[spicyusername]

    AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task

This is probably true, but on a time horizon that is almost certainly much much longer than we think. Centuries. Perhaps millennia, even.

It's fun to go back to the newspapers of the 1920, 30s, and 40s, and see how absolutely CERTAIN they were this was going to happen to them. I'm sure there are examples from the 19th and 18th centuries as well.

Advancement happens in fits, and then tends to hibernate until another big breakthrough.

And even when it does happen, humans love to do things, just for the sake of them. So I highly doubt art, music, literature, or any other thing humans love to intrinsically do are going away, even if they can be done by AI. If anything, they'll be done MORE as AI enables wider participation by lowering the cost and skill barriers.

[aspenmartin]

I think I completely agree with you but I think HN folks seriously underestimate the rate of progress. Believe what you will about the magnitude of capex but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. And we are extremely extremely close now. I agree we constantly have gotten timelines wrong, and I think it’s easily possible SOME capabilities may take longer but I think it’s hard to overstate just how much we are accelerating progress like in the next year or two.

But yea: self driving cars are still not here, see e.g. all the other AI booms

Difference here is we’re seeing it with our own eyes and using it right now. So much absolutely existential competition between companies (even within them!) and geopolitically.

[fragmede]

> self driving cars are still not here

Yeah they are, even if you don't have one yet. We can rathole into whether the need to hit level 5 before it "counts", but Waymos drive around multiple cities, today, and Tesla FSD works well enough that I'd rather drive next to a Tesla with FSD than a drunk driver.

If your evidence that AI isn't something to be worried about is saying self-driving cars aren't here, when they are, will then, we're fucked.

The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. For cars, this manifests as they're physically not available everywhere yet. For programming, it's unevenly distributed according to how much training data there was in that language and that domain to scrape across the whole Internet.

[aspenmartin]

Oh wait I’m not sure if I was clear I just mean: yes we’ve gotten lots of hyped claims like “FSD will be here in 5 years” in 2014 wrong but it is to our peril not to take the very short AI timelines seriously

Also — I think the arguments of yourself and another comment are also great analogies to AI situation, we can haggle over “ok but what is {FSD, AGI} really and in many ways it’s already here!”

I agree totally and I would just point out we’re at an even more intense moment in the AI space

[pixl97]

>self driving cars are still not here

That's one of my triggers that we've reach AGI. In may senses, self driving cars are here. In the vast majority of tasks self driving likely works fine. It's when you get to the parts where you need predictive capabilities, like figuring out what other idiots are about to do, or what some random object is doing in the road that our AI doesn't have the ability to deal with these things.

[pixl97]

The particular problem here is the past has very little predictive power on when something is going to happen in the future.

There were plenty of people in 1890 saying heavier than air powered flight was never going to happen.

>humans love to do things, just for the sake of them.

This said, it doesn't prove a negative. How many things would people be doing if they could get paid for it. It's easy to say these things in generalities, but you do any specific things, especially for a living, those could dry up and disappear.