I wish people would stop comparing AI with cryptocurrency. The hype/perception was the only thing that was similar between them. The fundamental usefulness of the respective technologies are not comparable.
The cognitive dissonance around this is astounding.
First of all define productive. Would someone using AI to build software at a startup which is likely to fail be considered productive? What if there is already similar software available that solves the same problems? What about the broad use of LLMs to draft emails or make silly memes?
It’s funny how everyone’s concerns around climate change just disappeared when they realised AI was useful to them.
I think it's worth noting that the "work" these LLMs are doing is digital. ChatGPT cannot plow fields, or construct buildings and roads, or otherwise interact with the physical world. LLMs are useful because humanity has evolved (devolved?) into so much intangible work- documents, code, powerpoint presentations... One solar flare and that's all wiped out, and then we can say definitively that LLMs were a waste of time and energy.
That's the fallacy. You think technology usefulness dictates the outcomes. There are billions of people living in poverty the world over, starving every day, we have the technology and resources to solve that right now, we have for decades, but we don't because we don't want to.
Could AI technology change the world? Sure. Will it? That depends on so much more than what the technology can do. Why are we all still working 40 hours a week? Why are people still hungry? We could have radically changed our world with the technology we have had for decades. Yet, we have not, we have continued, nothing has really changed.
The internet is a great example. What is the most impactful part of the internet today? Social media. Social media has radically changed our culture. What is social media? A database, a few endpoints and an app? The technology is the least consequential part, the consequence comes from how we use it.
Nerds focus on what is possible with the technology, not what society is likely to do with it. What evidence is there that AI is going to change the world? What change is going to come from... being able to generate plausible sounding text? From being able to instruct agents? How many companies are using garbage software from 20 years ago despite dozens of revolutionarily better equivalents being available out there today that could have drastically reshaped their workforce? What are agents if not better macros? How many businesses have hundreds of employees doing the same tasks over and over again that could have been replaced by a few macros? How much of the code that you and I have written in our careers has already been written before?
The fundamental usefulness is the least important part of a technology when discussing how that technology will impact the world.
What "society is likely to do" with a technology drops to zero for things that technology cannot do. That's a technical property. On the other hand, people quite reliably find unexpected uses for technology, beyond the initial hype, again, due to inherent technical properties. You're vastly overcorrecting against "nerds".
