What if useful AI is a fantasy?

Usefulness depends on intended job to be done. A hair dryer isn't very useful at drying clothes.

If someone spent a lifetime mastering woodworking with hand tools, and then was shown a couple very early rudimentary power tools (lacking safety features, crude features, etc) they would rightly conclude they weren't useful. The artisan can do better work faster with less risk of dismemberment without them.

Prior to LLMs, the world's demand for good software was bottlenecked by access to competent software engineers. The people who want software just want it, they don't care about the craft. They have a different job to be done than the engineer.

An example this reminds me of is a jobs to be done theory thought exercise:

Two different first time home owners need to store yard working tools in their backyard, and determine they need a shed. The first one cares most about minimizing the time it takes to get the shed. The second one has some special constraints to deal with AND also wants to start developing their amateur construction skills. They both need sheds, but they have different values, so:

- the first one buys a shed-kit made of plastic panels that can easily be assembled in 20 minutes.

- the second one buys a power saw, power drill, tool belt, saw horses, lumber, screws, metal roofing, etc and builds a custom shed from relative scratch over a few weekends.

Another example is getting take out vs cooking the meal yourself. There are many many examples.

LLMs are already useful to many. They are also not useful to many others. To assume they aren't useful to anyone just because they aren't useful to you is a sign of absent cognitive empathy. Not acknowledging that other people have other priorities and values they are equally valid to your own.

I seriously don’t understand the naysayers around here. Have they just not used anything past gpt4? You can’t just outsource all of your thinking to them, but they’re obviously useful.

Anecdotally, my 81 year old father was able to point his phone at the boiler and ask Gemini what the error message meant. It correctly identified the boiler model, identified the error code being displayed on the screen, explained what it meant, provided him with a way to confirm the problem by checking the water pressure guage and then asked to be shown the underside. It again correctly identified and described to him the position and colour of the filling loop lever and how to adjust it to start and stop the water flow. He was able to do all this instead of spending hundreds on getting a plumber out at night because it was during a cold spell and he needed the heating on. That kind of thing is no fantasy and was amazing to witness.

edit: I had already looked up the error code the "old fashioned" way using Google to find the boiler manual, so I would have stepped in if needed, but it was literally flawless and I can't think of any time anything like that hasn't worked when I've used it for similar diagnostics.

> What if <common sense>?

I find it baffling that some people had to find this out the hard way. You already knew that it's — if not more work — then at least more tedious to study existing code than write your own.

People have been choosing greenfield rewrites over grokking legacy code since forever.

The hypothetical is that everyone will eventually agree with the author that AI is not useful. I don't see what could possibly change everyone's minds at this point. People have too much direct experience with it. At best, it might remain controversial.

It's obviously useful - we have to figure out best practices.

Definitely a fantasy, just one that people try to realize at the moment.

Useful AI is.

Useful LLM is not.

So-called "agentic" AI is definitely a fantasy.

It's like saying a calculator can do your taxes.

Doesn't work that way.

But grifters gonna grift

We can already see (net) useful so-called AI is more than a fantasy.

It's a psychotic delusion.

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To me, it is as practical and concrete as it can be. Keep coping