[rspoerri]

People tend to forget how fast technological development advances. Even if you lived trough it you tend to forget how recently the world looked very different.

- before 2012 there was no smartphone

- before 2001 there was no wikipedia

- before 1995 less then 10 percent of the rich country home users had internet

- before 2023 there was no ai available to home users.

Hardware has been getting faster by a factor of 100 in 10 years and ~10‘000 in 20 years. Ai currently develops faster because of a combination of software and hardware improvements. Even if the best current system is only right 1/100 times right now, its likely nearly allways accurate in 10 years.

I also like to remind people that the phone i am writing this on (iphone 12), has the same computing power as the earth simulator in 2003. that was the fastest computer on the earth back then.

Imagine this development and think what changes might come.

[jaen]

Not quite, the Earth Simulator in 2003 had 35.86 Linpack TFLOPS, 10TB of RAM and 700TB of disk.

That's still almost three orders of magnitude from the iPhone 12 (0.02 Linpack TFLOPS, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage).

[rspoerri]

https://www.tnhh.net/posts/phone-power.html

edit: you are right, this source is wrong, but we are getting closer fast.

A19 seems to be getting 2.3 tflops (still only 10%, but still a whole floor of computers vs a smartphone is crazy!).

[jaen]

Those TFLOPS numbers are quite useless as they are "marketing peak TFLOPS". There's usually a 10-100× difference between that and actual computational capabilities in meaningful general workloads.

It only makes sense to compare specific, well-calibrated benchmarks, such as Linpack, which is what I did.

[guytv]

Correction:

> - before 2012 there was no smartphone

- by 2011, 35% of US adults had smartphones, iPhone released June, 2007

[rspoerri]

sorry i got the date wrong, my first text where i researched it properly got deleted accidentially.

[danaris]

But we also hit serious diminishing returns effects—in the last decade for hardware, in the last 2-3 years for LLMs.

Just because things have advanced in leaps and bounds for X amount of time does not mean they will continue to do so at the same (or increasing) rates indefinitely.

The problem is that just what will end up being the thing that advances dramatically in the next few years is often very unpredictable, especially if one is looking at surface-level trends over the last few years.

Given what we, who have a better understanding of them than "wow, look how far they've come since 2018", can see, LLMs seem unlikely to advance by another 100x over the next several years. Frankly, another 100% seems unlikely. (Though of course, quantifying LLM performance is a tricky proposition to begin with...it is, to a large extent, a qualitative endeavor.)

[mmiliauskas]

No technological improvement will make the halting problem decidable.

[wilkystyle]

Technology advances quickly, but the apocalypse narrative is still bullshit. The reality is much closer to what it has always been: technological advances are a way to enhance what humans can do, not replace them. Being adaptable and adopting a spirit of learning and growth is (as it always has been) a key factor in a successful career trajectory.

Through a sufficiently narrow lens, any technological advancement can be perceived as a threat. If your job was to perform calculations for your company using a microscope and calculator (computer, the job title) then the invention of the computer (the machine) was absolutely a threat to your job security. That's not to say that there aren't challenges to adapting or considerations for how to do it well, but it has always been the case that the old way is a casualty of the new way.

I am neither anti-AI nor an AI evangelist but I think a more productive viewpoint is to think about how these advancements could open the door to new opportunity. For example, democratization of learning. It has never been easier for anyone in the world with an Internet connection and a computing device to have access to a personal math tutor or nutrition coach.

[rspoerri]

Why is it an apocalypse if people don't have jobs anymore? Why is it an apocalypse if the most intelligent being in the world isn't a human anymore.

It will be a major change, but only to people that see it as a thread to their existence - to not work anymore - are in real danger. There are tons of people in our society that are fine without working. We could tend to our children, we could tend to our elders. We could do arts and improve our world instead of competing and being better then others.

[ctoth]

Every real-world example of material needs being met without economic competition (dorms, retirement communities, high school) produces vicious social hierarchies, not enlightenment." But this's a full blog post, someday, not an HN comment. Just for now realize that Star Trek is probably actually high school hell if you think about it for five minutes.

[GeoAtreides]

> Why is it an apocalypse if people don't have jobs anymore?

because i need to pay rent? eat? not die naked in ditch when i'm old?

[_DeadFred_]

Because all signs right now are pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity. These companies were supposedly non-profits who were supposedly deep thinking on improving things but they can't even get a basic narrative/philosophy out of how things will improve and have instead pivoted to for profit.

Our systems of power are locked in caveman style thought and don't seem capable of creating something new, just applying new tech to very very old, very coercive systems of power. Gone are the techno optimist days replaced by the tech companies with enshitification with them explicitly stating you will live worse so that they can have more profit, and that if there is nothing you can do to stop them, they will cater to their worst instincts.

[sifar]

Right. Technology is more distributed, empowering for the individual, however the power that wields it is stuck in a more feudalistic mindset and so we get this weird state where technological advancements seem more dystopian.

[ctoth]

Okay. So you talk to your personal math tutor and you learn math. That the AI knows. Are you gonna get paid to use that? I don't understand "there is a machine which will teach you everything, so you'll be fine" when "there is a machine that will teach you everything and will work cheaper than you" is also true. Please explain?