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That isn't the loop. A lot of predictions about computers have turned out wrong. The biggest one in my lifetime was the belief that social media would bring th
by chinchilla2020 3y ago
That isn't the loop. A lot of predictions about computers have turned out wrong.
The biggest one in my lifetime was the belief that social media would bring the world together, create world peace, and spread economic prosperity.
Usually the technologies that surprise us were predicted by nobody. They just show up.
Go watch "2001: A Space Odyssey". Then go watch some music videos from 2001. You will get a better idea about how accurate these predictions are.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>That isn't the loop. Unfortunately, you're right, that isn't the loop. Any new tech is also the novel weapon of tomorrow. I can't even think of a counter-example.
- chinchilla2020 3y agoI'm jealous of your username, zero.
- antifa 3y ago> social media would bring the world together, create world peace, and spread economic prosperity. I don't it'll happen, but it's a little early to declare yourself the winner.
- chinchilla2020 3y agoFair enough. Give it a couple more decades to play out completely.
- civilized 3y agoEven GPT is not at all what anyone predicted before the late 2010s, when we started seeing Transformers scaling up and improving rapidly with more data. Now that we've cottoned onto that trend, it's all anyone talks about. Which is going to make it extra funny when it doesn't deliver what so many predict.
- nonameiguess 3y agoThis kind of gets me, too. I'm seeing a lot of this "skeptics said we couldn't do this, but we did," but really? Predictions seem to have largely been wildly unrealistic. The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade. Clarke and Kubrick thought we'd have computers that resisted being turned off and could autonomously control spacecraft (and that we'd have human missions to Jupiter and a permanent station on the moon) 22 years ago, which we still don't have. Back to the Future II thoguht we'd have antigravity in 2015. I recently did a full X-Files rewatch and the first episode involving AI comes up in season one, when a computer programmed to handle internal building security and temperature control becomes sentient, decides it doesn't want to be turned off or do what its system administrator tells it to any more, and decides to start killing people in the building, via cleverly calculated means that make the deaths look accidental. Scully, the skeptic in this situation, insists this kind of technology is decades away. Here we are, decades later, and I don't see anything with a capability anywhere close to defying its programming and carrying out murder plots that look like accidents. It feels like people are being fooled into a single decade's worth of legitimately rapid and unexpected advances in autonomous game play and text generation and now acting like the entire history of computing and AI has been tech consistently exceeding expectations, but that has definitely not been true over any appreciable long term.
- ben_w 3y agoMost of your examples are literally works of fiction. The possible exception: > The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade. I can't find a reference for (just tried searching, a few variations, no hits where they made that claim).
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- chinchilla2020 3y agoI've never seen back to the future but the concept of a hover skateboard still sounds pretty cool. It never happened, but we got the Segway and those little balancing single-wheel skateboards.