I personally believe widely available self-driving cars which don't operate at a loss will continue to elude us until we accept the tradeoffs of dedicated lanes, a standardized vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocol, and roadside sensors. We were lied to.

Yep. The IoT home automation stuff is still less performant than much older, wired solutions where whole systems were designed at once in a set-and-forget mode and didn't have weird sync issues or delays. I remember seeing the 'home of the future' exhibit at Epcot like 20+ years ago and these IoT setups are often still a total joke in comparison because of all the protocol issues and fiddling with various interfaces needed.

Just like how the analog wired POTS phone systems were more performant in many ways than pretty much any IP based voice setup.

I simply got tired of messing with stuff that kept breaking in unexpected ways. It wasn't saving time, it was adding a lot of totally unnecessary stress and actually taking time away from me-- for little more than an occasional spark of novelty. Being able to use voice accurately & repeatably for simple task requests is probably the only standout advancement.

My 'nerdy colleagues' and myself can get a lot of enjoyment out of tinkering with this new agentic hotness. However, very few of us I think are really getting something that's actually saving us time in the long run (at least in our personal lives), and it's going to take a while to figure out what's actually realistically reproducible toward that end at a reasonable cost.

Adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot detection and emergency braking are all the modern automation I want in a personal vehicle at this point. Other drivers are unpredictable, I want to choose how I respond to their various forms of idiocy and not delegate to a black box.

I have yet to see a convincing counter argument to this hypothesis.

My counter to this is that such an occurrence was increasingly likely starting around the time the massive US Evangelical base was essentially fully captured by (and became a wing of) the Republican party. It was more and more obvious over a period of at least 40 of those 60 years you mention.

Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.

When people talk about the 'plateau of ability' agents are widely expected to reach at some point, I suspect a lot of it will boil down to skyrocketing costs and plummeting accuracy past a certain point of number of agents involved. This seems to me like a much harder limit than context windows or model sizes.

Things like Gas Town are exploring this in what you might call a reckless way; I'm sure there are plenty of more careful experiments being conducted.

What I think the ultimate measure of this new tech will be is, how simple of a question can a human put to an LLM group for how complex of a result, and how much will they have to pay for it? It seems obvious to me there is a significant plateau somewhere, it's just a question of exactly where. Things will probably be in flux for a few years before we have anything close to a good answer, and it will probably vary widely between different use cases.

I am exhausted by so many people calling writing out as AI without sufficient proof other than writing style. Some things are more obvious, sure... maybe I'm just too stupid to see a lot of the rest of it? But so much of what gets called out seems incredibly familiar to me compared with traditional print media I've been reading my entire life.

I'm starting to wonder if a lot of people just have poor literacy skills and are knee-jerk labeling anything that looks well written as AI.

To be fair, they got it from us. This happened to me plenty of times long before modern LLMs.

While I agree with your second sentence here, the first one gives me pause. Why isn't it "worth discussing"? Do you refuse to engage in conversation with all mentally challenged people? Do you avoid all interactions with human children? There are many, many folks living their lives as fully as they can right now who are convinced these things are alive. There are ethical implications to that assumption regardless of whether the things are actually alive, especially when people respond to them as if they are.

We need to have better arguments and refine them for different audiences.

Are you aware of the concept of philosophical zombies? Some of the top minds on the planet are telling us they can't even determine if you or me are conscious and sentient, let alone if a machine is. On the other hand, some of those people's peers are arguing that weather patterns might be conscious (among even more extreme claims). From the standpoint of logic and reason being paramount, we cannot claim to know the answers to these questions. What we can do is discuss the ethical implications of various people coming to different conclusions about them.

It seems to me like too many people are missing this point.

Modern philosophy tells us we can't even be certain whether other humans are conscious or not. The 'hard problem', p-zombies, etcetera.

The fact that current LLMs can convince many actual humans that they are conscious (whether they are or not is irrelevant, I lean toward not but whatever) has implications which aren't being discussed enough. If you teach a kid that they can treat this intelligent-seeming 'bot' like an object with no mind, is it not plausible that they might then go on to feel they can treat other kids who are obviously far less intelligent like objects as well? Seriously, we need to be talking more about this.

One of the most important questions about AI agents in my opinion should be, "can they suffer?", and if you can't answer that with a definitive "absolutely not" then we are suddenly in uncharted waters, ethically speaking. They can certainly act like they're suffering (edit: which, when witnessed by a credulous human audience, could cause them to suffer!). I think we should be treading much more carefully than many of us are.

"Early on, the notebook computer and LCD vendors commonly used the term LVDS instead of FPD-Link when referring to their protocol, and the term LVDS has mistakenly become synonymous with Flat Panel Display Link in the video-display engineering vocabulary."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_differential_signa...

For me, the issue isn't that I can't conceive of work AI could help with. It's that most of the work I currently need to be doing involves things AI is useless for.

I look forward to using it when I have an appropriate task. However, I don't actually have a lot of those, especially in my personal life. I suspect this is a fairly common experience.

We are going down tumultuous, uncharted, river rapids. There are many models of varying sizes and types being trained on hardware large and small, with finely tuned, bespoke weighting competing alongside industrial, committee-driven inference with massive budgets.

There is a wide spectrum of sizes of models and the hardware/environments they run in. What works today in one place may not work tomorrow in another. What stopped working yesterday may start working better next month.

The only way to have enough control to be scientific about it is to run your own hardware and provision a large amount of it to R&D. For anything big, this is very expensive.

In summary: You cannot predict how role-playing style prompts influence output until you thoroughly test it against a proper 'control group' on whatever stack you're currently running.

May not be as crazy of a thought as it seems on the surface. There are many different types of not-easily-roboticized manual work, doable by people of varying skillsets and physical abilities, which will continue to hold value due to our basic physiological needs.

The lower bound, or 'floor', of this value is not going to sink lower than group consensus among wide swaths of the population allows.

Spoken word is still the most information dense way for humans to communicate abstract ideas in real time.

Part of the reason for my prior comment is the clear fact that a not-insignificant percentage of white collar jobs are being massively devalued at the moment, which means many people who thought they'd be able to send their kids to college with income from such jobs won't.

Considering that the field of robotics is so far behind LLMs in terms of clear value outside of niche industrial applications, I think manual labor is about due for a resurgence. There may be some major rebalancing happening. The big question for laborers will be - as it has always been - what can I do that sucks the least but also allows me to pay for a decent life? Answers will vary.

These are predictable jobs with very few variables that there is still no sign of automation replacing any time soon. They often don't suck as bad as people think. One of the most enjoyable jobs I had was on an assembly line, because my mind was mostly free to wander. It was almost like meditation.