alt Hacker News- The birth of the space age, and more realistically the birth of the ICBM and satellite age. Both key to national security, and in the context of a cold war.
- 40% of long-distance ton miles travel by rail in the US. This represents a VAST part of the economic activity within the country.
- A literal plague, and the cessation of much economic activity, with the goal of avoiding a total collapse.
- ...Come on.
So we're comparing these earth-shaking changes and reactions to crisis with "AI"? Other than the people selling pickaxes and hookers to the prospectors, who is getting rich here exactly? What essential economic activity is AI crucial to? What war is it fighting? It mostly seems to be a toy that costs FAR more than it could ever hope to make, subsidized by some obscenely wealthy speculators, executives fantasizing about savings that don't materialize, and a product looking for a purpose commensurate to the resources it eats.
Replies
> What essential economic activity is AI crucial to?
The continued devaluing of skilled labor and making smaller pools of workers able to produce at higher levels, if not their automation entirely.
And yeah AI generated code blows. It's verbose and inefficient. So what? The state of mainstream platform web development has been a complete shit show since roughly 2010. Websites for a decade plus just... don't load sometimes. Links don't load right, you get in a never-ending spinning loading wheel, stuff just doesn't render or it crashes the browser tab entirely. That's been status quo for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, fuck knows how many desktop apps which are just web wrappers around websites, for just.. like I said, over a decade at this point. Nobody even bats an eye.
I don't see how ChatGPT generating all the code is going to make anything substantively worse than hundreds of junior devs educated at StackOverflow university with zero oversight already have.
It continually surprises me when people are in denial like this.
Literally every profession around me is radically changing due to AI. Legal, tech, marketing etc have adopted AI faster than any technology I have ever witnessed.
I’m gobsmacked you’re in denial.
I agree we don’t have an actual ROI on AI yet. There is a ton of activity but the progress for society is speculation at this point. I don’t think we will have an idea on societal progression for at least 10 years and maybe 30.