[chartered_stack]

I think this piece makes a fair and important point about LLM hype and the need to treat it as a normal technology rather than a cult movement. The over-the-top marketing and constant “AI will change everything” drumbeat can definitely obscures the more grounded, practical ways it can be used day-to-day.

That said, every major technology wave has needed a similar level of push, hype, and momentum to reach mass adoption. The Internet existed for decades before the public knew what to do with it. AOL gave such a huge push with the “You’ve got mail”, endless free trial CDs and an almost manic push to bring it into homes for it to become the foundation of modern life. The same was true of personal computers: early machines like the Apple II or IBM PC were expensive, clunky, and had little practical software. But without the evangelism, marketing, and cultural hype that surrounded them, the entire ecosystem might never have matured. So while the AI frenzy can feel excessive, some level of over-excitement may be what turns the technology from niche tools into something broadly accessible and transformative — just as it did for the web and the PC before it.

[crote]

> every major technology wave has needed a similar level of push, hype, and momentum to reach mass adoption

People were standing in line for the first iPhone. Gmail had a waiting list. Tesla sold EVs far faster than they could make them.

On the other hand, I now literally have AI icons blinking in several apps, begging to be used. This isn't a regular marketing push of a brand-new product, it is companies desperately trying to justify their billions of dollars of sunk costs by bolting AI onto their existing products.

[basch]

Part of the reason for the blinking icon begging to be used is because AI chat is a new interface being grafted onto existing products. It's difficult to get people to make the habit of using a different interface to a familiar product. That's why google can get people to use AI by injecting the response above the results. But facebook messenger for example throws a metaai icon in the lower right corner because they cant figure out a natural way to create discovery that isnt intrusive, and is able to silently hijack some existing muscle memory.

[the_other]

That mass adoption has brought in the normalisation of automated surveillance, attention farming and arguably lowered peoples’ tolerance to “the other”. I’m currently not convinced it’s a net positive. Perhaps things would have gone better if the adoption had been slower.

[pj_mukh]

I think this is exactly the right intuition. I think people hopelessly underestimate the human tendency to do nothing. We have this idea that if an innovation is good enough it should “sell itself”, and that’s almost never true because across all organizations, it’s almost always safer to do nothing, adopt nothing, keep doing what you’re doing.

No one gets fired for suggesting no change.

It takes a special level of hype where “doing nothing” is no longer the sensible choice.

Do I wish this hype was spread around to other technologies that are also awesome, of course. I’d love to help someone figure out a way to do that but as of now, we don’t know how to do that. Humans are very bad at holding two different ideas in their head.

[BrenBarn]

But we don't need to do anything. We don't need AI and so we don't need a push for it. If AI is just a "normal" technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost, it doesn't need any hype at all. It can just be slowly discovered and used by the people who have a legitimate use for it. Doing nothing is often a good move.

[pj_mukh]

“ technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost”

That’s what I’m disagreeing with. “Legitimate uses” isn’t something just hanging out in the ether to attach itself to useful technology it happens via a grinding sales process and big industry wide cultural changes.

People don’t like change.

I think AI and its knock-on effects in robotics will have massive productivity boosts in industries where productivity has been lagging for years. It will take decades and multiple boom-busts to happen to drag the population into change but it’ll happen.

[BrenBarn]

I guess what I'd say is that if that grinding sales process and those industry-wide cultural changes have all the negative effects we're seeing with AI, then we shouldn't make that trade. There is simply no urgent need to adopt AI, and the frenzied push to adopt it anyway is actively harmful.

[pj_mukh]

“If people keep stabbing each other with knives then we shouldn’t make that trade just to be able to continue to cut vegetables at home”

Tale as old as time itself.

“But on balance it’s a negative!!”

By what measurement? That’s simply a measurement of your own personal information bubble.