alt Hacker NewsI think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them.
So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current AI. Probably tons of power generation.
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"Tons of power generation?" Perhaps we will go in that direction (as OpenAI projects), but it assumes the juice will be worth the squeeze, i.e., that scaling laws requiring much more power for LLM training and/or inference will deliver a qualitatively better product before they run out. The failure of GPT 4.5, while not a definitive end to scaling, was a pretty discouraging sign.
We didn't just build roads, we utterly changed land-use patterns to suit them.
Cities, towns, and villages (and there were far more of the latter then) weren't walkable out of choice, but necessity. At most, by the late 19th century, urban geography was walkable-from-the-streetcar, and suburbs walkable-from-railway-station. And that only in the comparatively few metros and metro regions which had well-developed streetcar and commuter-rail lines.
With automobiles, housing spread out, became single-family, nuclear-family, often single-storey, and frequently on large lots. That's not viable when your only options to get someplace are by foot, or perhaps bicycle. Shopping moved from dense downtowns and city-centres (or perhaps shopping districts in larger cities) to strips and boulevards. Supermarkets and hypermarkets replaced corner grocery stores (which you could walk to and from with your groceries in hand, or perhaps in a cart). Eventually shopping malls were created (virtually always well away from any transit service, whether bus or rail), commercial islands in shopping-lot lakes. Big-box stores dittos.
It's not just roads and car parks, it's the entire urban landscape.
AI, should this current fad continue and succeed, will likely have similarly profound secondary effects.
Customer service will be almost fully automated, and human customers will be forced to adapt to the bots.
This is a really interesting observation! Cars don't have to dominate our city design, and yet they do in many places. In the USA, you basically only have NYC and a few less convenient cities to avoid a city designed for cars. Society has largely been reshaped with the assumption that cars will be used whether or not you'd like to use one.
What would that look like for navigating life without AI? Living in a community similar to the Amish or Hasidic Jews that don't integrate technology in their lives as much as the average person does? That's a much more extreme lifestyle change than moving to NYC to get away from cars.