows to anyone whose interest is piqued by this.

ETH_start• 3 months ago

Humanity has industrialized the production of intelligence. We're nowhere near the end of what this leads to.

justonepost2• 3 months ago

it be the end of the paradigm myth, and eventually, the Anthropocene

it be the beginning of vast and infinite potentia spreading out beyond us

Invictus0• 3 months ago

ItS thE eND of ThE InTeRwEbS

himata41133• 3 months ago

Every time I see these I am thinking to myself: Is microsoft copilot a problem of implementation or the capability of the models?

I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one and you had copilot everywhere and I mean not the way it is now instead you're presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox rather than trying to figure out how to use a computer which is why I am not quick to discredit "microslop", they're most likely pivoting windows to how it will look like in the future.

Obviously, the strongest argument here is that it should have been an entirely different product such as "Windows AI" where the entire system is designed around it. But if you look at their current implementation it's more of a copilot which is just there, letting you know it exists. Obviously not all of these features were thought through such as recall, that should have been dead and burried since it doesn't offer that much real value a magical box that takes in english sentences and does roughly what you want.

At the end of the day it's a question if AI will/is doing more harm than good. AI has really only existed in this form for a little more than 3 years and really started shining since the advent of Opus 4.5. We went from having models producing more security vulnerabilities than one can count to fixing obscure human made ones and the capabilities will keep increasing (if anthropic is to be believed). We will enter an era where it will have 95%+ accuracy in doing what a typical computer user would want from AI and there's really nothing anyone can do to stop it.

So my opinion is that AI will be the next big thing and it might spread way beyond what we can even imagine.

I think that we will have things similar to non technical people that just talk on the phone with an AI agent to get a website done, register a domain and have a website done within a 1 hour phone call all for pennies while the AI has access to their financials, mail and other things. All of that is relatively possible today with the simple caviat of security and I do believe we have enough smart people in the world that can figure out how to make AI better at rejecting social engineering than 99% of humans.

chromacity2• 3 months ago

I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one ... presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox

I don't know. We've been telling ourselves things like that about user interfaces for a long time. For decades, it was pretty much universally understood that everyone would prefer to talk to their computer instead of using a keyboard. Now that you can, no one really wants to. In fact, now that we can text / email / IM other people, we don't talk to them as much as before.

One obvious problem with the interface you're proposing is that sometimes, it's easier to do the thing than to explain precisely what you want. For example, it takes much longer to ask ChatGPT what's the weather forecast for this week, and then read the flowery response, than to press Ctrl-N, "wea", enter, and see it at a glance in a consistent format with pictograms.

himata41133• 3 months ago

You already know how to use a computer or a phone, but take someone who has never seen or used a smartphone, computer or a laptop. I think the story will be very different.

boh• 3 months ago

AI is destroying the economic premise that has drawn so much investment into Silicon Valley. It's going from a capital light business model with network driven moats that allow market domination, to a capital heavy, high burn-rate model with the potential to not only offer ZERO moat protection but destroy the ones that already exist. Cloud infrastructure + vibe coding now make it possible to quickly replace existing apps with custom fit alternatives. Open source+cheap Chinese LLMs may not be as good as Opus but maybe good enough turns out to be good enough ( Sun Microsystems Vs. Linux is a good example). Currently AI has just as much potential destroying Silicon Valley as it does building it up.

pixl978• 3 months ago

That sounds like Silicon Valley's fault for taking the actual silicon out of the valley.

Sounds like it's best to be the shovel manufacturer now.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

The open weight LLMs seem a prime candidate for Innovator's Dilemma style disruption.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 months ago

Yeah, I agree with TFA I think.

Introduction of new mass production techniques often has an initial wave of high profit when early adopters have an initial advantage... existing workers are more efficient... but this will followed by a long term decline in the rate of profit as margins aggressively fall ...

e.g. if every software company uses AI to double its coding speed, the price of software will eventually drop by half.

As "AI" becomes a required and common commodity input, competition will drive prices down until the productivity gains are entirely captured by customers, leading to margin compression across the sector.

Also... firms will be forced to invest in using AI just to stay in the same place. If you don't adopt it aggressively, you'll be priced out; if you do, your margins still shrink because everyone else did too.

So... yeah, I don't think this is the next part of a "digital wave" if that means giant increase in new startup investments and SaaS companies etc, it's actually probably the start of I think a margin collapse and consolidation in our industry.

If it's 2x easier to build e.g. a CRM, we’ll end up with 10x more CRMs, leading to a "race to the bottom" on pricing.

The last 15 years of investment by people like YC etc seems to have been in businesses that were "like Uber but for <X>". Service businesses on which a small layer of software automated things, and drove some sort of explosion of customers. I don't really see how VCs are going to separate wheat from chaff on this front anymore? If anybody can do it.... what's the value of any particular approach over the others? I'd think the result would be consolidation?

So I suppose if you're selling "the means of production" in the form of GPUs you're in a good spot, but even that is likely to be subject to aggressive downward pricing.

hanyki111• 3 months ago

I don't really understand why they call it the end of the digital revolution.

jimbokun14• 3 months ago

Meaning software has eaten the world and there's nothing left to eat.

DeepYogurt• 3 months ago

We are collectively out of ideas

wordspotting2• 3 months ago

So many diseases to solve, nuclear fusion, better materials, expanding the frontier of science, communicating complex ideas to public, climate change, helping disadvantaged communities better, better farming, better participation platforms for good governance. There are so many aspects we can improve on with AI. But it is contingent on our govts prioritizing progess over destruction.

darkwater• 3 months ago

Probably a bit unrelated but I wondering if there is any economic theory that actually predicted something for real rather than extrapolate trends from past data in hindsight - even if crossing different kinds of events.

Honest question, I'm not trying to mock economists or anything like that.

negura2• 3 months ago

any prediction requires a model/theory of some sort. and a lot of economists make correct predictions. a lot of them also make incorrect predictions

krishna3145• 3 months ago

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403780821_Adversari...

Show HN: RedSOC – adversarial evaluation framework for LLM-integrated SOCs

AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

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