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3338 points keepamovin | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source
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iambateman ◴[] No.46207321[source]
This was a fun little lark. Great idea!

It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future. It’s very good at predicting the next token but maybe even worse than humans—who are already terrible—at making educated guesses about the state of the world in a decade.

I asked Claude: “Think ten years into the future about the state of software development. What is the most likely scenario?” And the answer it gave me was the correct answer for today and definitely not a decade into the future.

This is why it’s so dangerous to ask an LLM for personal advice of any kind. It isn’t trained to consider second-order effects.

Thanks for the thought experiment!

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vidarh ◴[] No.46207837[source]
I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.
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tempestn ◴[] No.46208762[source]
Wait, wouldn't sustained net positive energy be huge? (Though I don't think that's actually possible from ITER unless there were some serious upgrades over the next decade!)
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1. vidarh ◴[] No.46218091[source]
It would be huge, but only 20 minutes would also still mean it's still far away from making fusion workable, so it fits neatly into the standard joke that fusion is perpetually 10 years away.
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2. tempestn ◴[] No.46222137[source]
True I suppose, though I also expect we're considerably more than 10 years away from 20 minutes of overall net positive output!