The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person might say "Oh my god, everything will change! Instantaneous, cheap communication! The world's information available at light speed! Science will accelerate, productivity will explode!" And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the same world with the same general patterns and limitations. With LLMs I expect something similar. Not a singularity, just a new, better tool that, yes, changes things, increases productivity, but leaves human societies more or less the same.
I'd like to be wrong but I can't help but feel that people predicting a revolution are making the same, understandable mistake as my hypothetical 1950s person.
The internet did change things pretty dramatically.
Productivity at information communication tasks just isn’t the entire economy.
I think we are massively more productive. Some of the biggest new companies are ad companies (Google, Facebook), or spend a ton of their time designing devices that can’t be modified by their users (Apple, Microsoft). Even old fashioned companies like tractor and train companies have time to waste on preventing users from performing maintenance. And then the economy has leftover effort to jailbreak all this stuff.
We’re very productive, we’ve just found room for unlimited zero or negative sum behavior.
> The internet did change things pretty dramatically.
For sure - I grew up in the mid-late 70s having to walk to the library to research stuff for homework, parents having to use the yellow-pages to find things, etc.
Maybe smartphones are more of a game changer than desk-bound internet though - a global communication device in your pocket that'll give you driving directions, etc, etc.
BUT ... does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet? Only sort-of - more convenient, more connected, but not massively different in the ways that I imagine other inventions such as industrialization, electricity, cars may have done. The invention of the telephone and radio maybe would have felt a bit like the internet - a convenience that made you feel more connected, and maybe more startling being the first such capability?
I once asked my mom, who grew up in the 1930s (aside: feels increasingly necessary to specific 19--), what was the biggest technological change she had seen in her lifetime. Her immediate answer was 'indoor plumbing.' But her next answer was the cellphone. She said cars and trains weren't vastly different from when she was a kid, she almost never went on a plane, and that people spent a lot of time watching the TV and listening to the radio, but they used their cellphones more and for far more things.
My grandmother was born at home in 1917. Her father had to hitch up the wagon to go to town to fetch the doctor, and she had been born by the time they arrived. She felt it wasn't any particular innovation that was meaningful so much as the velocity of change. She lived to be nearly 100, so had gone from that horse-driven subsistence farm life to watching people land on the moon and the eventual digitalization of the world. She commented many times that she had a hard time believing that the same rate of change would occur in the next 100 years after she was gone. I've often wondered what that would look like - you'd almost need colonies on Mars to top what the last 100 years have been like in terms of changes. I suspect that the complete reengineering of our world away from fossil fuels may be that level of disruption and change.
This is a bit far from the economic aspect, but the world currently seemed to be utterly suffused with a looming sense of dread, I think because we have, or know other people have, news notifications in their pockets telling us all about how bad things are.
I don’t remember that feeling from the 90’s, but then, I was a kid. And of course before that there was the constant fear of nuclear annihilation, which we’ve only recently brought back really. Maybe growing up in the end of history warped my perspective, haha.
People who experienced a stable childhood seem to have a natural tendency to view the period they grew up in as, if not a golden age, then a safer, simpler time. Which makes sense: You’re too young to be aware of much of the complexity of the world, and your parents provide most of your essential needs and shield you from a lot of bad stuff.
That’s not to say all eras are the same. Clearly there’s better and worse times to be alive, but it’s hard to be objective about our childhoods.
That's certainly all true, and not just parents shielding you from bad stuff, but the bad stuff just not appearing on the TV or in the newspaper the way it will today on TV or internet. If it was going on then nobody was aware of it, and maybe not a bad thing. Is my life really better for reading about some teenage cartel hitman making human "stew" etc ?
But I do think that perhaps the 70's was a somewhat more decent time than today. Lines have been crossed and levels of violence normalized that it seems really didn't exist back then, or certainly were not as widespread. e.g. I grew up with the IRA constantly in the news - often bombings in the UK as well as violence in Northern Ireland. But, by today's standard the IRA's terrorism was almost quaint and gentlemanly ... they'd plant a bomb, but then call it into the police and/or media so that people could be evacuated - they still created terror/disruption which realistically probably did help them achieve their goals, but without the level of ultra violence and complete disregard for human life that we see today, such as ISIS beheadings posted on FaceBook or Twitter that some people happily watch and forward to their friends, or the 9/11 attack which was really inconceivable beforehand.
I was a teenager in the 90s in a house that read the Daily Mail every day, and that could deliver a similar sense of dread.
But at least the dread was about things that seemed vaguely tractable and somewhat local, rather than the dizzyingly complex, global and existential threats the news delivers these days.
And of course not everyone read newspapers as intentionally-alarming as the Mail. Whereas now many more people’s information supply is mediated by channels with that brief.
Feels to me like a double-whammy of the alarm-maximising sections of the internet developing at the same time as the climate crisis becomes more imminent, maybe?
I grew up in the UK, so news was mainly from the BBC which was pretty decent although bad news (e.g. IRA bombings) was still front and center. US TV news doesn't even pretend/try to be unbiased and is all about shock value, reinforcing their viewers political beliefs and of course advertizing (which the BBC didn't have, being state funded).
Internet takes bad news and misinformation to a whole new and massively distorted level.
I gave up watching TV many years ago (nowadays primarily YouTube & Netflix for entertainment), and mostly just skim headlines (e.g. Google news) to get an idea of what's going on.
For me, it's incredibly different. I moved to the US from Spain back when the best internet we could get at home was 3kb/sec, and we liked it (yes kids, close to a million times slower than today). I recall the massive cultural and economic detachment of that move: Minimal shared culture. Major differences in food availability: Often I couldn't even cook what I wanted if I didn't smuggle the ingredients. Connecting with people with shared interests was really difficult, as discovering communities was a lot of work: Even more so in America, where I needed a car for everything, and communities lacked the local gossiping infrastructure that I relied on at home.
Today, I got to do some miniature painting while hanging out on video with someone in England. I get to buy books digitally the same day they are published, and I don't have to travel a suitcase full of them, plus a cd collection for a 1 month vacation. My son can talk to his grandma, on video, whenever he likes: Too cheap to meter. Food? I can find an importer that already has what I want most of the time, and if not, i can get anything shipped, from anywhere. A boardgame from germany, along with some cookies? Trivial. Spanish TV, including soccer games, which before were impossible. My hometown's newspaper, along with one from Madrid, and a few international ones.
An immigrant in the 90s basically left their culture behind with no recourse. Today I can be American, and a Spaniard, at the same time with minimal loss of context by being away. All while working on a product used by hundreds of millions of people, every day, with a team that spans 16 timezones, yet manages to have standups.
A lot of people's lives haven't changed that much, because their day to day is still very local. If you work at the oil field, and then go to the local high school to watch your kid's game on friday night, and all your family is local, a big part of your life wouldn't have been so different in the 90s, or even in the 60s. But I look at the things my family did week that I couldn't have possibly done in 98, and it's most of my life. My dad's brain would have melted if he could hear a description of the things I get to do today that were just sci-fi when he died. It's just that the future involved fewer people wielding katanas in the metaverse than our teenage selves might have liked.
> does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet?
Yes. You said it yourself: you used to have to WALK somewhere to look things up. Added convenience isn't the only side affect; that walk wasn't instantaneous. During the intervening time, you were stimulated in other ways on your trek. You saw, smelled, and heard things and people you wouldn't have otherwise. You may have tried different routes and learned more about your surroundings.
I imagine you, like I, grew up outside, sometimes with friends from a street or two over, that small distance itself requiring some exploration and learning. Running in fresh air, falling down and getting hurt, brushing it off because there was still more woods/quarry/whatever to see, sneaking, imagining what might lie behind the next hill/building; all of that mattered. The minutae people are immersed in today is vastly different in societies where constant internet access is available than it was before, and the people themselves are very different for it. My experience with current teens and very young adults indicates they're plenty bright and capable (30-somethings seem mostly like us older folks, IMO), but many lack the ability or desire to focus long enough to obtain real understanding of context and the details supporting it to really EXPERIENCE things meaningfully.
Admittedly anecdotal example:
Explaining to someone why the blue-ish dot that forms in the center of the screen in the final scene of Breaking Bad is meaningful, after watching the series together, is very disheartening. Extrapolation and understanding through collation of subtle details seems to be losing ground to black and white binaries easily digested in minutes without further inquiry as to historical context for those options.
I abhor broad generalizations, and parenting plays a large part in this, but I see a concerning detachment among whatever we're calling post-millenials, and that's a major, real world difference coming after consecutive generations of increasing engagement and activism confronting the real problems we face.
It's because the change happened slowly. So it feels like nothing has changed.
Another thing that's changed is engineering. The US has moved up the stack. Engineering is now mostly software development and within that it's mostly web development. Engineering and manufacturing has largely moved overseas to Asia and that's where most of the expertise lies. The only thing off the top of my head that the US still dominates in engineering is software/aerospace/defense. In general though everything else is dominated by Asia, if you want the top hardware technology the US is no longer the place to get it. In Silicon Valley there used to be a good mix of different types of engineers, now everyone is SWE, and most likely doing web stuff. But here's the thing, you most likely wouldn't have noticed this unless you thought hard about it because either you're too young or because the change happened so slowly.
The same will be for AGI if it comes into fruition. A lot of jobs will be replaced, slowly. Then when AGI replacement reaches saturation most people will be used to the status quo whether it's better or worse. It will seem like nothing has changed.
I don't think so. AGI will fundamentally change things. People will marry AGIs or at least try to (watch Her). Any and all digital jobs will be first to be replaced, and then most other jobs too via robotic arms or full androids. SDVs will reach their full potential, likely disrupting the entire automotive industry. Our economy will get even more messed up...
I would say that it feels different because the internet / smartphones are more about giving everyone access to inexpensive, high bandwidth, communication (nearly) everywhere. But high bandwidth communications have been available everywhere for a long time, if you had a need and were willing to pay for it --- tv news would bounce signals off a satelite for on scene reports, etc.
It does feel different, but I don't think it's the bandwidth, or even the availability. A newspaper is high bandwidth and fairly inexpensive and ubiquitous but also fairly high latency. The evening TV news was only once a day until the 80s. One big change I noticed was 24-hour news. Suddenly, it felt important to know about things immediately.
The web was different because it was interactive--both in the sense that you could swiftly switch between information sources and then in the social media sense that everybody could participate, even if participation meant flame wars.
And historically, TV news isn't that old, especially the 24-hour variety. The Apollo landings and Vietnam War are often cited as landmarks in TV news, where for the first time large numbers of people watched things as they occurred. But it's only about 25 years from those events to Netscape Navigator, where the web became widely available (at least in the developed world). That's a long time in most people's lives, but I wouldn't be surprised if future historians will see TV as something like an early, one-way Internet.
I remember long ago reading an argument that information technology has not actually increased productivity. I really wish I could find a source for this now, but I just can't seem to find it anywhere on the internet. Here it is anyway:
The administration of the Tax Service uses 4% of the total tax revenue it generates. This percentage has stayed relatively fixed over time.
If IT really improved productivity, wouldn't you expect that that number would decrease, since Tax Administration is presumably an area that we should expect to see great gains from computerisation?
We should be able to do the same amount of work more efficiently with IT, thus decreasing the percentage. If instead the efficiency frees up time allowing more work to be done (because there are people dodging taxes and we need to discover that), then you should expect the amount of tax to increase relatively which should also cause the percentage to decrease.
Therefore IT has not increased productivity.
Either it doesn't do so directly, or it does do so directly, but all the efficiency gains are immediately consumed by more useless beurocracy.
> The administration of the Tax Service uses 4% of the total tax revenue it generates. This percentage has stayed relatively fixed over time.
The tax administration is far more efficient than that. The IRS has 79K workers out of a total workforce of 158M, or 1/2000 workers. Federal taxes are about 19% GDP (28% of GDP including state and local taxes.) The IRS costs $14.3B to run and collects 19% of $25.46T = $4,800B or 0.3% of collected taxes.
> If IT really improved productivity, wouldn't you expect that that number would decrease, since Tax Administration is presumably an area that we should expect to see great gains from computerisation?
Those gains are so great that tax administration has been computerised for more than half a century now.
We could certainly save an awful lot more in tax preparation for the economy as a whole if we sent out pre-filled tax forms (the IRS already has all the information required for most people) like other countries do but the tax preparation companies have made a lot of contributions to politicians to prevent this.
The idea of measuring the “efficiency” of the tax system in terms of money in per money out seems a bit odd to me in the first place. Taxes don’t create wealth, the job is to destroy it at the correct rate.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a “taxes are theft” dummy or anything like that. Taxes are an important knob in shaping the economy. But a better functioning tax collection agency should more effectively implement the rules of whose money is collected for deletion, not just collect more money generally.
>Taxes don’t create wealth, the job is to destroy it at the correct rate.
Not exactly, it's more about redistributing or reappropriating wealth because we know there exists flaws in the economic system we have (progressive tax systems). In more general terms, ignoring progressive structures, it's about investing in necessary shared services for everyone and to maintain the government that does such and more.
Looking at taxes as if they destroy wealth is a bit bleak. Governments may not be the most efficient institutions in all possible metrics but they're not out to destroy wealth exactly.
I don’t think it needs to be seen as bleak; money just exists as a tool, it doesn’t have any other meaning, sometimes destroying it is the best thing to do.
It is fungible anyway, so I think it is really just a matter of semantics or philosophy if the government is collecting and redistributing dollars, or if it is destroying and creating them. My (outsider) understanding is that modern monetary theory leans toward the latter, because it more accurately reflects the latitude the government has, working with a fiat currency and all that.
It's still a useful measure to be aware of. Imagine if the IRS costed 30% of collected taxes to run instead of 0.4%. That would be a pretty telling sign that maybe we need to improve the IRS instead of raising taxing.
Only, I think, in the sense that it would be bad if it was very expensive.
It just isn’t an efficiency, in the <achieved quantity>/<total quantity> sense. The measurement of <tax revenue>/<money spend on tax collection> is meaningless in the same way that a comparison between the energy required to flip a light switch and the energy that is sent to that socket as a result is basically meaningless.
I mean, sure, if tending a light switch required an appreciable percentage of the amount of the energy the socket could provide, that would be bad, but it is a ridiculous scenario.
>Either it doesn't do so directly, or it does do so directly, but all the efficiency gains are immediately consumed by more useless beurocracy.
That's how government digitalization has functioned in my country. It hasn't improved things, it just moved all the paper hassle to a digital hassle now where I need to go to Reddit to find out how to use it right and then do a back and forth to get it right. Same with the new digitalization of medical activities, a lot of doctors I know say it actually slows them down instead of making them more productive as they say they're now drowning in even more bureaucracy.
So depending on how you design and use your IT systems, they can improve things for you if done well, but they cal also slow you down if done poorly. And they're more often done poorly than great because the people in charge of ordering and buying them (governments, managers, execs, bean counters, etc) are not the same people who have to use them every day (doctors, taxpayers, clerks, employees in the trenches, etc).
I kind of feel the same way about the Slack "revolution". It hasn't made me more productive compared to the days when I was using IBM Lotus Sametime. Come to think of it, Slack and Teams, and all these IM apps designed around constant group chatting instead of 1-1, is actually making me less productive since it's full of SO .... MUCH ... NOISE, that I need to go out of my way to turn off or tune out in order to get any work done.
The famous F1 aerodinamic engineer, Arain Newey, doesn't even use computers, he has his secretary print out his emails every day which he reads at home and replies through his secretary the next day, and draws everything by hand on the drafting board and has the people below him draw them in CAD and send him the printed simulation results through his secretary, and guess what, his cars have been world class winning designs. So more IT and more sync communication, doesn't necessarily mean more results.
Hmm, I’m not sure I buy it, because I’m not sure what additional effort applied to tax administration looks like.
Perhaps we could be optimistic about people and assume the amount of real, legitimate tax fraud and evasion is pretty low. If we took the latter scenario you present—increasing efficiency means the same amount of people will do more work—and assumed this effort is instead applied to decreasing the number of random errors (which might result in someone overpaying or underpaying), we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see a change in the expected value of the taxes. But, it could be “better” in the sense that it is more fair.
A third option: technology investments improved the efficiency of the previous tax base, which allowed the expansion of the tax base - through additional enforcement activity, increasing the tax base in absolute terms but also returning the overhead to its historical norms.
Without tracking the size of the tax base in inflation-adjusted terms, hard to account for.
(The cynically, you’re probably right re: useless bureaucratic expansion)
I feel you are mixing value capture with value generation. If GM produces cars with the same level of margins as Facebook or Google, things will be different. LVMH (Louis Vuitton Group) holds a value equivalent to that of Toyota, Volkswagen, and two-thirds of Ford combined. Louis Vuitton alone was valued more than Red Hat a few months ago. This doesn't mean that Louis Vuitton is more valuable than Red Hat, but rather that it captures Value more effectively than Red Hat.
I think I may have just skipped a step or not expressed myself very well.
What I’m saying is, I suspect information technology has made classic production companies vastly more efficient and productive. To the point where we can afford to have massive companies like Facebook that are almost entirely based on value capture.
That’s my speculation at least. Your example puts me in a tough spot, in the sense that Louis Vuitton is pretty old and pretty big. I’d have to know more about the company to quibble, and I don’t feel like researching it. I wonder if the proportion of their value that comes from pointless fashion branding was originally smaller. Or if the whole pointless fashion branding segment was originally just smaller itself. But I’m just spitballing.
In the past we also had mercenary companies and the like to capture value without producing much, so I could just be wrong.
Probably something like market cap (although I guess it would have to be based on the past now that Red Hat has been bought), or there are nebulous measures of brand value out there.
I think it is a fair point TBH, my original comment could have been more clear about this aspect.
“Our central theme is that computers and the Internet do not measure up to the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in this do not merit the label of Industrial Revolution,”
I think AGI can change the world once it gets way beyond human level both in terms of types of beyond-human "senses" and pattern matching/prediction (i.e. intelligence), but we are nowhere near that yet.
On their current trajectory LLMs are just expert systems that will let certain types of simple job be automated. A potential productivity amplifier similar to having a personal assistant that you can assign tasks too. Handy (more so for people doing desk-bound jobs than others), but not a game changer.
An AGI far beyond human capability could certainly accelerate scientific advance and let us understand the world (e.g. how to combat climate change, how to address international conflicts, how to handle pandemics) so be very beneficial, but what that would feel like to us is hard to guess. We get used to slowly introduced (or even not so slowly) changes very quickly and just accept them, even though today's tech would look like science fiction 100 years ago.
What would certainly be a game changer, and presumably will eventually come (maybe only in hundreds of years?) would be if humans eventually relinquish control of government, industry, etc to AGIs. Maybe our egos will cause us to keep pretending we're in control - we're the ones asking the oracle, we could pull the plug anytime (we'll tell ourselves) etc, but it'll be a different world if all the decisions are nonetheless coming from something WAY more intelligent than ourselves.
By that standard, nothing has meaningfully changed since agriculture and domesticated animals. We're still killing each other, forming hierarchical societies, passing down stories, eating, drinking, sleeping, and making families - except now we're killing each other from afar with gunpowder, forming those hierarchies using the guise of democracy or whatever, passing down stories in print rather than speech, can use condoms to control when we make families, and so on.
Human civilization has accumulated many layers of systems since then and the internet changed all of them to the point that many are barely recognizable. Just ask someone who's been in prison since before the internet was a thing - there are plenty of them! They have extreme difficulty adapting to the outside world after they've been gone for forty or fifty years.
Yeah in a real sense nothing has changed. I wonder if they finally will when we start modifying our bodies and minds to extreme degrees, that’d be my guess for when the model breaks down.
Imagine telling those same people in the 50s that all those changes in productivity would come for the benefit of no one since the work week would be the same and purchasing power would decline
I just got back from the shop with my dad, he was born in 1935 .. neither of us struggled to survive the 1950s.
It's dropped from a standard 40 hour work week to a 38 hour week for indexing a living wage, but things are more or less still as they were in 1907 (inflation adjusted) albeit with greater choice of consumerables.
It doesn't need to be all or nothing. It's possible to acknowledge that the 50s had a better economic outlook for the middle class in developed countries than it does now, despite the incredible advances in computing. And you might still prefer to live now, for social reasons or because you prefer the computing advances, despite it not delivering economically as much.
Either way, it does highlight a serious economic concern as computing continues to advance. The majority of the wealth is increasingly being concentrated by our tech overlords.
I’d arguing you cannot meaningfully separate them, they are on a continuum. As a thought experiment, you don’t know where you are going to land socioeconomically, which would you choose? Now or then?
Don't have to imagine, same thing is happening right now with LLMs.
I see "AI safety" brought up as a laughable attempt at stopping the progress of LLMs, when in reality the people talking about "AI safety" are the people trying to say that the majority will not benefit from this technology.
There's certainly pockets of the AI Safety movement that is about creating strategic motes to protect their private enterprises, but there are also legitimate concerns out there about these new search techniques can lead rise to concerns that may effect daily life.
I think most people realize there are some gains to be had here, the trick is to do so in a way that doesn't, yet again, massively redistribute wealth and power to a select few and instead share some of those gains. Right now there's not enough legitimate competition to keep things in check and that should be concerning. I'm all for rewarding the early successors who invested and took risk but let's not pretend those investments weren't captured through all sorts of other unequitable approaches to begin with.
I think the AI safety people are saying that whatever benefits LLMs bring to the masses might be outweighed by the costs. We've seen this with social media. And on the extreme end, there's the existential concern. If we do ever get to AGI, all bets are off from where we stand right now, because nobody has the faintest clue how a human-level (or beyond) intelligence will play out in society.
It's important to remember that the internet is still very very new. Like the generation of digital natives are barely in adulthood. Sure, it's existed in some form for about 40 years, but most of the world didn't have access for the longest time. I wouldn't be surprised if we see massive changes in the next 20 years from the people who grew up on the web (specifically people outside the United States and Europe, where access was harder for a long time)
"Digital native" are the people who grew up with computers. Many kids born in 1980's and later grew up with computers in their earliest memories.
I'd call the current generation "Social media natives", because that is the biggest difference from the previous generation. 90s kids grew up with games and communication, but they were free from facebook, youtube and instagram.
Many kids in the US and Europe grew up with computers[1]. There's a large large population of people from Africa, South America, Asia, etc. who just got internet access in the last 10-20 years.
If we ignore technology for the sake of technology and look at daily life, things we need like food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, socialization, etc. then I'd say technology has definitely improved some of these aspects.
Food distribution has improved as have most logistics in general. These efficiencies have somewhat been shared with the general public but in a lot of cases, those gains were captured by private enterprise.
Healthcare has improved a little bit, iterative progress can be made more quickly, shared, and moved into translational medicine as practice. Drug discovery has improved quite a bit, as have logistics around getting said drugs in the hands of people who need them and doing so affordably. This improved lives and longevity.
Socially we can communicate far easier. It remains to be seen to me if thise is always an improvement. Humans seem to be designed for much smaller social circles and don't seem to be capable of taking much advantage in their daily lives of increases frequency, scale, and reach of socialization.
The list goes on. It's not exactly linearly correlated with technology growth because ultimately it boils down to actionable information. Just because we have more information or more processing capability around information doesn't mean we get direct returns from that or that we don't reach limits where we simply don't have use for the additional gains. Information has to be actionable in some way, otherwise it's just intermediate data products that may or may not benefit us. I know can ready daily news from some small town in Southern Japan if I wanted to. That doesn't improve my life mostly, but it's there.
We have piles and piles of scientific literature we could share and iterate on towards new discoveries for humanity. That doesn't mean in my daily need for survival and balance with recreation I have time to contribute to things I find interesting or necessary, after all I am to some degree a slave of my needs within the economic system I'm entrenched in. I have bills, I have to earn money, and I have to work.
Even if that wasn't the case maybe or maybe not would I be able to contribute more back to society than I do now at my paid profession. Currently I'd say I do pretty well in this department in terms of reach. Without that I might struggle.
> And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the same world with the same general patterns and limitations. With LLMs I expect something similar. Not a singularity, just a new, better tool that, yes, changes things, increases productivity, but leaves human societies more or less the same.
by what criteria do you see the world as the same today vs 70 years ago?
Look around. The most significant change is that there are a lot more screens, and a lot more "cheap stuff" (consumer electronics, food, clothes, entertainment, plastic anything, etc).
Things "behind the scenes" have perhaps changed a lot -- e.g. financialization, more competitive markets, explosion of communication options, which are the driving force behind those visible changes.
VERY broad strokes. We also still have a Sun, and the stars.
Internet and the last 30 years tech did change things dramatically. I bet that most people would feel handicapped if they were teleported just 50 years back. We got into this type of life progressively, so people didn't notice the change, even though it was dramatic. The same phenomena with gradient changes happen on physiological level too, this is not different.
It's dramatic, but there are plenty of things in society that are similar to what they were 50 years ago. It's not like people from 50 years ago would be incapable of understanding those changes if you explained them. Which is a bit different than 500 years ago.
At least if we're using the technological singularity was what constitutes fundamental societal change in unpredictable ways. The singularity people think AGI is going to fundamentally change everything, even more than what the past 500 years has done. Certainly many magnitudes of order more than the last 50 years. And they think it will happen much faster.
I'm not the original commenter, but moving from nomadic tribes to stable settlements, moving from hunter gathering to agriculture, moving from almost everyone subsistence farming to the introduction of money at all, to most people working unrelated for money and trading money for food[2], moving from multigenerational homes to nuclear families to sending kids to schools and daycares, moving from tribal lands to countries with a national identity of their own which you are supposed to have some kind of loyalty to - over and above the king/warlord you trade protection with.
As well as those, the change from food and goods being scarce to abundant roughly corresponding with the industrial revolution (abundant textiles and clothes) and the early to mid 1900s (factories), labour receding from sunrise to sundown changing to a working week with days off (various, but early 1900s official 5 day week[1] and 8 hour day), changing to the more recent thing where both parents have to work to get enough income while the child is away all day, massively increased free time (particularly household chore automation - electricity, light, central heating, food mixers, washing machines, mostly early to mid 1900s).
Compared to those things, the internet gets you something else to read or watch (instead of TV, newspaper, book, radio) and some other way to talk (instead of letter, telegram, postcard, telephone). Yes the organisation of things happens quicker and information comes from farther away, and can be more up to date, but you spend your time sitting in a chair watching or reading (office, home, school) like you did before, you buy things and have them delivered or go collect them (like you did before), you consult maps and directories and consumer advice and government documents (like you did before), you take and share holiday photos (like before). It's different, but it's not all that different.
Oh what a frustratingly low effort reply to my high effort comment. Come on, if you want to make the claim that the internet changed _everything_ you can back it up with some examples - especially when the claim was not "nothing changed" but "things don't feel as different" - so the examples should not be "someone far away does something differently" or "some behind the scenes organisation was more efficient", but things everyday us (HN readers) feel in day to day life.
No telephone to telephone is a HUGE change. Telephone call to digital PBX over fibre to packet switched VoIP to WhatsApp feels like no change at all.
True, I’m not very used to internet debates lasting longer than one or two low effort replies, so I became dismissive too. Apologies.
I don’t really have hard data that proves the impact of the internet at a macro level, just anecdotal stuff. I think it’s easy to overplay the impact of past innovations bc we see the late waves - eg the telephone wasn’t really a thing that impacted most of the world for decades, and there’s entirely countries that went from no telephone at all to whatsapp directly (brazil for instance)
When it comes to jobs, I think I know maybe a dozen people whose jobs/industries only exist because of the Internet - and that’s counting outside the tech bubble, mind you. I’m sure this is verifiable with labor data somehow. Not to mention the entire middle class slipping into gigs in a model that only exists because of the internet (maybe a bit too recent for most to grasp the consequences).
On a personal level - quite literally everything in my life would’ve been completely different. I can’t even imagine the kind of local job I’d have at a small town, watching about stuff on the TV and hearing about tech only from a friend over radio
Some people claim AGI will. If you believe in the heights of “singularity” talk, we should expect some pretty fundamental changes to the basics of our lives.
Good point to me the internet was just "other people", what differentiated is not the 4 people you know but literally (almost) and potentially all other people.
With AI, the way I see it, it is just virtual other people. Of course, a bit stranger but more simillar than you think.
There's currently little to no learning or feedback loop due to the relatively small context window sizes.
I've done many language exchanges with people using Google Translate and the lack of improvement/memory of past conversations is a real motivation killer; I'm concerned this will move on to general discourse on the internet with the proliferation of LLMs.
I'm sure many people have already gone around in circles with rules-based customer support. AI can make this worse.
My take on this is that much of work and problem solving is about understanding the problem. So I think human abilities will remain the bottleneck. I pose this thought experiment: Is it possible to design an AI system for a monkey which gives it super-monkey abilities?
For a monkey it's impossible to design... pretty much anything beside a few simple tools. So, no. A monkey cannot design a bow, a loom, a tractor, a computer, or an AI of any kind.
We had designed many tools that beat us in various aspects. This is an invalid analogy.
Technology is the one force that drives modern human societies, Western ones even more. The world has changed dramatically, especially with smartphones. I suggest reading Ted Kaczynski.
Depends on the quality of the AGI. If it’s legitimately as good or better than humans at almost everything, while being cost effective, it will utterly and completely change society. Humans will be obsolete at almost every job - why pay a human if an AGI can do it as good or better, for free(-ish)? Best case scenario, the AGI is benevolent, traditional work is gone, but we find some post-capitalism system, and new ways to keep life interesting/meaningful. Worst case scenario, pure sci-fi dystopia.
If it’s closer to a midpoint between GPT-4 and true human intelligence, then sure, I agree with you, it’s a significant change to society but not an overhaul. But if it’s actually a human level (or better) general intelligence, it’ll be the biggest change to human society maybe ever.
I'd like to be wrong but I can't help but feel that people predicting a revolution are making the same, understandable mistake as my hypothetical 1950s person.