Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7
FridaySteve@lemmy.world 2 days ago
When someone comes up with something like this, I transport the phrase back to the 80s where people said the exact same thing about home computers. “if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.” Ok great but a computer turned out to be something everyone wanted or needed which is why computers were built into everything by the turn of the 90s, famously leading to the Y2k bug.
Then I transport the phrase back to the mid 90s where people said the exact same thing about the internet. By the end of the 90s, the internet provided the backbone communications structures for telecommunications, emergency management, banking, education, and was built into every possible product. Ten years later people got smartphones and literally couldn’t put them down.
Yeah, some of the things AI can do really is very impressive. Whether that justifies the billions upon billions that are being spent is another matter - and probably explains why it’s being shoved in our faces. It needs to become essential so it can be made expensive, that’s the only way it’ll make the money back.
It does piss me off too - I recently bought a new phone and it’s infested with AI stuff I don’t need or want.
At the time computers were totally useless for everyone but big firms, banks and military. Ads for computers were rare and confined in specialists magazines. For mundane people, computers started to be acutely useful (like money earning useful) 20 years latter at least. That’s how I understand your approximative comparison
I transport you to the time of NFTs and crypto. Not all tech will pan out. Computers and the internet fundamentally worked. LLMs have flaws that look like they will not be solved before funding runs out. They are already looking into going public for funding. LLMs are not deterministic models. AI in general will progress and it will have its time to shine. But the LLM breakthrough we had recently has peaked. It needs to be supplemented with something else.
I was there in the 80s and I don’t remember home computers being pushed all that hard. There were Radio Shack ads and ads for running games, but it was just another appliance.
Honestly I think we’re in the radium water phase of the tech: it’s been found to do things we couldn’t before, but nobody’s got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you’ve got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y’know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
People did just use it. But because they were so comically expensive and complicated, most people couldn’t afford one until the mid-90s.
Computers were rapidly adopted for business, initially. But they quickly became a popular tool for entertainment as well.
AI serves little in the way of either purpose