alt Hacker NewsThis was a fun little lark. Great idea!
It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future. It’s very good at predicting the next token but maybe even worse than humans—who are already terrible—at making educated guesses about the state of the world in a decade.
I asked Claude: “Think ten years into the future about the state of software development. What is the most likely scenario?” And the answer it gave me was the correct answer for today and definitely not a decade into the future.
This is why it’s so dangerous to ask an LLM for personal advice of any kind. It isn’t trained to consider second-order effects.
Thanks for the thought experiment!
Replies
>It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future.
I agree it's a bit silly, but I think it understood the assignment(TM) which was to kind of do a winking performative show and dance to the satisfaction of the user interacting with it. It's entertainment value rather than sincere prediction. Every single entry is showing off a "look how futury this is" headline.
Actual HN would have plenty of posts lateral from any future signalling. Today's front page has Oliver Sacks, retrospectives on Warcraft II, opinion pieces on boutique topics. They aren't all "look at how future-y the future is" posts. I wonder if media literacy is the right word for understanding when an LLM is playing to its audience rather than sincerely imitating or predicting.
A while back I gave it a prompt, something like, "I'm a historian from the far future. Please give me a documentary-style summary of the important political and cultural events of the decade of the 1980s."
It did ok, then I kept asking for "Now, the 1990s?" and kept going into future decades. "Now, the 2050s?" It made some fun extrapolations.
I guess most of the articles it generated are snarky first and prediction next. Like google cancelling gemini cloud, Tailscale for space, Nia W36 being very similar to recent launch etc.
While I agree completely with the conclusion, for obvious reasons we can’t know for sure if it is correct about the future until we reach it. Perhaps asking it for wild ideas rather than ”most likely” would create something more surprising.
I think the average human would do a far worse job at predicting what the HN homepage will look like in 10 years.
I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.