[libraryofbabel]

Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents.

If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see.

I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end.

It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.

[massysett]

Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.

[K0balt]

It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.

No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.

Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.

They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.

Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.

Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.

[jodrellblank]

You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative?

That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?

[nancyminusone]

>You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI.

If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a good chance the country you live in wouldn't either. If you don't believe the effect is large, go to the farthest uncontacted place on earth and take out a CO2 meter.

[jodrellblank]

> "If you don't believe the effect is large"

It's not that I "don't believe the effect is large", but the changes from pre-intelligence planet Earth to post-intelligence planet Earth are larger because they include the invention of steam, and literally everything else too: language, writing, irrigation, cities, trade, numbers, currency, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, nations, governments, supply chains, steam, etc.

An AGI that can solve the problems we think are solvable, but we can't solve, would be huge. Any sci-fi idea that isn't ruled out by the laws of physics, but that we haven't got the brains to solve, any breakthrough that we think should be there but we haven't found, any problem that requires too much time to learn, or too many parts to hold in one human mind, any coordination that is too big for one team, any funding problem, any scarcity problem, any disease or illness problem, any long timeframe problem, are all on the table as possibilities.

[Cthulhu_]

There's potential there (with the pocket-PhDs), the question is whether it'll actually make a measurable difference in the long run. I mean I'm sure it will make a difference, the question is whether it's what they say it will be, and whether it'll be financially viable. At the current burn rate of the AI companies, it isn't - before long the first ones will have to give up. They won't die, they'll be subsumed into their competitors.

Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume.

Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?

This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use.

I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.

[Windchaser]

> Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?

Yes, there is still a large demand for people with analytical thinking, a deep knowledge base, and good problem-solving skills. This demand shows up broadly across STEM fields, and it's a major reason that these fields pay relatively high.

Even just thinking of R&D, there is an immense amount of work left to be done in basic science. Research is throttled partly by a lack of cheap graduate lab labor. (If that physical + mental labor became much cheaper, the costs of research would shift - what does it take to get reagants? What does it take to build more lab space, and provide water and light? Etc.)

The present issue is that current AI does not really offer the same capabilities as a good grad student or PhD. Not just physically, as in, we don't have good robotics yet, but mentally. LLMs do not exhibit good judgment or problem-solving skills, like a good PhD does. And they don't exhibit continual learning.

No clue on when these will change, but yes, a cheap AI with solid problem-solving skills and good judgment would absolutely upend our economy.

[jodrellblank]

> "I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use."

This is why I said "isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”", but you still went straight for "LLMs aren't AGI", which was not in question.

AGI is what OpenAI says they are going for. That's the goal of all this trillion dollar investment, not to output 1000 screenplays a day, but to takeover the world, basically. What would infinite PhDs discover if they could hold all of Arxive in their 'heads' at once and see patterns in every experiment that's ever been done? What could they engineer and manufacture if they could 'concentrate' on millions of steps of a manufacturing process at once without getting fatigued or bored? What ideas could they test if they could be PhD level in a dozen subjects all at once?

[ineedasername]

A PhD generating knowledge has a cumulative effect that an equivalent intelligence generating prose purely for entertainment does not. And a whole bunch of that work isn’t really about novel insights, it’s about filling in gaps and doing knowledge work that assists people who are capable of having those insights. AI doing this enables them, also making it possible for more people to do the same.

[estimator7292]

An actual artificial intelligence? Yes, total paradigm shift. Not even a shift, we'd launch the old paradigm into the sun.

LLMs and modern day """AI"""? Don't kid yourself.

[greysphere]

Another interesting thing about the steam engine is much of science in the 1800s was dedicated to figuring out how steam engines actually worked to improve their efficiency. That may be similar for AI, or it may not!

[Gooblebrai]

> They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see

Would you mind expanding on this?

[qsera]

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions.

It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.

[libraryofbabel]

I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much.

It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.

[direwolf20]

Where is the huge mass of good software that AI has created?

[jon_north]

Yup. I judge by results too. I'm still waiting for that too.

I see a whole lot of software created by smart people - as far as I can tell, about the same amount of software they would have created on their own.

Open to being wrong! But show me the results.

[qsera]

No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight.

It is generating large amount of power on demand.

From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!"

And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time.

So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.

[usrnm]

> No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight

Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us

[danlitt]

From your exact link,

> The aeolipile is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine, but it is neither a practical source of power nor a direct predecessor of the type of steam engine invented during the Industrial Revolution.

[direwolf20]

The ancient Greeks surely would have realised that an aeolipile could be used as a source of power, if they'd had abundant combustible fuel, a need for rotary motion, and no better source of it.

Newcomen engines are mere curiosities today, because we have better sources of power (better engines). In the past, they had better sources of power too (donkeys, wind, water, or human slaves). Newcomen engines, like all technologies, are only viable in certain economic environments. In all others they are curiosities.

[usrnm]

Which is the exact point I was trying to make? It's still a steam engine, the basic idea is there and, yet, nobody saw its huge potential

[qsera]

Yea, sure.

Better search could be used in ways that we can't think of right now..

[usrnm]

I already use AI tools for more things than just "better search". Like, today. For work.

[Windchaser]

Early steam engines did not produce large amounts of power on demand, though. They produced small amounts of power, were a hassle to fuel and maintain, and broke often. It was reasonable that the engineers of the 1700s said "well, until someone improves on this, it's not worth using"..

.. which is not far off from what people said about ChatGPT in 2022.

I don't know how long it'll take for AI to be as broadly impactful as the steam engine was, but.. it's definitely coming. I expect the world to look radically different in 50 years.

[generallyjosh]

There are lots of intelligent people looking at AI and imagining its potential

Are you just saying that you're more intelligent than them? You can see clearly, where all the steam engine technicians can't?

[qsera]

What are they saying that contradicts with something I said?

[generallyjosh]

Well, you said:

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions.

I do think that pretty clearly contradicts with what a lot of people who make/use LLM models are saying haha

[randomdrake]

Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?