alt Hacker News> but it’s getting harder to understand how someone can be thinking of AI as just a slightly better autocomplete or slightly better Grammarly at the end of 2026.
That wasn't the point. My point was that if you had rolled LLMs out like that, as embedded technology in existing products. Slowly, over time, you'd have a lot less cynical people. I think the hostility towards AI product in large parts comes from the disruption and glancing over the negative parts. What we're doing now is the equivalent of putting millions of cars on roads which five years ago had never seem a car, only horses. We're doing so without any understanding of how that might affect society. Social media was a similar story. It was slower, yet we still didn't catch the majority of the negative consequences.
If it turns out that the people behind social media, and smart phones, don't care about e.g. peoples mental well being, then why would I trust that the people behind AI wouldn't behave the same way?
Cars are actually a great historical example of this. The car was invented, and people saw the benefits, but some parts of the world went so car-mad that they started bulldozing entire neighbourhoods and deprioritising anything that wasn't a car. Decades later, you see the knock-on effects of those decisions, with high traffic levels, pollution, people spending hours in cars because it's the only way to go shopping, see friends, or take the kids to school. Places that took a more cautious approach still gained the benefit of cars, but kept the choice and quality of life for others