[decimalenough]

Railroads move people and cargo quickly and cheaply from point A to point B. Mechanized textile production made clothing, a huge sink of time and resources before the industrial age, affordable to everybody.

What does AI get the consumer? Worse spam, more realistic scams, hallucinated search results, easy cheating on homework? AI-assisted coding doesn't benefit them, and the jury is still out on that too (see recent study showing it's a net negative for efficiency).

[azeirah]

For learning with self-study it has been amazing.

[gamblor956]

Until you dive deeper and discover that most of what the AI agents provided you was completely wrong...

There's a reason that AI is already starting to fade out of the limelight with customers (companies and consumers both). After several years, the best they can offer is slightly better chatbots than we had a decade ago with a fraction of the hardware.

[simonw]

"Until you dive deeper and discover that most of what the AI agents provided you was completely wrong..."

Oddly enough, I don't think that actually matters too much to the dedicated autodidact.

Learning well is about consulting multiple sources and using them to build up your own robust mental model of the truth of how something works.

If you can really find the single perfect source of 100% correct information then great, I guess... but that's never been my experience. Every source of information has its flaws. You need to build your own mental model with a skeptical eye from as many sources as possible.

As such, even if AI makes mistakes it can still accelerate your learning, provided you know how to learn and know how to use tips from AI as part of your overall process.

Having an unreliable teacher in the mix may even be beneficial, because it enforces the need for applying critical thinking to what you are learning.

[JimDabell]

> > "Until you dive deeper and discover that most of what the AI agents provided you was completely wrong..."

> Oddly enough, I don't think that actually matters too much to the dedicated autodidact.

I think it does matter, but the problem is vastly overstated. One person points out that AIs aren’t 100% reliable. Then the next person exaggerates that a little and says that AIs often get things wrong. Then the next person exaggerates that a little and says that AIs very often get things wrong. And so on.

Before you know it, you’ve got a group of anti-AI people utterly convinced that AI is totally unreliable and you can’t trust it at all. Not because they have a clear view of the problem, but because they are caught in this purity spiral where any criticism gets amplified every time it’s repeated.

Go and talk to a chatbot about beginner-level, mainstream stuff. They are very good at explaining things reliably. Can you catch them out with trick questions? Sure. Can you get incorrect information when you hit the edges of their knowledge? Sure. But for explaining the basics of a huge range of subjects, they are great. “Most of what they told you was completely wrong” is not something a typical beginner learning a typical subject would encounter. It’s a wild caricature of AI that people focused on the negatives have blown out of all proportion.

[Gud]

That has not been the case for me. I use LLMs to study German, so far it’s been an excellent teacher.

I also use them to help me write code, which it does pretty well.

[rockemsockem]

I almost always validate what I get back from LLMs and it's usually right. Even when it isn't it still usually gets me closer to my goal (e.g maybe some UX has changed where a setting I'm looking for in an app has changed, etc).

IDK where you're getting the idea that it's fading out. So many people are using the "slightly better chatbots" every single day.

Btw if you only think chat GPT is slightly better than what we had a decade ago then I do not believe that you have used any chat bots at all, either 10 years ago or recently because that's actually a completely insane take.

[simonw]

> So many people are using the "slightly better chatbots" every single day.

To back that up, here's a rare update on stats from OpenAI: https://x.com/nickaturley/status/1952385556664520875

> This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.

[fc417fc802]

At a minimum, presumably once it arrives it will provide the consumer custom software solutions which are clearly a huge sink of time and resources (prior to the AI age).

You're looking at the prototype while complaining about an end product that isn't here yet.

[osigurdson]

I don't have that negative of a take but agree to some extent. The internet, mobile, AI have all been useful but not in the same way as earlier advancements like electricity, cars, aircraft and even basic appliances. Outside of things that you can do on screens, most people live exactly the same way as they did in the 70s and 80s. For instance, it still takes 30-45 minutes to clean up after dinner - using the same kind of appliances that people used 50 years ago. The same goes for washing clothes, sorting socks and other boring things that even fairly rich people still do. Basically, the things people dreamed about in the 50s - more wealth, more leisure time, robots and flying cars really were the right dream.