[blowski]

Every few years a new technology goes mainstream and quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally.

I’ve lived through the web in 1995. Google in 2000. Web 2.0 in 2005. Smartphones in 2009. Now it’s generative AI in 2023.

Every time, there’s an argument about whether it’s the end of the world or a total nothingburger. Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Every time, there are surprise developments and innovations, both positive and negative. Every time, within a few years, the new technology goes from seeming magical even in the wealthiest and most advanced locations to commonplace in a rural farm in the developing world.

It’s an incredible, terrifying and fascinating time to be alive.

[shanebellone]

You've also lived through many technologies that failed to achieve mainstream adoption despite demonstrating comparable levels of hype.

[probably_wrong]

I'm constantly resisting the urge to write "MongoDB is webscale" whenever these threads show up.

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198. The original video is gone but it lives on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs.

[BiteCode_dev]

This is how you know it is different. Because the people that were not treating mongo, graphql, microservices, the block chain, and web 3 as miracles are impressed by llm. Just like people that are not tech saavy.

[packetlost]

There's hype and then there's overhype. We are clearly in the overhype category for LLMs, but there's absolutely no doubt they are going to change things.

[blowski]

In the 90s, the web was overhyped in the short run and under-hyped in the long run. We wrongly predicted 100% of people would do their shopping on the internet by 2005, but never dreamed Somali market traders would use it to discuss the price of fish, or that foreign hackers would use it to influence US elections.

I guess it’s the same with generative AI.

[wanttocomment]

Different marketing appeals to different people.

I do think there is a lot of overlap with people promoting self driving predictions that haven't panned out.

[LinuxBender]

It's funny you mention that because one of many concerns I can see with OpenAI might be, "... but is it web scale?" in that I could envision tight rate limits being imposed and then businesses having to pay exponentially more to get higher limits and passing those costs on to someone and these costs climb over time on some scale. New tech often operate at a loss until they get businesses dependent on their service.

[djmips]

12 years later and I feel like the dream of being a farmer isn't so bad (I know - farming isn't easy).

[hitchdev]

MongoDB is still around.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Segway enters the chat

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-18306

[snowwrestler]

It was only a few years ago that fully self-driving cars were only a few years away.

[MathMonkeyMan]

Not sure why this was downvoted.

I mean, it's true that we still don't know whether self-driving cars are a few years away, but the analogy with "LLMs are the beginning of AGI" is apt.

[nly]

Like cryptocurrency.

[lapcat]

> Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch.

Is that really true? The two largest corporations in the world by market cap are Apple and Microsoft, both founded in the 1970s.

[swores]

Would you call Apple "industry leaders" pre-2000s, though?

But anyway, they didn't specify all industry leaders, and it's pretty solid that many leaders were knocked off their perches.

[jprete]

Apple was absolutely an industry leader before the 2000s. Which leaders exactly have been knocked off their perches?

[gabereiser]

Yahoo, Compuserve, AOL, Gateway Computers, Nokia, SEGA, Blockbuster, KMart, and countless more medium-large business that didn't have a strategy for the technology shift.

[swores]

Yes, good list, and plenty of others too like Blackberry, Palm, Digg, MySpace, IBM, Blockbuster, etc etc

[gabereiser]

friendster, napster, yellow pages, arcades, Pontiac, Saturn, JNCO, geocities, iomega, Sun Microsystems, CREATIVE. So many bodies...

[Macha]

That's not the question was asked though. Sure, they were an industry leader in the 70s/80s but in the period 1990-2005? It's hard to claim they really were. It's one of the rare examples of a fallen giant getting back on their feet, most just slowly dissolve over a few decades. AT&T is the only other such example that comes to mind.

[rootusrootus]

> AT&T is the only other such example that comes to mind.

If you're talking about the current AT&T, then I'd argue it's not a great example. The relationship between old AT&T and the company currently calling itself AT&T is tenuous. It would be more accurate to say the brand name survived, because it has good name recognition value.

[bshimmin]

Yahoo ("once the most popular web site in the U.S.", according to Wikipedia)?

[lapcat]

Yahoo was more of a slow decline, and missed opportunities. They could have actually acquired Google and/or Facebook at one point, and could have been acquired by Microsoft at a later point.

The comment talks about "quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally", "knocked off their perch", and "within a few years", which doesn't seem like an accurate description of what happened with Yahoo.

[876978095789789]

IBM, DEC, Sun MicroSystems, SGI.

[cinntaile]

From the phone era... Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, Palm, Ericson...

[seanmcdirmid]

Both Apple and Microsoft have had ups and downs since then. Even IBM, Intel, have been through ups and downs even if they are probably down forever now.

Apple had the obvious comeback, but even Microsoft had to reinvent itself away from windows.

[analognoise]

Also the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living.

I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.

[root_axis]

> computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living

Huh?? What world are you living in where the standard of living hasn't increased in the last 50 years?

[Mezzie]

I'd say that would depend on one's point of view in a couple of key respects:

- Are we just discussing the first-world middle class? Obviously if we extend our scope to all of humanity there have been remarkable jumps in standards of living.

- Does the idea of 'standard of living' include only access to goods, services, and information or also intangibles like access to safety and (more pertinently to this particular discussion) security? As a 34 year old American, I feel that my material standard of living is much better than it was in 1992, but my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive.

[grugagag]

> my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive.

Doesn’t that imply a decrease in standard of living? Not easy to quantify one. I personally see not living in fear as a staple of standard of living.

[Mezzie]

I agree with you, but a reasonable case could be made for viewing standard of living as material access so I think that's where a lot of us talk past one another.

Also American society is pretty disdainful of security, historically.

[robertlagrant]

> my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive

While it's hard to say, that might be the news you read, rather than reality.

[Mezzie]

Eh. Depends on which part. I definitely have fallen into doomscrolling on occasion, but I have reasons to believe our society is less stable than it was. This has good and bad aspects - the 'stability' offered was in many ways the stability of a less rich way of living (think people without plumbing or with dirt floors), but at the same time the lack of security is a major stressor and that's not good for your mental health any more than material deprivation is.

There's also that I am a disabled American and we're generally not in great spots. As an American, your ability to have things like housing is directly tied to your ability to be economically productive, and as someone with MS, I have to roll the dice each morning on whether or not I will be able to work. I don't know how long my career can last which creates a lot of stress. But then that's also true for all Americans: How many of us could survive our main/only earner getting cancer? That's the sort of stability I mean: The ability to be wiped out by things outside of your control is higher (which is partially down to society deciding everything is an individual problem and if a tornado flattens your house that sounds like a you problem) and we're moving towards a lower-trust society and the community bonds that were existent but frayed in the 90s (see Bowling Alone) are pretty torched now. Who and what can you rely on?

Which is more relevant if you consider that a lot of Americans have medical conditions and that things like the move from a single-income to dual-income household as the standard means that losing one adult can cripple a household financially. I'm also basing this on things like my peers' ability to do things like pay for child care since mid-30s are prime 'give all your money to daycare' years.

I also was in school during 2008, so I entered college under the 'get a degree and you'll be fine' years and exited it into the bloodbath of the Great Recession. There are many realities and my personal one is less secure than it was and this is true for many Americans.

[somenameforme]

It depends on what you're look at. This [1] is a graph of real median wages, for full time workers, since 1979 (date the Fed data begins). They've only increased by about 10%, and that's misleadingly high since 1979 was a local low of the era. The figures they give are in ~1983 constant dollars, so it works out to about $54k real median earnings in 1979 and $58.5k real median earnings today.

And since 1979 people have far more basic 'necessities' like internet and electronic devices. And other necessities like housing, education, and healthcare have all increased in cost far beyond nominal inflation figures. So a person in this situation is most certainly going to have a substantially lower quality of life in modern times. You have to keep in mind that in the past most families were single bread-winner, so wages and life were organized around the vision of one working individual being able to support at least 3 others, in a nuclear household. It was a very different economic vision than what has emerged in more modern times.

---

The one thing I'd say these numbers miss out on is opportunity. I think in modern times there is dramatically more opportunity, but if you're just going to live a normal, as expected, life without really aggressively going after the opportunities we all have available - then you'd almost certainly be better off living on the median in the 70s than today. And since most people should be expected to live these sort of perfectly average lives, as that's precisely what the average is, that's a real problem.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[analognoise]

If you buy the bullshit about being able to afford a faster computer as increased standard of living, sure.

If you consider housing, food, medical insurance, car prices, education - all of these things are ridiculously expensive compared to what they used to be.

"But we have the Nintendo Switch!" does not alleviate what we're going through right now.

[qgin]

Depends on whether you mean access to giant TVs or stuff like education and healthcare and housing. It’s hard to usefully turn it into a single metric.

Wages have remained flat, cost of consumer electronics have gone down, cost of education, healthcare, and housing has gone way up.

[HFguy]

This is true only if you look narrowly at developed countries. If you look more broadly, a tremendous number of people have had huge increases in income in places like China.

That might even be related (i.e., wages for workers are being depressed in developing world as workers see competition from other workers in developing nations). And capital owners benefiting from increased availability of labor.

TBC, agree that gini coefficient re: wealth in developing world is increasing.

[penneallagricia]

China is the one country that doesn't allow a concentration of the wealth in the top 1%.

Look at India, they don't come close to China if you compare how the standard of life improved for the masses.

[c1sc0]

In the 70s the top 1% couldn’t even conceive of the power they’d have in their pockets one day. Today both billionaires and the rest of the world can have access to that same power. We’re all carrying the same phones in our pockets after all.

[zorked]

I will give you all the power of my phone and you give me a billion dollars.

Easy trade right.

[kortilla]

You missed the point. In the 70s you didn’t have the ability to give someone the power of your phone. If you did, the ultra wealthy would have paid a billion for it (inflation adjusted).

The technology you take for granted is huge. Warren Buffet said he would rather give up flying on a private jet, than give up his smartphone.

[zorked]

No, you missed the point. Something that is a baseline today is being used to justify absolutely colossal disparity in how people live on the unimaginative base of "gee, you are not a caveman".

Your phone does not mean that you don't have to work three jobs to have a roof over your head and can't have a family. Having a phone does not make you rich.

[RhodesianHunter]

Power to search the internet != Food and housing.

[hamdouni]

Rich people benefit from poor people too

[2devnull]

Poor people benefit from lightbulbs too.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Haha, poor billionaires. Just can't improve your iPhone no matter how many $$$$ you throw at it. The most expensive smartphone to date is an iPhone6 with a huge diamond protruding from it.

[jprete]

I’m not a fan of wealth concentration but a lot of the wealth increase at the bottom was by increasing the technological power of their possessions. While this isn’t the same as political or financial power, it’s something.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Well, average wage in China increased more than x100 over that period of time.

[mensetmanusman]

Policies accelerated the wealth of the 1%, not computers.

[tambourine_man]

The concern with the Web and mobile was mental health, obsolete jobs, etc. No one was making existencial risk comparisons with nuclear weapons.

Jobs and Berners-Lee didn’t think there was at least a 10% chance of the iPhone or Web ending civilization, like half of AI researchers do.

Like the author said, it’s different this time.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Careful. That claim about half of AI researchers was probably overestimating:

To summarize: The claim—that half of AI researchers believe that there is at least a 10% chance that rogue AI will kill us all—is based on a survey question that included 162 respondents. All we know about these respondents is that they were authors on papers published at 2021 machine learning conferences. Possible confounding issues are vagueness of the question, small sample size, response bias, confidence of responses, and level of expertise.

https://aiguide.substack.com/p/do-half-of-ai-researchers-bel...

[tambourine_man]

Can you imagine someone even considering this question regarding PCs, Web, mobile? You'd be rightly laughed out of the room.

[peteradio]

Anybody else feel like smartphones were overall net negative? I like cell phones they fit a particular need that I think most people would agree is a net good. But smart phones? I don't fucking want to see any of this stuff on my phone its just like cigarettes, feels nice but in the long run just makes you feel sicker. And people would say ok just don't get one but I sort of feel like its not just a me thing, most people would be better off if most people didn't have a phone. Facebook would not be a problem without smartphones IMO.

[expertentipp]

Yes I agree, most of what I do on smartphone I'm better off doing on computer, and everything I do exclusively on smartphone is toxic for my mental health and for my time spending habits.

[realo]

I guess "it depends"...

My internet-connected smart phone allows me to pay securely for things, unlock the public city bikes for local transit, find quickly directions for a place, provide me answers to questions, read books at the cafe, etc...

All this without a single wallet or bag of "stuff" dangling over my shoulders.

Now... I don't have a facebook account ... YMMV ... :)

[Izkata]

Until your battery dies, or the app fails.

A co-worker had to skip lunch last month because he relied on his phone for payments and the app wouldn't let him pay - no explanation given. I keep critical stuff like payment methods separate and have no plans to stop carrying a wallet because of stuff like this.

[namaria]

It's amazing to me that people who work closely with software are happy to introduce a software powered single point of failure in their ability to function.

[expertentipp]

> Until your battery dies, or the app fails.

Or the phone falls on the sidewalk and the screen cracks rendering the entire phone useless.

[robertlagrant]

Don't forget when we all switched to defi in 2018!

[fullstackchris]

But how is it terrifying, if you've seen this four times and we're all still here? I'm inclined to think this AI hype way more fear mongering and over extrapolation than anything else.

[bckr]

There are other things that are terrifying, besides annihilation. Like the idea that you really cannot predict the future to any strong extent, because society is becoming extremely fluid.

[jfengel]

Your timeline is interesting. I've heard people complain about nothing new happening. So I like seeing it laid out like that, so regularly every five years. Then not for fourteen.

I still think it's rubbish for people to demand two revolutions a decade or they get bored but I understand the scope a bit better.

[bcrosby95]

People have been flailing around for the "next thing" for a while. First there was crypto, then the metaverse, but now it seems like it will be generative AI. The real world uses I've seen people using it for already outstrip crypto or the metaverse.

[roenxi]

It is amazing to think that people have already forgotten about things like the introduction of smartphones and the internet. The military applications of AI could be civilisation shattering (once someone wins a war with a fully mechanised army all bets are off as to what happens to democracy as a political system and the human race in general). Apart from that risk, there is no reason yet to think that this will be more transformative than what we've seen in the past.

[wslh]

We forget about the "invention" of open source, Linux et al (e.g. GCC, Python, Curl, etc) that makes it possible to run those Androids, macOS, and infrastructure and zillions of devices around the world. Don't forget ;-)