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Experience says that at this stage people have inflated expectations of AI. See 3D printing, few years ago everyone was into "0-mile" manufacturing and how it

Experience says that at this stage people have inflated expectations of AI. See 3D printing, few years ago everyone was into "0-mile" manufacturing and how it will solve the housing crisis, because we are just going to print houses.

rprospero 3y ago
I oddly miss the 3D printing hype train. My favourite was the various plans to replace restaurants with 3D printed meals. - Point out that most 3D printing is plastic? Recieve a derisive link to a journal article where some beleagured postdoc managed to push some protein paste through the extruder - Point out that the 3D printer is orders of magnitude slower than the most geriatric fry cook? Get a five paragraph history of Moore's law. The fact that it no longer really applies to semicoductors doesn't matter, since we're making burritos! - Point out that grinding an apple into paste and painstakingly reprinting it in an apple shape will always be more expensive than simply eating the apple? Hear a grand tale on the company becoming the sole global food preparation firm and thus having a monosopy on all farming products, enabling them to set their own price on their supplies. I also will always hold a soft spot for the group promising a 3D printed dating site, but I'm pretty sure that one was a satire. Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Pages of blog posts describing their web stack (Rails and Mongo) in great detail, proving that they could scale to the billions of people who would be visitng their site. The actual technology that created custom sentient life was just "3D printing"
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  Personally I’m waiting for the 3 nano-tortilla process to hit. I think that that’ll push us over the hump.
- scaradim 3y ago
  I realize now that trees are just autonomous specialized 3D printers of fruits :-) Moreover they reproduce autonomously (AI dream) and auto-repair to some degree
  - dackerlunghack 3y ago
    [dead]
- b112 3y ago
  Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Uh... I... asking for a friend, do you recall the name? Google isn't helping. Them, I mean, it's not helping them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Kuinox 3y ago
  Well, 3D printer did get way faster these last years. The record speed looks like science fiction: https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 A benchy printed under 3 minutes.
- grotorea 3y ago
  Some people really just want to make Star Trek real. Or those artificial food pills from more dystopic scifi.
pzo 3y ago
smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still a while before fridge got invented and got into mainstream. 200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term
- amalcon 3y ago
  > 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
  - pzo 3y ago
    successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.
cornholio 3y ago
The housing crisis is not a building manufacturing problem. Strictly on the manufacturing side, the existing technology allows production costs affordable for most - in the tens of thousands for a basic non-frills habitable unit. Almost anyone can afford that, and those that can't are sufficiently few that they can be covered by public assistance or private charity. The supply of housing on the other hand is an entirely political issue: what land can be developed, what can be built there and what public infrastructure is provided, who gets to live there - with discrimination via pricing being the main factor deciding it etc.
- b112 3y ago
  Indeed. In the housing game, you buy land and build a house. Excluding inflation, the value of the land goes up. The value of the house goes down. Even with regular (eg cost) maintenance, a 25 year old house is never worth what a new house is. New building methods (just improvements in insulation alone), and things like the interior... kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom, means that trying to dight this is not cheap. And even if you do? The house is still worth less than a new built. Houses are as cars. Massive devaluation year over year. Most don't get this, because they don't factor in inflation, nor do they factor in the cost of keeping a house maintained. So land, land, land is the cost, which is much of what your post eludes to.
  - have_faith 3y ago
    It's pretty common here (UK) for new-builds to be derided as cheap flimsy throw-away things and old houses being built to last the heat death of the universe. It's probably true from a house skeleton perspective but everyone also knows the new builds (usually) have better insulation.
    - stonemetal12 3y ago
      Do new UK homes use reinforced concrete slabs? It is my understanding that those are fairly short lived in UK housing terms anyway, with average life in the 50-75 year range.

rprospero 3y ago

I oddly miss the 3D printing hype train. My favourite was the various plans to replace restaurants with 3D printed meals. - Point out that most 3D printing is plastic? Recieve a derisive link to a journal article where some beleagured postdoc managed to push some protein paste through the extruder - Point out that the 3D printer is orders of magnitude slower than the most geriatric fry cook? Get a five paragraph history of Moore's law. The fact that it no longer really applies to semicoductors doesn't matter, since we're making burritos! - Point out that grinding an apple into paste and painstakingly reprinting it in an apple shape will always be more expensive than simply eating the apple? Hear a grand tale on the company becoming the sole global food preparation firm and thus having a monosopy on all farming products, enabling them to set their own price on their supplies. I also will always hold a soft spot for the group promising a 3D printed dating site, but I'm pretty sure that one was a satire. Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Pages of blog posts describing their web stack (Rails and Mongo) in great detail, proving that they could scale to the billions of people who would be visitng their site. The actual technology that created custom sentient life was just "3D printing"

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
Personally I’m waiting for the 3 nano-tortilla process to hit. I think that that’ll push us over the hump.
scaradim 3y ago
I realize now that trees are just autonomous specialized 3D printers of fruits :-) Moreover they reproduce autonomously (AI dream) and auto-repair to some degree
- dackerlunghack 3y ago
  [dead]
b112 3y ago
Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Uh... I... asking for a friend, do you recall the name? Google isn't helping. Them, I mean, it's not helping them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Kuinox 3y ago
Well, 3D printer did get way faster these last years. The record speed looks like science fiction: https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 A benchy printed under 3 minutes.
grotorea 3y ago
Some people really just want to make Star Trek real. Or those artificial food pills from more dystopic scifi.

pzo 3y ago

smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still a while before fridge got invented and got into mainstream. 200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term

amalcon 3y ago
> 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
- pzo 3y ago
  successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.

cornholio 3y ago

The housing crisis is not a building manufacturing problem. Strictly on the manufacturing side, the existing technology allows production costs affordable for most - in the tens of thousands for a basic non-frills habitable unit. Almost anyone can afford that, and those that can't are sufficiently few that they can be covered by public assistance or private charity. The supply of housing on the other hand is an entirely political issue: what land can be developed, what can be built there and what public infrastructure is provided, who gets to live there - with discrimination via pricing being the main factor deciding it etc.

b112 3y ago
Indeed. In the housing game, you buy land and build a house. Excluding inflation, the value of the land goes up. The value of the house goes down. Even with regular (eg cost) maintenance, a 25 year old house is never worth what a new house is. New building methods (just improvements in insulation alone), and things like the interior... kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom, means that trying to dight this is not cheap. And even if you do? The house is still worth less than a new built. Houses are as cars. Massive devaluation year over year. Most don't get this, because they don't factor in inflation, nor do they factor in the cost of keeping a house maintained. So land, land, land is the cost, which is much of what your post eludes to.
- have_faith 3y ago
  It's pretty common here (UK) for new-builds to be derided as cheap flimsy throw-away things and old houses being built to last the heat death of the universe. It's probably true from a house skeleton perspective but everyone also knows the new builds (usually) have better insulation.
  - stonemetal12 3y ago
    Do new UK homes use reinforced concrete slabs? It is my understanding that those are fairly short lived in UK housing terms anyway, with average life in the 50-75 year range.