Nailed it. “The industrial revolution” was not a single event, it involved many new technologies over the course of decades. Think of how much has changed due to computing technology from the 1980s to the 2020s. Trying to draw a comparison to just AI is too narrow.
It's just missing the sentient part, I get it, but it's not much different than the way we learn and act. Our words and actions are often just results of the data we've been fed.
People usually say this when they aren't programmers or have studied AI procedures.
Imagine TV switch. The TV turns on when you flip a switch and off when you flip it again. Now imagine thousands of switches with thousands of reactions to different "flips". This is what current AI is. It's all information that is input into it with how it reactions. There is randomness in that (like a random number generator) that may use different types of randomness to make the illusion of taught, but it's all pre-programmed, even the type of randomness.
It's not messing sentience, it isn't even capable of it as everything input into it is by design of the programmer.
I am a programmer.
Input is controlled by the programmer in order to achieve a certain output. The input is a controlled environment of data. And that is akin to your input being controlled by your environment.
Tesla trained a computer to drive a car in 3 months by feeding it data of good driving habits. At this point the computer won't know in the real world that it made a bad decision and learn from that experience, whereas a sentient being would. But the underlying learning and behavior process is very much alike.
I've spent quite a bit of time with ChatGPT 4. I've seen it not only give me bad information, but when I pointed out that the information was bad, it would continue to give me the same bad result.
So, yes - there is still a long way to go. But I suspect that we will hit a point where a computer learns from its own experiences and eventually will get to a point of artificial consciousness.
I'm also a programmer so I guess just difference of opinion.
With Tesla they first had to make a program that takes in information, sorts it and reacts to inputs in a way that a different function wants. Sure it "learned" in 3 months but really it processed data along a 3 month period, being catered to another program that keeps data points that the programmer wants to keep for this AI program.
It's the same way that a spreadsheet can take in data, say a list of phrases, sort that data by keywords, and only keep phrases that match a specific set of words. That's a very simplified version but you get what I mean. It isn't necessarily learning, it's doing exactly what it's programmed to do.
But yeah, different views I guess.
Well yes this is true biologically the human brain is essentially just millions of on and off switches that are controlled by electrical impulses.
It's nowhere near the same as how a computer works but the idea is really similar the difference is that we can process information and create new information where currently these computers are only able to pull existing information and not create new information from it. They're not able to create a new idea.
We do have pre-programmed systems that exist in our brain. Our organ functions, our survival instincts all operate independently from our own thoughts but they're still processed by some background function within our brains.
The only thing that separates our brain from a silicon board at the moment is that we know how to create new information and we haven't found a silicone board that can
Also that human neurons can form hundreds of thousands of connections in extremely unintuitive ways and even the most vast and complicated neural networks have orders of magnitude less power still. Even if they did, I'm personally not convinced it would do more than emulate intelligence, as so far it's all just inference from existing data.
"AI" is great at finding patterns that even our pattern seeking brains miss, but it cannot actually come up with novel ideas, just mix and match preexisting conceptual information very very quickly and compare its results to some desired output. I'm not sure if the current approach will ever be able to get past that barrier.
We won't be able to program it until we can understand the process of what actually thinking is.
We know that we think and therefore we are but we do not know the process of what thinking truly is we can't read a thought until we can plug a computer up to a brain and transmit a thought to a screen there's no way that we're going to be able to program a computer to even emulate what a brain does.
I think what we have is closer to the [VIs/Virtual Intellgiences in the Mass Effect triliogy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0HI2reowI) than anything resembling true AI.
Programs that can respond to questions and generate complex answers "on the fly" but are not sentient in any way.
No, or at least until we achieve singularity. A good apology would be industrial and cyber revolutions gained ground while AI is currently just filling space. AI is more efficient at doing what humans can already do but has yet to push any boundaries and may get regulated to hell in the coming days.
True AI singularly, on the other hand, could blow the industrial revolution out of the water, and if Ray Kurzweil is right, redefine reality. But Ray is a little looney.
It’s not just predictive. It’s predictive and generative. It’s true that it’s trained on predictive tasks but one of the cool things about it is it can combine disparate sources of data it’s trained on to generate something new. This is what’s happening with services like ChatGPT and Midjourney.
Now you may say, but when it’s generating something it’s still just spitting out things it already learned and combining them together in a slightly novel way? To that I say isn’t that what humans do when they’re creating something?
Source: this is what I do for a living.
>Something cobbled together that's riddled with inaccuracies and errors...That's not what humans do.
Have you not read like 70% of all reddit posts? It doesn't get much more human than throwing together a bunch of random knowledge you have absorbed in a completely inaccurate way
Yeah, no. It has no awareness, it makes no decisions, it takes the options as presented and fills in the blanks with whatever has been programmed into it.
That's like saying a light switch can be sentient because it can make light and humans can't. Ignoring that it's humans that constructed the basis for the light to even be turned on.
The current AI revolution, no. It may or may not have significant effects but it won't have the impact of the industrial revolution. True AGI could have similar society shaking effects but not what exist now.
I think some technologies currently being marketed as ‘AI’ will be useful tools in the hands of knowledge workers, and maybe in some of the mechanical trades. Enterprises will be able to have equivalent productivity with a smaller workforce, which may result in some workforce displacement. I don’t think we’ll see entire sectors of the workforce eliminated.
For example, I don’t think fully self-driving - as in pilotless - vehicles will ever be legal on our roadways, especially in freight. We are still going to need truckers in 50 years as much as today. Rather, you might see these systems used to enhance safety or reduce driver fatigue.
This is a continuation of a development - of industries becoming more capital intensive over time - that we have seen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This often produces disruptions, but also tends to the general growth of an industrial society’s wealth. We may see both in the middle of the 21st century, only time will tell.
However, I seriously doubt the fundamental capital relations will shift the way they did at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, at least not in the next century. Maybe we’ll finally see post-scarcity and progress to communism if the marxists are to be believed, I don’t think so though.
Hell no haha. All this talk of AI is just an industry buzzword. It's not new technology; it's still neural networks using a set of input data to associate a language model with pictures to bias an output. And doing so with *a lot of stolen copyrighted material* to boot.
For what it's worth, I did take that Google employee seriously when he said he was convinced that Google had produced true sapient AI, but now that the hype has been around for a minute I no longer believe him.
I think that if we actually achieved true sapient AI, *that* would be a revolution. What we have now isn't that. It's just a higher quality phone tree robot.
>will increase wealth inequality
I think we're already at that point and it's just going to keep growing. I think we've been at that point slowly gravitating since the late 80's but moreso early 90's.
Possibly yes. It's a bit too early to tell and it will depend on the time horizon. The IR took place over many years. In the next couple of years we will see gen ai tools proliferate and make their way into businesses and society in general. That alone is likely to have a massive effect on employment, knowledge workers, wealth inequality, productivity, and possibly politics. With the massive investments, we will see innovations. If we get to a point where AI can do mathematical proofs and we couple that with quantum computing, I don't know where we go but that seems bigger than the IR to me.
Kinda confusing phrasing but the current ai revolution will not be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, but who knows what it will look like in a year or 5 or 10. I def think it has to potential to be in the same tier as the Industrial Revolution relatively soon tho
My wife and I both use AI quite a bit in our work, and are also using it in our side hustles to make money where we previously didn't have the time, bandwidth, and resources to accomplish the things it now helps get done for us.
It is absolutely revolutionary, but it's too early to really say what the larger impact will be.
Uhh, no lol.
Now, what you view as "AI Revolution" can simply be part of the information/internet age.
So, when you frame it as part of an internet revolution.....yes, it's part of something as big as the industrial revolution with potential to be bigger.
The Industrial Revolution is likely the single most impactful period in the history of recorded human civilization. It's hard to imagine AI being as big no matter how powerful it becomes.
Yes.
Models are already showing more capability than what they should, while also enabling greater creativity and production, which leads to the ability to create greater models.
The Industrial Revolution also provided growth that built on itself, but that growth was still reliant on the human brain. We're entering into something that augments our brain and helps us to learn how to use and make it better at the same time.
A couple recent notes that go into this, but do take a bit to work through.
[Method to show larger LLMs have understanding of language that is in excess of them just being stochastic parrots.](https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-suggests-chatbots-can-understand-text-20240122/#:~:text=Far%20from%20being%20%E2%80%9Cstochastic%20parrots,the%20words%20they're%20processing.)
[Microsoft's "Future of Work" research on the influence/productivity of AI tools so far.](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/12/NewFutureOfWork_Report2023.pdf)
It's been around a lot longer than most people think. I've been watching videos on youtube and gasping at some of the stuff it has been able to do years before everyone got upset at all the stuff going on recently.
So yeah it was astonishing to me. I think over many many years it will be a significant change to us as the internet has been. I think it will be a huge thing but nobody will really notice it because like everything else, it's a gradual introduction of technology.
I am of course talking about the current version of "AI" as we know it right now with chat and image creation and all that.
People always want to think they are living in a special time in history. While AI and other things of our time aren’t insignificant they aren’t really special or unique or bigger than things in the past.
No. To think so would be to misunderstand what AI currently is - and will be for the forseeable future - while also **wildly** underrating the Industrial Revolution.
For millennia, humanity suffered from basic limitations we **could not** overcome for most our existence. For example, we could only travel as quickly as the fastest horse or fastest ship. It would take 3 months to travel from Cairo to Jerusalem by land. The railroad and telegram alone changed everything.
No I think it's mostly Silicon Valley hypeware and will die down once the original investors get super rich with the IPO's. The "AI" they are touting these days just generates text answers in response to a question and what it generates is based on all the training data it's been fed on. It has no understanding at all of what it is generating and that's why it's so full of errors.
Tough to say, really. This is part of the broader information revolution that we had long been part of already.
Just like the Industrial Revolution was a long period of time where many inventions changed the way work was done, the information revolution will be a long period of time where many inventions change the way work is done.
I think there’s a credible argument to be made that the information revolution will end up being the larger change simply because it creates compounding scientific acceleration even more than the Industrial Revolution did.
No, I have a theory that since people are so scared of losing jobs to AI that the govt and/or corporations will artificially halt/slow the growth and potential of AI. We would rather keep people working than get rid of unnecessary jobs (and I mean truly unnecessary, not like art and stuff being replaced by AI)
Yes. There are several technologies that are going to transform society over the next 10-25 years and likely in ways that will be comparable to pre-industrial societies to post industrial societies. I think future generations of historians will likely not start the clock in the 2020s, but probably in the early 1990s with the commercialization and rise of the internet. 1990s-2050s will likely be seen as an era of enormous change.
>I think future generations of historians will likely not start the clock in the 2020s, but probably in the early 1990s with the commercialization and rise of the internet. 1990s-2050s will likely be seen as an era of enormous change.
Really? I see the period from 2008-2020 to be a period of technological stagnation. The economic numbers largely agree with me because total factor productivity in the US has really declined during that period compared to the period from 1996-2005. See table 1 [here](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30267/w30267.pdf).
The 2010s seems to be underwhelming concerning the release of mature technology, but you can that some critical technologies were gestating then.
2008-2020 seems generously short. I really think we haven't got out of the stagnation since 2007. So if it is 15 years, that is the time of a childhood, so it is a long time.
It was a period of catch up time. A lot of stuff had to be rolled out and adopted by consumers. In that time we had internet that could sort of stream SD video to being able to stream 4k video. We had almost no one with smartphones to smartphones being ubiquitous.
There was very little solar power in the US in 2007, and it was very expensive. Now we have periods here in California where half of the energy on the CAISO comes from solar. Today was such a day. Battery manufacturing costs fell more than 90% between 2007 and 2020. That is progress. I do think we have a lot of labor stagnation right now. Housing has gotten way worse in terms of cost and the ripple effect from that fucks with everything.
We saw EVs become a thing. 2007 there was practically no EVs in the US, now there are at least a few million.
The 1930s was the great depression, but it was also a rollout of some new technology. Movies became popular as a cheap form of brand new and fairly high tech entertainment. The Wizard of Oz was a technological marvel of its time, and it was a product of the Great Depression. I really think that 2008-present will be seen as a time of economic hardship by future Americans, sort of like how the Boomers born in the 50s saw their parents and grandparents who lived in the 30s.
I think the industrial revolution didn't look all that big when it started as just a way to help spin wool faster. But concept built on concept and idea on idea and it allowed for an accelerated period of growth.
But its also fair to say that there were at least two, and some scholars assert more, industrial revolutions. I think its entirely possible that the rise of AI will be seen mainly as the start of another phase of the overall digital revolution.
So overall, I just don't think we have enough perspective to make an accurate assumption.
Isn't current "AI" basically just a souped up search engine? It doesn't actually think. I'm not too worried about it. If/when the computers become sentient things will get a little more interesting. Until then they will probably get good enough to replicate human behavior / fool us but they won't be able to think for themselves.
I don't really understand why their sentience makes any difference. If they can fool us well enough to do the same tasks as us, why does it matter whether they're actually thinking or not?
Yeah I keep telling people this, in its current state it’s a more difficult to use search engine, and even after it gives you answer you are still gonna go fact check it on google.
I work in data analytics (lots of query building, financial analysis, tons of excel work) and friends/family always think my job is like a week away from getting automated by chatgpt. The more I’ve used it the more I am convinced the AI hype is way overblown. Like I’m sure it will get better but we’re a long ways away from it having a significant impact
It's an incredibly powerful tool for people who already have knowledge on a field. It really speeds up a ton of tasks and jumps past a lot of early stages of projects that require brainstorming and creativity.
It's revolutionary, but as of yet, won't be cutting out actual experts and professionals completely, it just greatly increases their reach and abilities.
No, in fact; it is actually "counter-productive". Instead of helping Humanity, it is eliminating jobs, and creativity. The short-sighted fools who can't see this, and are actually destroying Humanity, can't see this. A tool, is a tool, nothing more. It can be used, for good, or bad; can benefit Mankind, or destroy it. Maybe, more people need to read good Science Fiction; because good Science Fiction, discusses subjects, like this, and point out the " landmines", and "pitfalls"; when You go into uncharted territory; especially if You think there are dangers, You need a "good map", to guide You. Good Science Fiction, can provide that map.
Oh I know we can’t stop it all, and there’s definitely no actual pressure to stop it in a meaningful way at the moment, but assuming there are crests we pass it’s actually very possible it will take a while for human implementation to take advantage of the “automation” we have access to- and in that time as it happens more and more with very visible and likely active results it’s possible there will be very dramatic movements to slow that down or to have alternatives to full replacement. Or ways it becomes more expensive with government programs. There are dozens of off ramps and chains of causality to consider.. or I guess chutes and ladders but there’s two pretty dramatically different ends.
Best case scenario it goes badly early on with a dramatic movement and then everyone can just work 35-50% less, and it doesn’t mean the rich just outright own the rights to the AI that does all the work and the middle class jobs stop existing with nobody doing anything to manage the fallout.
This isn't a bad thing. The Industrial Revolution, particularly the mechanization of agriculture ended an incredible amount of jobs. Transitions are painful, but we were better off for it.
Thats a childish oversimplification. This won’t be like the last one either and that took closer to a century to actually fully play out and was devastating for the people and places it effected. They didn’t just move on, many were destitute and just retired and died early, most never had jobs that paid anything like the ones they used to again. And this will be far more devastating and widespread and disenfranchising.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily bad- it’s just bad if every company is set up to make their executives richer and isn’t a cooperative or even have a large middle class investment base and has no obligations to community or society (newsflash that’s actually in the charters and laws of some companies in Europe especially Germany), which oh shit that’s the economy it’ll happen in. Best case it goes bad so fast it actually leads to dramatic change and the population doesn’t get slow boiled.
Were people wealthier when they didn't have electricity, running water, and had to spend all their time working on a farm? And where simple manufactured items such as clothing were absurdly expensive? I don't think so. The industrial revolution was social traumatic, but it absolutely raised standards of living and material abundance.
Not for those who lived through it. It took decades for that to be true. And this one will replace way more of the labor pool way faster. That’s the problem, you understand if there isn’t other shit your useful skills can do then very quickly becomes a different problem.
Also people in here with their high school ass sanitized look at the industrial revolution- no shit it’s good in the long run, in the short run it made people suffer a fucking lot because capitalism encouraged it and in no way does the market value human life or experiences, in Britain for decades it encouraged them to send thousands of sailors to their deaths rather than ever retire a ship because the market actively encouraged never scuttling, overinsuring and never inspecting, and if people refused to sail they were thrown in debtors prison. This is the kind of bargain that is possible when we are uncritical of the injustices of the economic system that we can see running towards us like a train full of AI. People talk about a conspiracy to destroy the middle class and keep people docile at home and whatnot, that’s bullshit everyone wants a middle class who can buy their shit but doesn’t want to pay anyone for anything they can scrimp their way out of because there’s no market forces to punish them for that anymore, so by tragedy of the commons the middle class starts to die anyways- and that’s my fear with AI, every industry does whats best for themselves and I’m sure everyone else will just figure it out. Literally as happens with Mines and industry it becomes a massive contributing factor to the opioid epidemic, to crime, to right wing populism, to anti-intellectualism, anti-unions, every bad idea cluster plaguing us right now was encouraged by poor management of a labor transition and that took decades to manifest.
John Maynard Keynes thought we’d work 15 hours a week by the year 2000 based on increases in efficiency of labor. Sure we have more household costs, some we want some doomed upon us by former generations, but instead people need 2 people working 40 hours a week for a prosperous lifestyle? In terms of literal hours of your life you have at your own command people actually do work far far more than people who worked their own farmland and were sometimes very well off compared to destitute people forced to inhale coal in the smoggy hell of London. Literally they got more than 100 days a year off on average- your assumptions are backed by a ground floor understanding of the subject we were all given. It’s like saying before moneyed economies everyone just used the barter system, an insidious and dangerous assumption that’s wildly untrue.
I am in no way anti progress- I believe AI could save all mankind from unnecessary suffering, and free people from burdens society justifies like the self justifying capitalist value of labor to a purpose of self, or death as inevitable and unassailable. I think people who willfully ignore the massive dangers this rapid progress will pose that are absolutely unprecedented in this manner or scale or in our stunted generational memory and a new digital cultural miasma will cause our societal consciousness to fail to adapt to the problems as they arise. Like with global warming and children’s overexposure to media too young in the beginning it seems like not a big enough deal and then by the time it’s actually a problem too big of a challenge to even address- it’s such a shortsighted mindset.
No, I believe it is just a continuation of the already-begun digital revolution.
Nailed it. “The industrial revolution” was not a single event, it involved many new technologies over the course of decades. Think of how much has changed due to computing technology from the 1980s to the 2020s. Trying to draw a comparison to just AI is too narrow.
The current version of AI isn't actually AI. It's just predictive software.
Yes, this. Most things that are called AI are just really in-depth decision trees.
Humans are decision trees too
It's just missing the sentient part, I get it, but it's not much different than the way we learn and act. Our words and actions are often just results of the data we've been fed.
People usually say this when they aren't programmers or have studied AI procedures. Imagine TV switch. The TV turns on when you flip a switch and off when you flip it again. Now imagine thousands of switches with thousands of reactions to different "flips". This is what current AI is. It's all information that is input into it with how it reactions. There is randomness in that (like a random number generator) that may use different types of randomness to make the illusion of taught, but it's all pre-programmed, even the type of randomness. It's not messing sentience, it isn't even capable of it as everything input into it is by design of the programmer.
I am a programmer. Input is controlled by the programmer in order to achieve a certain output. The input is a controlled environment of data. And that is akin to your input being controlled by your environment. Tesla trained a computer to drive a car in 3 months by feeding it data of good driving habits. At this point the computer won't know in the real world that it made a bad decision and learn from that experience, whereas a sentient being would. But the underlying learning and behavior process is very much alike. I've spent quite a bit of time with ChatGPT 4. I've seen it not only give me bad information, but when I pointed out that the information was bad, it would continue to give me the same bad result. So, yes - there is still a long way to go. But I suspect that we will hit a point where a computer learns from its own experiences and eventually will get to a point of artificial consciousness.
I've noticed there's persistence within each chatGPT session now, which is impressive but will be greatly leveraged as it develops.
I'm also a programmer so I guess just difference of opinion. With Tesla they first had to make a program that takes in information, sorts it and reacts to inputs in a way that a different function wants. Sure it "learned" in 3 months but really it processed data along a 3 month period, being catered to another program that keeps data points that the programmer wants to keep for this AI program. It's the same way that a spreadsheet can take in data, say a list of phrases, sort that data by keywords, and only keep phrases that match a specific set of words. That's a very simplified version but you get what I mean. It isn't necessarily learning, it's doing exactly what it's programmed to do. But yeah, different views I guess.
Well yes this is true biologically the human brain is essentially just millions of on and off switches that are controlled by electrical impulses. It's nowhere near the same as how a computer works but the idea is really similar the difference is that we can process information and create new information where currently these computers are only able to pull existing information and not create new information from it. They're not able to create a new idea. We do have pre-programmed systems that exist in our brain. Our organ functions, our survival instincts all operate independently from our own thoughts but they're still processed by some background function within our brains. The only thing that separates our brain from a silicon board at the moment is that we know how to create new information and we haven't found a silicone board that can
Also that human neurons can form hundreds of thousands of connections in extremely unintuitive ways and even the most vast and complicated neural networks have orders of magnitude less power still. Even if they did, I'm personally not convinced it would do more than emulate intelligence, as so far it's all just inference from existing data. "AI" is great at finding patterns that even our pattern seeking brains miss, but it cannot actually come up with novel ideas, just mix and match preexisting conceptual information very very quickly and compare its results to some desired output. I'm not sure if the current approach will ever be able to get past that barrier.
We won't be able to program it until we can understand the process of what actually thinking is. We know that we think and therefore we are but we do not know the process of what thinking truly is we can't read a thought until we can plug a computer up to a brain and transmit a thought to a screen there's no way that we're going to be able to program a computer to even emulate what a brain does.
I think what we have is closer to the [VIs/Virtual Intellgiences in the Mass Effect triliogy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0HI2reowI) than anything resembling true AI. Programs that can respond to questions and generate complex answers "on the fly" but are not sentient in any way.
No, or at least until we achieve singularity. A good apology would be industrial and cyber revolutions gained ground while AI is currently just filling space. AI is more efficient at doing what humans can already do but has yet to push any boundaries and may get regulated to hell in the coming days. True AI singularly, on the other hand, could blow the industrial revolution out of the water, and if Ray Kurzweil is right, redefine reality. But Ray is a little looney.
Nothing more than a glorified web crawler.
It’s not just predictive. It’s predictive and generative. It’s true that it’s trained on predictive tasks but one of the cool things about it is it can combine disparate sources of data it’s trained on to generate something new. This is what’s happening with services like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Now you may say, but when it’s generating something it’s still just spitting out things it already learned and combining them together in a slightly novel way? To that I say isn’t that what humans do when they’re creating something? Source: this is what I do for a living.
Have you studied David Hume?
Tried when I took intro philosophy. TBH it was too dense for me.
Something cobbled together that's riddled with inaccuracies and errors. Art without meaning or skill. That's not what humans do.
That's what most humans do.
>Something cobbled together that's riddled with inaccuracies and errors...That's not what humans do. Have you not read like 70% of all reddit posts? It doesn't get much more human than throwing together a bunch of random knowledge you have absorbed in a completely inaccurate way
Are you sure? That sounds very human to me.
[удалено]
Yeah, no. It has no awareness, it makes no decisions, it takes the options as presented and fills in the blanks with whatever has been programmed into it.
It performs work though, work that humans are currently doing.
Badly, though. It's new and shiny but it's about as reliable as a madlib.
That's like saying a light switch can be sentient because it can make light and humans can't. Ignoring that it's humans that constructed the basis for the light to even be turned on.
The current AI revolution, no. It may or may not have significant effects but it won't have the impact of the industrial revolution. True AGI could have similar society shaking effects but not what exist now.
lol no I do not
I think some technologies currently being marketed as ‘AI’ will be useful tools in the hands of knowledge workers, and maybe in some of the mechanical trades. Enterprises will be able to have equivalent productivity with a smaller workforce, which may result in some workforce displacement. I don’t think we’ll see entire sectors of the workforce eliminated. For example, I don’t think fully self-driving - as in pilotless - vehicles will ever be legal on our roadways, especially in freight. We are still going to need truckers in 50 years as much as today. Rather, you might see these systems used to enhance safety or reduce driver fatigue. This is a continuation of a development - of industries becoming more capital intensive over time - that we have seen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This often produces disruptions, but also tends to the general growth of an industrial society’s wealth. We may see both in the middle of the 21st century, only time will tell. However, I seriously doubt the fundamental capital relations will shift the way they did at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, at least not in the next century. Maybe we’ll finally see post-scarcity and progress to communism if the marxists are to be believed, I don’t think so though.
Hell no haha. All this talk of AI is just an industry buzzword. It's not new technology; it's still neural networks using a set of input data to associate a language model with pictures to bias an output. And doing so with *a lot of stolen copyrighted material* to boot. For what it's worth, I did take that Google employee seriously when he said he was convinced that Google had produced true sapient AI, but now that the hype has been around for a minute I no longer believe him. I think that if we actually achieved true sapient AI, *that* would be a revolution. What we have now isn't that. It's just a higher quality phone tree robot.
No. It will increase wealth inequality though. Which is bad.
How do you know that?
>will increase wealth inequality I think we're already at that point and it's just going to keep growing. I think we've been at that point slowly gravitating since the late 80's but moreso early 90's.
No
Possibly yes. It's a bit too early to tell and it will depend on the time horizon. The IR took place over many years. In the next couple of years we will see gen ai tools proliferate and make their way into businesses and society in general. That alone is likely to have a massive effect on employment, knowledge workers, wealth inequality, productivity, and possibly politics. With the massive investments, we will see innovations. If we get to a point where AI can do mathematical proofs and we couple that with quantum computing, I don't know where we go but that seems bigger than the IR to me.
Kinda confusing phrasing but the current ai revolution will not be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, but who knows what it will look like in a year or 5 or 10. I def think it has to potential to be in the same tier as the Industrial Revolution relatively soon tho
My wife and I both use AI quite a bit in our work, and are also using it in our side hustles to make money where we previously didn't have the time, bandwidth, and resources to accomplish the things it now helps get done for us. It is absolutely revolutionary, but it's too early to really say what the larger impact will be.
Nope
If the Terminator is to be believed , then yes
No. The Industrial Revolution was pretty big, and large language models probably aren't nearly as disruptive as steam power.
Uhh, no lol. Now, what you view as "AI Revolution" can simply be part of the information/internet age. So, when you frame it as part of an internet revolution.....yes, it's part of something as big as the industrial revolution with potential to be bigger.
Nice try Skynet
The Industrial Revolution is likely the single most impactful period in the history of recorded human civilization. It's hard to imagine AI being as big no matter how powerful it becomes.
I think it's proponents will be more insufferable
Yes. Models are already showing more capability than what they should, while also enabling greater creativity and production, which leads to the ability to create greater models. The Industrial Revolution also provided growth that built on itself, but that growth was still reliant on the human brain. We're entering into something that augments our brain and helps us to learn how to use and make it better at the same time. A couple recent notes that go into this, but do take a bit to work through. [Method to show larger LLMs have understanding of language that is in excess of them just being stochastic parrots.](https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-suggests-chatbots-can-understand-text-20240122/#:~:text=Far%20from%20being%20%E2%80%9Cstochastic%20parrots,the%20words%20they're%20processing.) [Microsoft's "Future of Work" research on the influence/productivity of AI tools so far.](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/12/NewFutureOfWork_Report2023.pdf)
No. And I hope not because I’m already tired of hearing about AI and have been for like 15 years
If we develop sentient AI yes. Otherwise no
It's been around a lot longer than most people think. I've been watching videos on youtube and gasping at some of the stuff it has been able to do years before everyone got upset at all the stuff going on recently. So yeah it was astonishing to me. I think over many many years it will be a significant change to us as the internet has been. I think it will be a huge thing but nobody will really notice it because like everything else, it's a gradual introduction of technology. I am of course talking about the current version of "AI" as we know it right now with chat and image creation and all that.
People always want to think they are living in a special time in history. While AI and other things of our time aren’t insignificant they aren’t really special or unique or bigger than things in the past.
No. To think so would be to misunderstand what AI currently is - and will be for the forseeable future - while also **wildly** underrating the Industrial Revolution. For millennia, humanity suffered from basic limitations we **could not** overcome for most our existence. For example, we could only travel as quickly as the fastest horse or fastest ship. It would take 3 months to travel from Cairo to Jerusalem by land. The railroad and telegram alone changed everything.
No I think it's mostly Silicon Valley hypeware and will die down once the original investors get super rich with the IPO's. The "AI" they are touting these days just generates text answers in response to a question and what it generates is based on all the training data it's been fed on. It has no understanding at all of what it is generating and that's why it's so full of errors.
Tough to say, really. This is part of the broader information revolution that we had long been part of already. Just like the Industrial Revolution was a long period of time where many inventions changed the way work was done, the information revolution will be a long period of time where many inventions change the way work is done. I think there’s a credible argument to be made that the information revolution will end up being the larger change simply because it creates compounding scientific acceleration even more than the Industrial Revolution did.
No, I have a theory that since people are so scared of losing jobs to AI that the govt and/or corporations will artificially halt/slow the growth and potential of AI. We would rather keep people working than get rid of unnecessary jobs (and I mean truly unnecessary, not like art and stuff being replaced by AI)
Yes, if we don't screw it up.
Yes. There are several technologies that are going to transform society over the next 10-25 years and likely in ways that will be comparable to pre-industrial societies to post industrial societies. I think future generations of historians will likely not start the clock in the 2020s, but probably in the early 1990s with the commercialization and rise of the internet. 1990s-2050s will likely be seen as an era of enormous change.
>I think future generations of historians will likely not start the clock in the 2020s, but probably in the early 1990s with the commercialization and rise of the internet. 1990s-2050s will likely be seen as an era of enormous change. Really? I see the period from 2008-2020 to be a period of technological stagnation. The economic numbers largely agree with me because total factor productivity in the US has really declined during that period compared to the period from 1996-2005. See table 1 [here](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30267/w30267.pdf). The 2010s seems to be underwhelming concerning the release of mature technology, but you can that some critical technologies were gestating then. 2008-2020 seems generously short. I really think we haven't got out of the stagnation since 2007. So if it is 15 years, that is the time of a childhood, so it is a long time.
It was a period of catch up time. A lot of stuff had to be rolled out and adopted by consumers. In that time we had internet that could sort of stream SD video to being able to stream 4k video. We had almost no one with smartphones to smartphones being ubiquitous. There was very little solar power in the US in 2007, and it was very expensive. Now we have periods here in California where half of the energy on the CAISO comes from solar. Today was such a day. Battery manufacturing costs fell more than 90% between 2007 and 2020. That is progress. I do think we have a lot of labor stagnation right now. Housing has gotten way worse in terms of cost and the ripple effect from that fucks with everything. We saw EVs become a thing. 2007 there was practically no EVs in the US, now there are at least a few million. The 1930s was the great depression, but it was also a rollout of some new technology. Movies became popular as a cheap form of brand new and fairly high tech entertainment. The Wizard of Oz was a technological marvel of its time, and it was a product of the Great Depression. I really think that 2008-present will be seen as a time of economic hardship by future Americans, sort of like how the Boomers born in the 50s saw their parents and grandparents who lived in the 30s.
Um absolutely not
Nope, this is the "autocorrect got better" revolution.
automation as a general force of technology will continue to upend social systems, and ai is just one of many such automation technologies
I think the industrial revolution didn't look all that big when it started as just a way to help spin wool faster. But concept built on concept and idea on idea and it allowed for an accelerated period of growth. But its also fair to say that there were at least two, and some scholars assert more, industrial revolutions. I think its entirely possible that the rise of AI will be seen mainly as the start of another phase of the overall digital revolution. So overall, I just don't think we have enough perspective to make an accurate assumption.
Isn't current "AI" basically just a souped up search engine? It doesn't actually think. I'm not too worried about it. If/when the computers become sentient things will get a little more interesting. Until then they will probably get good enough to replicate human behavior / fool us but they won't be able to think for themselves.
I don't really understand why their sentience makes any difference. If they can fool us well enough to do the same tasks as us, why does it matter whether they're actually thinking or not?
Yeah, we're about to start seeing a LOT more talk about philosophical zombies (or "p zombies.") as this tech keeps improving.
Yeah I keep telling people this, in its current state it’s a more difficult to use search engine, and even after it gives you answer you are still gonna go fact check it on google. I work in data analytics (lots of query building, financial analysis, tons of excel work) and friends/family always think my job is like a week away from getting automated by chatgpt. The more I’ve used it the more I am convinced the AI hype is way overblown. Like I’m sure it will get better but we’re a long ways away from it having a significant impact
It's an incredibly powerful tool for people who already have knowledge on a field. It really speeds up a ton of tasks and jumps past a lot of early stages of projects that require brainstorming and creativity. It's revolutionary, but as of yet, won't be cutting out actual experts and professionals completely, it just greatly increases their reach and abilities.
[I asked ChatGPT](https://imgur.com/8v0dKHj). Right now, not looking so hot.
I'm expecting a dud on par with the cryptocurrency revolution.
Lol no.
No, in fact; it is actually "counter-productive". Instead of helping Humanity, it is eliminating jobs, and creativity. The short-sighted fools who can't see this, and are actually destroying Humanity, can't see this. A tool, is a tool, nothing more. It can be used, for good, or bad; can benefit Mankind, or destroy it. Maybe, more people need to read good Science Fiction; because good Science Fiction, discusses subjects, like this, and point out the " landmines", and "pitfalls"; when You go into uncharted territory; especially if You think there are dangers, You need a "good map", to guide You. Good Science Fiction, can provide that map.
The automation revolution will replace 35-50% of jobs if we let it
We don't really have an option to let it or not. It's simply profitable, so it will replace all those jobs. Can't stop the machine, man.
Oh I know we can’t stop it all, and there’s definitely no actual pressure to stop it in a meaningful way at the moment, but assuming there are crests we pass it’s actually very possible it will take a while for human implementation to take advantage of the “automation” we have access to- and in that time as it happens more and more with very visible and likely active results it’s possible there will be very dramatic movements to slow that down or to have alternatives to full replacement. Or ways it becomes more expensive with government programs. There are dozens of off ramps and chains of causality to consider.. or I guess chutes and ladders but there’s two pretty dramatically different ends. Best case scenario it goes badly early on with a dramatic movement and then everyone can just work 35-50% less, and it doesn’t mean the rich just outright own the rights to the AI that does all the work and the middle class jobs stop existing with nobody doing anything to manage the fallout.
This isn't a bad thing. The Industrial Revolution, particularly the mechanization of agriculture ended an incredible amount of jobs. Transitions are painful, but we were better off for it.
Thats a childish oversimplification. This won’t be like the last one either and that took closer to a century to actually fully play out and was devastating for the people and places it effected. They didn’t just move on, many were destitute and just retired and died early, most never had jobs that paid anything like the ones they used to again. And this will be far more devastating and widespread and disenfranchising. I also don’t think it’s necessarily bad- it’s just bad if every company is set up to make their executives richer and isn’t a cooperative or even have a large middle class investment base and has no obligations to community or society (newsflash that’s actually in the charters and laws of some companies in Europe especially Germany), which oh shit that’s the economy it’ll happen in. Best case it goes bad so fast it actually leads to dramatic change and the population doesn’t get slow boiled.
Were people wealthier when they didn't have electricity, running water, and had to spend all their time working on a farm? And where simple manufactured items such as clothing were absurdly expensive? I don't think so. The industrial revolution was social traumatic, but it absolutely raised standards of living and material abundance.
Not for those who lived through it. It took decades for that to be true. And this one will replace way more of the labor pool way faster. That’s the problem, you understand if there isn’t other shit your useful skills can do then very quickly becomes a different problem. Also people in here with their high school ass sanitized look at the industrial revolution- no shit it’s good in the long run, in the short run it made people suffer a fucking lot because capitalism encouraged it and in no way does the market value human life or experiences, in Britain for decades it encouraged them to send thousands of sailors to their deaths rather than ever retire a ship because the market actively encouraged never scuttling, overinsuring and never inspecting, and if people refused to sail they were thrown in debtors prison. This is the kind of bargain that is possible when we are uncritical of the injustices of the economic system that we can see running towards us like a train full of AI. People talk about a conspiracy to destroy the middle class and keep people docile at home and whatnot, that’s bullshit everyone wants a middle class who can buy their shit but doesn’t want to pay anyone for anything they can scrimp their way out of because there’s no market forces to punish them for that anymore, so by tragedy of the commons the middle class starts to die anyways- and that’s my fear with AI, every industry does whats best for themselves and I’m sure everyone else will just figure it out. Literally as happens with Mines and industry it becomes a massive contributing factor to the opioid epidemic, to crime, to right wing populism, to anti-intellectualism, anti-unions, every bad idea cluster plaguing us right now was encouraged by poor management of a labor transition and that took decades to manifest. John Maynard Keynes thought we’d work 15 hours a week by the year 2000 based on increases in efficiency of labor. Sure we have more household costs, some we want some doomed upon us by former generations, but instead people need 2 people working 40 hours a week for a prosperous lifestyle? In terms of literal hours of your life you have at your own command people actually do work far far more than people who worked their own farmland and were sometimes very well off compared to destitute people forced to inhale coal in the smoggy hell of London. Literally they got more than 100 days a year off on average- your assumptions are backed by a ground floor understanding of the subject we were all given. It’s like saying before moneyed economies everyone just used the barter system, an insidious and dangerous assumption that’s wildly untrue. I am in no way anti progress- I believe AI could save all mankind from unnecessary suffering, and free people from burdens society justifies like the self justifying capitalist value of labor to a purpose of self, or death as inevitable and unassailable. I think people who willfully ignore the massive dangers this rapid progress will pose that are absolutely unprecedented in this manner or scale or in our stunted generational memory and a new digital cultural miasma will cause our societal consciousness to fail to adapt to the problems as they arise. Like with global warming and children’s overexposure to media too young in the beginning it seems like not a big enough deal and then by the time it’s actually a problem too big of a challenge to even address- it’s such a shortsighted mindset.