> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.

> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’

>i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.

AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.

The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.

I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.

Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing",

I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.

I think this is very domain-specific.

FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.

LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!

It's held to that standard because of the hype. Literally the boosters can't stop saying "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012

- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around

- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)

- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)

- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)

That's just off the top of my head.

I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Surely you're kidding right?

You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.

Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.

Blender was life changing for me, both when I first discovered it and still today.

> It’s doing more harm than good.

For context

Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.