alt Hacker News> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype product
I think there is a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane. In the people-persuation plane, it is all about convincing someone of something, and hype plays here, and marketing, religion and political persuation too. In the real world plane, it is all about tangible outcomes, and working code or results play here, and gravity and electromagnetism too. Sometimes there is a reflex loop between the two. I chose the engineering career because, what i produce is tangible, but I realize that a lot of my work is in the people-plane.
>a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane
This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset.
The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease.
The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more about how the universe works, people would naturally become more rational, and thus more persuadable by reality-compliant arguments and less persuadable by reality-denying ones.
That's... not really what I've been seeing. That's not really what most of us have been seeing. Like, devastatingly not so.
My guess is that something became... saturated? I'd place it sometime around the 1970s, same time Bretton Woods ended, and the productivity/wages gap began to grow. Something pertaining to the shared-culture-plane. Maybe there's only so much "informed" people can become before some sort of phase shift occurs and the driving force behind decisions becomes some vague, ethically unaccountable ingroup intuition ("vibes", yo), rather than the kind of explicit, systematic reasoning which actually is available to any human, except for the weird fact how nobody seems to trust it very much any more.