Are we asking the right questions?
3 comments
Are we asking the right questions? No. But that wasn't the right question...
Snark aside:
> are we walking blindly into a shift that none of us is ready for?
Yes, we are, because none of us can see what it will actually be yet. That makes it hard to not walk blindly.
Perhaps the best we could do is to throw out both extremes (AGI on one hand and a nothingburger on the other), leaving a range in the middle, and start acting as if the middle of that range was what was coming. That would leave us, not accurate, but hopefully not too badly wrong.
Snark aside:
> are we walking blindly into a shift that none of us is ready for?
Yes, we are, because none of us can see what it will actually be yet. That makes it hard to not walk blindly.
Perhaps the best we could do is to throw out both extremes (AGI on one hand and a nothingburger on the other), leaving a range in the middle, and start acting as if the middle of that range was what was coming. That would leave us, not accurate, but hopefully not too badly wrong.
- hypers, extremely happy to see "reasoning" becoming a commodity and thinking that they'll finally be able to heal their inferiority complex - detractors, trying to cope with the current situation by highlighting the limitation of AI
There's many sub categories of course, but those are the main ones I notice.
What I can't understand is why the discussion doesn't go deeper. We don't need AI to be that great for it to disrupt our societies and daily lives, my gut feeling tells me that we already passed the tipping point with Fable based on my experience. Hell, even Opus is more than enough if used correctly, Fable just made it even simpler to translate vague requirements/ideas into something that's shippable.
Now, I know that there's plenty of obstacles towards a technology like Fable to be deployed across the entire economy and solve all inefficiencies that allow most of us knowledge workers to have a job and a salary, but Pandora's box is open, and it's been open for a while.
The economical forces will be brutal as the gap between companies adopting new technologies faster and those lagging behind becomes wider and wider.
Engineers believing that their edge lies in optimized AI workflows will get a rude awakening as harnesses improve and everything becomes transparent to users, look at tools like Claude Code and how much our experience changed in just 12 months.
TL;DR: I'm surprised to find so few conversations online about our impending future and how the edge that people are euphoric about these days will quickly disappear in a matter of years. Some professions will be safer than others, but are we ready for the transition that's upon us?
I'm mostly worried on a societal level. Sure, society likely won't collapse, but are we walking blindly into a shift that none of us is ready for? I'd be interested to hear opinions from others that have been thinking about this.