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by thisisit 26 days ago
> I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened.

Amara’s law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

This continues to be applied to AI where people think is going to be next 12 to 18 months. Changes are coming but certainly not at the rate Zuckerberg and most people are thinking.
1 comments
ifwinterco 26 days ago
I believe this in general but the issue with AI specifically is historically in every cycle we've overestimated the potential of AI in both the short and the long run - people in the 60s were genuinely quite convinced we were close to AGI for a few years, as ridiculous as that now sounds.

This is why you get "AI winters" but we've never had a "steam engine winter" or a "railway winter" or a "petrochemicals winter"

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Gareth321 26 days ago
It's interesting to score our predictions of various technologies. I've been waiting for hoverboards for 40 years. Our predictions of nuclear power being in every consumer appliance were way off. We just couldn't make it safe and cheap enough. This is a common theme for "physical" technologies. On the other hand, we greatly underestimated the advent and potential of the internet. Most science fiction of the 20th century envisioned very large computers with limited interconnected capabilities. We made computers far smarter and more ubiquitous than most could ever have conceived. I see AI as a function of the kinds of technologies we consistently underestimate.
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ifwinterco 26 days ago
Yes, that's a fair counterpoint. I guess my counter-counterpoint would be that LLMs actually seem to have characteristics closer to the first group than the second, in that they (currently at least) need enormous quantities of physical things and energy in order to work.

So the nuclear power problem of "it works fine and it's actually very good in a lot of ways, it's just too expensive" could be quite relevant

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