[scottLobster]

Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.

I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.

I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.

[pnut]

I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.

Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.

[numpad0]

Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.

Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.

GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.

[antifa]

TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.