[Therenas]

This isn‘t your main point, but the iPhone absolutely was the biggest revolution since the Internet. The world before it is wholly different to the world after it. AI looks to have a similar impact, but just like the iPhone it‘ll be a few years before everyone realizes the world has changed.

[ruszki]

There were mobile internet, touchscreen, “large” screen, downloadable mobile apps before iPhone. I could listen to music and watch movies on my phone before iPhone. I’m continuously online since 2001. AFAIK it had not a single major feature which didn’t exist before, except its design. It really had a terrific design for its time.

It was a step forward, but it was incremental. Internet was also incremental. In every sense. Just because the general populace didn’t hear about it until then, didn’t mean that it was that “revolutionary”. Yes, they crossed a line which made them useful, something what people want. Sometimes mainly because of marketing. But still incremental.

This whole modern neural network saga started around 2011. Every step was incremental since then. Just because most people didn’t hear about these just in 2022, doesn’t mean that large LLMs were suddenly here from nothing. They still need to improve for example to not make the code quality plummets immediately when programmers start to use it. It was, and will be an incremental process.

[grim_io]

The iPhone opened up a whole new world of opportunities which were very clear from the start.

No one, except Steve Ballmer, would describe it as a potential fad or question how good it can actually get before Apple goes bankrupt from all the investment into this new tech.

I like this new stuff we get now, but the iPhone felt like a clear win with no downsides of a potential societal collapse.

[gerad]

Mobile phone addiction is our generation's smoking. We just don't realize it yet.

[GolfPopper]

Mobile phones & social media, tobacco, opium, gin... it seems like every century or so there's an epidemic of "this readily available thing creates addictive stimulation" and a lot of people get lost to it until society wises up about that particular thing. And then a generation or three later, the pattern repeats.

[grim_io]

Good point.

Pretty sure it's known. But, just like smoking, it's tolerated. Can't make the line go down.

[epistasis]

I was there and it was a very common view, though perhaps not a majority view, that the iPhone was a flash in the pan. There were lots of people committed to the idea that only physical keyboards could work for mobile. Touch interfaces were viewed highly skeptically. And it wasn't just the Microsoft or Palm people saying it, it was large chunks of their customers. The initial goal of the iPhone was 1%, yes, 1% share of the phone market! And many thought that was impossible for Apple and their strange new device.

[grim_io]

Where are we now? Around the 3s era?

By then, no one was saying that anymore.

The AI scepticism is still going strong.

[LarMachinarum]

don't worry, human, that will be corrected soon enough. You should learn to welcome your new AI overlords. Ask your regular handler LLM for advice on how best to do that.

Sent from my iMPC

[coldtea]

>No one, except Steve Ballmer, would describe it as a potential fad or question how good it can actually get before Apple goes bankrupt from all the investment into this new tech.

Countless pundits and many heads of companies like Motorolla and Nokia, said exactly what you say "nobody except Ballmer" would say.

[coldtea]

>The world before it is wholly different to the world after it.

Mostly for the worse. Mental health crisis, depression, loneliness epidemic, antisocial tendencies, attentions destroyed, total 24/7 surveillance, hard dependency on a couple of mobile OS vendors...

[mensetmanusman]

No it won’t, it already happened. Just look at how school has been disrupted with everyone using these things.

People were lifting their ChatGPT prompts on their devices during graduation.

[cheschire]

It wasn’t on day one though.