AI as Normal Technology

AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal, so except for the details, it's not a big deal.

Going to be a simultaneously wild and boring ride.

Everything changes, but everything stays the same.

> AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal

100%. It just happened with the advent of the internet and then smartphones.

And thanks to both, future trends are getting established faster and faster. It took about a decade for the internet to go mainstream, maybe five years for smartphones, and now just a year or two for LLMs. It’s pretty fascinating watching that process get more and more compressed over a lifetime.

I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems

I know that there have always been disruptive technologies, but I the the rate of "technologies that are disrupting everything" as opposed to "technologies that are disrupting just one thing" has been kind of crazy

I think LLMs are actually taking quite some time to become economically and socially relevant. The smartphone/apps boom created a lot of opportunities for thousands of app developers while now besides some toy apps most people are not creating nothing too interesting. Which is funny because LLMs were supposed to make people code faster but everything is still bloated, broken, boring.

> I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems

Indeed. For the past 30 years, every 10 years people were raised in a completely different environment. TV -> Internet -> Smartphones and now the next 10 years of people growing up influenced by LLMs.

We've made the world run on machines, and gotten better about machine intelligence and distributing software, so the speed at which the world's machines can operate smarter has increased significantly.

An innovation by one person can be distributed to the majority of people on the planet within minutes. It's amazing and all of our social and political norms aren't built to handle this.

All of these things have happened before and all of these things will happen again :)

first telephone vs first iphone

It's said that the most disruptive technologies are the ones that change the way we communicate.

I'll admit, a lot of the reason for me being reticent of jumping into the AI game is an increasing amount of distrust towards the current state of the tech industry. Social media giants rose up, made everybody excited about the opportunities to communicate with anyone (which are perfectly valid, I was on board too) and years later, we come to realise the addictions, the fractured information landscape and the surveillance. Now a bunch of companies from the same part of the world come along asking for billions to change the world again and I'm just exhausted by the whole conversation.

I wrote this a few days ago:

This is a permanent part of the software industry now. It will just stop being such a large part of the conversation.

Once upon a time, all software was local, with no connectivity. The Internet commercialised and became mainstream, and suddenly a wave of startups were like X, but online! Adding connectivity was a foundational pillar you could base a business around. Once that permeated the industry and became the norm, connectivity was no longer a reason to start a business, but it was still hugely popular as a feature. And then further down the line, everybody just assumes all software can use the Internet for even the smallest, most mundane things. The Internet never “died down”, it just stopped being the central thing driving innovation and became omnipresent in software development.

Mobile was the same. Smartphones took off, and suddenly a wave of startups were like X, but as an app! Having an app was a foundational pillar you could base a business around. Once that permeated the industry and became the norm, being on mobile was no longer a reason to start a business, but it was still hugely popular as a feature. And then further down the line, everybody just assumes you’re available on mobile for even the smallest, most mundane things. Mobile never “died down”, it just stopped being the central thing driving innovation and became omnipresent in software development.

Now we’ve got intelligence as the next big thing. We’re still in the like X, but smart! phase. It’s never going to “die down”. You’re just going to see intelligence became a standard part of the software development process. Using AI in a software project will become as mundane as using a database, or accessing the Internet. You aren’t going to plan a project around it so much as just assume it’s there.

— https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1jylp6y/ai...

I think this is my take as well. Like, the web and smart phones and social media have transformed everything ... and also life goes on.

The ability to code faster leads to everything being bloated and broken even more.

Right, but society changes around this stuff pretty substantially. A lot of the discourse gets spent debating whether we like the changes or not, and the solutions to the new problems are usually very pie-in-the-sky or completely unachievable. Like we can't really put the social media genie back in the bottle, its here and society has reshaped around it. But banning phones from schools is pretty tangible and I'd probably argue its for the betterment of students.

Agreed