Well given that’s the only possible relevant “AI” you could possibly be talking about, as we don’t even have an inkling about true general AI and have no technologies that even look like they could produce anything close to it, forgive me for making the obvious assumption.
No, in 20 years no version of any technology currently in use will be replacing human employees or would have the capability of doing so. AI Bros jumped the gun and tried starting to do that with current tech, and now most companies are desperately hoping just throwing more compute power at the dead ends will make it magically work before the money runs out.
No, in 20 years no version of any technology currently in use will be replacing human employees or would have the capability of doing so
That’s a pretty bold statement when technology advances have replaced or downsized the need for human roles in the past.
The printing press, cars, typewriters, computers, emails and the internet, spreadsheet software and data visualization software, cloud infrastructure…
Think about what technology looked like 20 years ago. Same with the job market. The same jobs are not available to the same extent at the same equivalent rates of pay. There are new jobs that are created, for sure. But saying that technology won’t advance in 20 years enough to reduce the need for human employees is short-sighted in my opinion.
…of course, that’s assuming that you meant “technology won’t be replacing some human employees” and not “all” employees, lol
First of all, 20 years ago, many aspects of computer technology were better. Sure, CPUs are faster, traces are smaller, monitors are clearer. But every core Internet age technology is practically identical to what it was in 1990, even. There is no email 2.0, still no easy large file sharing, and on on. Things that need improvement cannot be improved anymore because monopolies dont improve things, they entrap. Everything’s proprietary inside a walled garden and not interoperable. We’d probably be close to electronic telepathy by now if not for Big Tech.
And secondly, the previous poster said nothing anything like the current technologies will be AI. The LLMs we have now are a combination of plausible sentence assemblers, code auto-completers, travesty generators, and “Actually Indians”. That is not a stepping stone to a thinking machine, it is as he said, a sidetrack that leads to a dead end.
There are many things in tech that have stagnated, or become standards that we’re stuck with. But we’re stuck with them not because nobody can do better, but because replacing them requires convincing the whole world to replace them.
Like email 2.0? You’d need it to be fully compatible with email 1.0, or nobody’s switching. And if it is fully compatible, you’re probably making compromises on how much it improves over 1.0.
On the other hand, as an end-user, my experience with email is easier than it was 20 years ago. This isn’t the technology changing, but email clients making things better and more accessible for the end user.
As to your other point, we don’t need “thinking machines” or “electronic telepathy” to consider the feasibility of technology replacing or reducing the need for certain types of jobs. Like I said, 20 years is a long time. Some things stay the same, yes, but many change.
We have, many times, forklifted old technologies to new by having a lengthy transition period where both old and new protocols are supported by new clients, with a separate and removable backward compatibility layer. That can be done again like every other time, with any communication protocol.
The reason it hasn’t been done with things like email, chat, and file sharing protocols is because Big Tech has manipulated the markets and has such outsize control of them that there is no financial incentive to do so. If those protocols are standardized, users of it are not trapped in their garden, so they’re not interested.
Improving upon only the client-side or adding logical layers to existing aging standards can only get you so far. I agree that email is better than it was, but only by the tiniest amount in its 40-odd year existence. I find it to be only better in minor quality of life ways, but still largely used in ways that are not well fit for purpose. If everyone’s shoehorning it to badly do things beyond its abilities, in a sane world, there’d be another technology standard that does it better. The fact that theres not demonstrates that supply and demand has failed, because the supply side has captured the market and does not need to respond to its demand.
Regarding my “telepathy” example, it was just that. I’m not claiming it would replace that specific need, but trying to illustrate how Big Tech has held back, not fostered innovation. The classic definition of AI is a machine that can think and decide with relative autonomy, but modern LLM AIs do not do anything like that, and there is no path between today’s AI and that. The thing we have today is a red herring that makes a user feel like he is getting more work done in the same time, but he is really just doing different work instead. Study after study shows this to be true, as well as appearing to cause psychological damage to the user in the process.
Some new technologies are simply duds destined to the trash bin or novelty uses. Time will tell with LLMs, but this human cost aspect is going to be difficult or impossible to overcome. Few people will willingly use a technology once it becomes widely known that it breaks your brain.
Think about what technology looked like 20 years ago.
20 years ago I had a 64-bit PC with a dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM, now I have a 64-bit PC with a 6-core processor and 32GB of RAM.
Sure, it’s an improvement but consider the same situation from 1986 where it would have been a 386 (The first 32bit x86 chip!) with 1MB of RAM. The rate of computer technology improvements is slowing down, not increasing.
Edit: Thinking about it, 20 years ago I had a GeForce 7600 GT, which I replaced with a 570, that with a 980, and finally with a 3070. So 4 GPUs across 20 years, and they all used the same bus on the motherboard.
You’re absolutely right that technology isn’t accelerating as quickly as it used to.
Still, things have changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. Cloud computing, for instance, didn’t need much to change in terms of the technical possibilities, or even in terms of the availability of consumer hardware. Groundbreaking changes can still happen without needing the baseline technology to improve.
All LLMs are neural nets, not all neural nets are llms, but they’re similar enough to have the same general flaws. 'Neural Networks" are misnomers, at best; especially given the designs were first being implemented before we had any real idea how neurons actually worked. It’s why Brain Organoid interfaces still completely destroy entire simulated interfaces in pretty much any task we’ve managed to actually train them on.
It’s also how we know we’re not close to the software or hardware capability to actually do anything complex. The best that we’ve been able to do is simulate a fly’s brain with a super computer.
So, given the current rate of advancement, we’d land somewhere close to a particularly curious moth for the cost of a small apartment complex in 20 years? That actually improved my day. Thanks!
Well given that’s the only possible relevant “AI” you could possibly be talking about, as we don’t even have an inkling about true general AI and have no technologies that even look like they could produce anything close to it, forgive me for making the obvious assumption.
No, in 20 years no version of any technology currently in use will be replacing human employees or would have the capability of doing so. AI Bros jumped the gun and tried starting to do that with current tech, and now most companies are desperately hoping just throwing more compute power at the dead ends will make it magically work before the money runs out.
That’s a pretty bold statement when technology advances have replaced or downsized the need for human roles in the past.
The printing press, cars, typewriters, computers, emails and the internet, spreadsheet software and data visualization software, cloud infrastructure…
Think about what technology looked like 20 years ago. Same with the job market. The same jobs are not available to the same extent at the same equivalent rates of pay. There are new jobs that are created, for sure. But saying that technology won’t advance in 20 years enough to reduce the need for human employees is short-sighted in my opinion.
…of course, that’s assuming that you meant “technology won’t be replacing some human employees” and not “all” employees, lol
First of all, 20 years ago, many aspects of computer technology were better. Sure, CPUs are faster, traces are smaller, monitors are clearer. But every core Internet age technology is practically identical to what it was in 1990, even. There is no email 2.0, still no easy large file sharing, and on on. Things that need improvement cannot be improved anymore because monopolies dont improve things, they entrap. Everything’s proprietary inside a walled garden and not interoperable. We’d probably be close to electronic telepathy by now if not for Big Tech.
And secondly, the previous poster said nothing anything like the current technologies will be AI. The LLMs we have now are a combination of plausible sentence assemblers, code auto-completers, travesty generators, and “Actually Indians”. That is not a stepping stone to a thinking machine, it is as he said, a sidetrack that leads to a dead end.
There are many things in tech that have stagnated, or become standards that we’re stuck with. But we’re stuck with them not because nobody can do better, but because replacing them requires convincing the whole world to replace them.
Like email 2.0? You’d need it to be fully compatible with email 1.0, or nobody’s switching. And if it is fully compatible, you’re probably making compromises on how much it improves over 1.0.
On the other hand, as an end-user, my experience with email is easier than it was 20 years ago. This isn’t the technology changing, but email clients making things better and more accessible for the end user.
As to your other point, we don’t need “thinking machines” or “electronic telepathy” to consider the feasibility of technology replacing or reducing the need for certain types of jobs. Like I said, 20 years is a long time. Some things stay the same, yes, but many change.
We have, many times, forklifted old technologies to new by having a lengthy transition period where both old and new protocols are supported by new clients, with a separate and removable backward compatibility layer. That can be done again like every other time, with any communication protocol.
The reason it hasn’t been done with things like email, chat, and file sharing protocols is because Big Tech has manipulated the markets and has such outsize control of them that there is no financial incentive to do so. If those protocols are standardized, users of it are not trapped in their garden, so they’re not interested.
Improving upon only the client-side or adding logical layers to existing aging standards can only get you so far. I agree that email is better than it was, but only by the tiniest amount in its 40-odd year existence. I find it to be only better in minor quality of life ways, but still largely used in ways that are not well fit for purpose. If everyone’s shoehorning it to badly do things beyond its abilities, in a sane world, there’d be another technology standard that does it better. The fact that theres not demonstrates that supply and demand has failed, because the supply side has captured the market and does not need to respond to its demand.
Regarding my “telepathy” example, it was just that. I’m not claiming it would replace that specific need, but trying to illustrate how Big Tech has held back, not fostered innovation. The classic definition of AI is a machine that can think and decide with relative autonomy, but modern LLM AIs do not do anything like that, and there is no path between today’s AI and that. The thing we have today is a red herring that makes a user feel like he is getting more work done in the same time, but he is really just doing different work instead. Study after study shows this to be true, as well as appearing to cause psychological damage to the user in the process.
Some new technologies are simply duds destined to the trash bin or novelty uses. Time will tell with LLMs, but this human cost aspect is going to be difficult or impossible to overcome. Few people will willingly use a technology once it becomes widely known that it breaks your brain.
20 years ago I had a 64-bit PC with a dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM, now I have a 64-bit PC with a 6-core processor and 32GB of RAM.
Sure, it’s an improvement but consider the same situation from 1986 where it would have been a 386 (The first 32bit x86 chip!) with 1MB of RAM. The rate of computer technology improvements is slowing down, not increasing.
Edit: Thinking about it, 20 years ago I had a GeForce 7600 GT, which I replaced with a 570, that with a 980, and finally with a 3070. So 4 GPUs across 20 years, and they all used the same bus on the motherboard.
You’re absolutely right that technology isn’t accelerating as quickly as it used to.
Still, things have changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. Cloud computing, for instance, didn’t need much to change in terms of the technical possibilities, or even in terms of the availability of consumer hardware. Groundbreaking changes can still happen without needing the baseline technology to improve.
Are all of the neural net projects I’ve been reading about for the last decade just llms, then?
All LLMs are neural nets, not all neural nets are llms, but they’re similar enough to have the same general flaws. 'Neural Networks" are misnomers, at best; especially given the designs were first being implemented before we had any real idea how neurons actually worked. It’s why Brain Organoid interfaces still completely destroy entire simulated interfaces in pretty much any task we’ve managed to actually train them on.
It’s also how we know we’re not close to the software or hardware capability to actually do anything complex. The best that we’ve been able to do is simulate a fly’s brain with a super computer.
So, given the current rate of advancement, we’d land somewhere close to a particularly curious moth for the cost of a small apartment complex in 20 years? That actually improved my day. Thanks!
Do you think they told the fly it was living in a simulation?
Fuck I hope not
Yes. That does seem to be the case based on the evidence before us.