[the__alchemist]

People have made this class of prediction in reference to oncoming technologies of many forms. Perhaps we've lost something valuable each time. Perhaps it has been worth it; perhaps not. Or, perhaps the predictions have been incorrect, partially or fully.

[xanderlewis]

I think they’ve been largely wrong so far, but not entirely. Some valuable things have been lost, but there is a clear (and huge) net benefit anyway so we needn’t worry.

But to think that AI (whether generative or some sort of AGI in the future) is just another technology seems to me to be an obvious mistake.

To take one example, there’s a huge difference between using a set of sophisticated and complex software tools to produce a piece of electronic music over a period of tens of hours, and spending ten seconds typing a prompt into one of these new genAI tools and selecting one of the several audio clips it throws back. But I suppose as these technologies mature and gradually become embedded into our ecosystems we’ll find that there’s still just as much work to be done.

It definitely feels like a fundamentally different class of tool to anything we’ve ever had before, though.