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Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
by noahmbarr 3y ago
Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
- alwaysbeconsing 3y agoI'd say this isn't limited to technology but is a general cognitive bias of us humans. By instinct we're very short term thinkers, although with practice and effort we can look further.
- digging 3y agoMy gut reaction to that commentary is that it's a misinterpretation of the time scales people are estimating. If I say, "LLMs will soon reinvent what it means to do knowledge work," and that doesn't happen within 5 years, does it mean I overestimated the short term impact? Or does it mean that "soon" was relative? Ultimately though, the long-term effects are impossible to estimate well. The effects of new technologies build upon each other. The first person to take a shovel to a walking path and maintain it as a flat surface certainly couldn't have imagined their ancestors would be crushed to death by two-ton SUVs on a paved road that replaced the walking path.