AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

jmstfv

tangentially related, but as someone who built multiple internet businesses -- mostly unsuccessful, some mildly successful -- I barely have any new ideas to work on. I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.

Zealotux

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

bearjaws

I could totally see it, recently there has been a social club opened near me and it has 100+ people attending weekly. All younger, 20-30 year olds in their early career. Separately, I have a local camera repair shop and my friend told me its 2 months backlog to get your film based camera worked on. Ultimately if the deal we get online is infinite tracking, infinite scrolling and infinite enshittification, real life start to sound a whole lot better.

jemmyw

The question it raises is if this is the fake surge, the one we see, what is the real one we don't see? Renewable energy comes to mind. Robotics too but maybe that's too tied up with AI.

schnitzelstoat

The theory doesn't seem to make much sense to me - like why can't there be simultaneous technological revolutions? And why would they last an arbitrary 50-60 years? > People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off. That could do with a solid citation tbh. The anti-AI people are really vocal on social media but personally I like having the AI results given how awful navigating the modern internet has become with all the cookie banners and anti-Ad Blocker popups etc. Honestly, the LLMs seem like the most transformative technology we've had since the release of the iPhone.

dasil003

It seems really premature to talk about AI being the end of anything. What’s at an end stage is adoption of smart phones and monetizing human attention. That’s been the fuel that powered the last quarter century of tech gains, and while still huge in absolute terms it has been running out of steam as a growth engine and facing cultural pushback (eg. Social media lawsuits) for a while. AI so far has really only shown massive utility for programming. It has broad potential across almost all knowledge work, but it’s unclear how much of that can be fulfilled in practice. There are huge technical, UX and social hurdles. Integrating middle brow chatbots everywhere is not the end game.

neals

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

awongh

I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the losses of the former. History says these transitions aren't easy on society. But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?

techteach00

I sort of agree with the premise of the article. I ask myself, did more non-technical people pick up AI chat bots when they were invented than picked up personal computers in the late 70s/early 80's? I think probably. From my conversations with others.

lkm0

These economic frameworks sure look like pareidolia to me

tomhillson

if this could last till a point where AI have actual automation ability, it's not a tool for humans anymore. it could have a identity and start to evolve literally. i don't understand why some people consider AI as tech revolution. maybe i'm into sf, but AI can be something other than just a tool.

a-dub

this perez model thing completely misses the communications revolutions of the telegraph, radio and television not to mention demonopolization of bell. > Then came AI, revealing new dynamics. ChatGPT’s breakthrough didn’t come from a garage startup but from OpenAI, i thought the transformer and large language models came from google research. > There’s also social pushback—in the UK the campaigns against big ringroad schemes started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And perhaps we’re seeing some of that about AI. The U.S. map of local pushback against data centres from Data Center Watch covers the whole of the country, in red states and blue. People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off. the us had the highway revolts. in most cities where the revolts succeeded it is widely heralded today as a success. the data center hate is interesting. i think many people are just learning what data centers are. but that said, they've come to represent something different in recent years. previously they were part of the infrastructure that made industry hum, now public messaging from tech leaders and academics is along the lines of "this is how your livelihood is going to be replaced" while the institutions that are supposed to provide any sort of backstop are being dismantled or slashed to pieces by crazypants trumpist politics. i think focusing the energy on the tangible like mundane buildings is interesting, but the hate makes a lot of sense. addressing the core thesis, i'd argue that ai is not the next step in the 70s digital technological wave (especially considering the future of ai compute is probably hybrid digital-analog systems), but rather is something fundamentally new that also changes how technology interacts with society and how economics itself will function. previous systems helped, these systems can do. that's a fundamental change and one that may not be compatible with our existing economic systems of social sorting and mobility. the big question in my mind is: if it succeeds, will we desperately try to hold onto the old system (which essentially would be a disaster that freezes everyone in place and creates a permanent underclass) or will we evolve to a new, yet to be defined, system? and if so, how will the transition look?

barrkel

The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article. I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software. There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and signing up prodigious amounts of recurring revenue every month.

josefritzishere

It could also be a huge bubble like everyone seems to agree about.

LunicLynx

And with robots, this also applies to the physical world.

alexwebb2

I view this post as primarily pattern-matching and storytelling. But I think there’s a buried truth there, and that they were nibbling at the edges of it when they started talking about the overlapping stages. There are some very interesting information network theories that present information growth as a continually evolving and expanding graph, something like a virus inherent to the universe’s structure, as a natural counterpoint to entropy. And in that view, atomic bonds and cells and towns and railroads and network connections and model weights are all the same sort of thing, the same phenomenon, manifesting in different substrates at different levels of the shared graph. To me, that’s a much better and deeper explanation that connects the dots, and offers more predictive power about what’s next. Highly recommend the book Why Information Grows to anyone whose interest is piqued by this.

ETH_start

Humanity has industrialized the production of intelligence. We're nowhere near the end of what this leads to.

justonepost2

it be the end of the paradigm myth, and eventually, the Anthropocene it be the beginning of vast and infinite potentia spreading out beyond us

Invictus0

ItS thE eND of ThE InTeRwEbS