[kyledrake]

Per usual, it's somewhere in the middle. I find LLMs to be very useful for coding and solving quick tasks, but I don't think it's going to turn into skynet or make humans worthless.

There's a lot of momentum (driven by incentivization) around sensationalizing and storyboarding emerging technology into the "to the moon" and "neo Luddite" camps, and there's far too many people that fall into that uncritically.

My guess based on historical precedent of most emerging tech is that ten years from now AI (my preferred name is machine learning) will settle in as a useful tool for certain tasks, and we will be shrugging about the implications of it.

[tuatoru]

The cynicism (in my case, and probably others') comes from remembering self-driving cars, blockchain, crypto, the millennial internet hype, and previous AI hype. Smartphones have arguably made life worse for many people too, judging by skyrocketing mental illness.

Edit: oh, and Uberisation (workforce casualisation), and AirBNB. Enshittification all round.

They might be right this time, but the prior has to be this is yet another hyped nothingburger, or more enshittification.

[kyledrake]

Why does it have to be completely worthless or completely dangerous? Where does this binary thinking come from? In my experience, almost nothing in the world is binary on a spectrum of "good" or "bad".

[skwirl]

“Millennial internet hype” was absolutely warranted, though. The utility of the Internet has exceeded the expectations almost everyone had for it in the 90s. It’s one of the big things people pushing blockchain hype always cited for their faith in the technology.

You will have a high batting average if you are dismissive of everything that gains momentum. But when you are wrong you end up being extremely wrong.