11 ms·
Asking the wrong questions (2017)
- adamc 2y agoSomething I've been thinking about, and then I noticed this essay.
- smiley1437 2y ago>Something I've been thinking about, and then I noticed this essay. Probably Baader–Meinhof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- User23 2y agoIt's an interesting claim, but it appears to just baldly assert that the frequency is an illusion. It sounds perfectly plausible to me that something should start cropping up just after you learn about it. For example I started thinking about LLMs not so long ago and then I just started seeing papers about them everywhere. Is that a frequency illusion, or did I just learn about an interesting new technology at a time when lots of people had things to say about it?
- ordu 2y agoWell... I believe that the illusion is a real thing, but a lot of people started talked about it also may be a real thing, and they could happen at the same time. But there is one more piece of the puzzle: probability to learn something raises when people start talking about it. And when it happens to someone there is one more person to talk about it, so it is a chain reaction. So if you learned something recently on Internet, and now you see people talking about it everywhere, then it is probable that the most of people talking are like you, who just learned about the thing recently.
- schoen 2y ago(2017) "A Logic Named Joe" is a fascinating story, which has also been discussed on HN occasionally.
- justinclift 2y agoFor reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe
- xmprt 2y agoWith the increasing adoption of AI into people's workflows I think this is something that's really important to be thinking about. AI is a paradigm shifting technology whether you like it or not.
- isodev 2y agoOr is "AI" just a kind of a fax machine (from the post) which Big Tech is trying to morph into something profitable (e.g. loading it up with ads/commercial responses "optimised" just for you)
- jsemrau 2y agoThe question is "What if AI is a platform like the smart phone?" and then "What are the apps that make multi-billion dollar businesses?".
- camillomiller 2y agoWhat ifs are quite bad questions to predict anything. Also, AI is not. A platform like the smartphone needs building blocks and distribution systems for those apps. Whatever you build with the current llm is not an app, is an interface to a black box you have absolutely no control over. A black box that, on top of that, people can access directly with a chat interface. I don’t think that’s a sustainable way to build a platform, nor it is a good idea to build a business on top of such a liability that you can't control in any possible way.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago>Whatever you build with the current llm is not an app, is an interface to a black box you have absolutely no control over. A black box that, on top of that, people can access directly with a chat interface. so that means there are no apps built on top of search? An app in this context is something that allows you to do something much quicker than trying to putter around and figure out what prompt to use. There are apps that are essentially interfaces with a few frills on top. However I do agree that based on the platform the apps you get will not be multi million dollar apps, they will be more like browser plugins. Low value propositions that does not make you rich, but maybe does well enough that you can spend your time on it.
- roenxi 2y ago> And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother - wanted to work. In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where nobody worked. The strategic goal, never yet realised although AI might finally manage it, is to push people out of the workforce rather than in to it. Signing your daughter up to be a wage slave may be an improvement on the 1950s it isn't really the sort of thing that makes a good long term goal.
- sorrybutno123 2y agoWorking is so much more than being a “wage slave”. Women had to work anyway, except that it was isolated, lonely and without respect. Try to spend your (entire) existence cooking, cleaning and looking after kids while having a good set of brains. It will destroy your soul. Being an educated “wage slave” is a massive improvement. Work in any way shape or form cannot be avoided. Not because it is physically necessary, but because of who and what we are.
- renox 2y agoWhile I agree with the first part of your post, I disagree with your second part, there are a few rich people who don't need to work.. > Work in any way shape or form cannot be avoided. Not because it is physically necessary, but because of who and what we are
- nurettin 2y ago> there are a few rich people who don't need to work There are a huge number of land owners and trust fund kids who will never have to work. Focusing on a tiny minority does nobody any good.
- astrobe_ 2y agoThe actual problem is not "destroys your soul", but rather the fact that women working for home have no financial autonomy; they depended on their husband entirely. Divorce was worse than losing your job. "Nobody works" is a bit naive, indeed. "Nobody has to work, but can if they want" is a bit more realistic, but I believe a not-so-bad possible future is "nobody has to work, but you have to compete with others to get the job you want". Capitalism and workers would have to stop being 19th century husband and wife, though. This could be helped by the challenge ahead of us: managing the stabilization of world population count. We've been talking about the necessity to do that for years, just like climate change - and just like climate change it will eventually happen, inducing slow changes in our societies.
- user_7832 2y agoPartially related/"obligatory" xkcd: xkcd.com/1425 (Tasks). (What appear to be) Hard problems can be very easy, and (what appear to be) easy can be very hard.
- rblatz 2y agoNow both are “easy”
- Animats 2y agoHe wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang gliders. There are also plenty of trolleys around, although most new ones use pantographs instead of trolley poles. Very few saw a world dominated by giant advertising firms. Or computing becoming a branch of advertising. Even in science fiction. There was Fowler Schocken Associates, in The Space Merchants (1952). The company behind the simulated world in Simulacron-3 (1964) builds it so they can do market testing and opinion polls. As late as "AI" (2001), the tie between search and ads hadn't appeared. In "AI", the "Dr. Know" search service is an expensive pay service.
- Eisenstein 2y agoPhilip K. Dick predicted it in Ubik.
- KineticLensman 2y agoGreat book, although I'm not sure 'predicted' is the right word. By that logic 'Flow my tears the Policeman said' is a prediction that by 1988 the US would have had a second civil war. 'Prescient', perhaps?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- devjab 2y agoIt’s a little unrelated but I always thought it was odd that people looked to things like science fiction for glimpses into possible futures rather than into the more social and political genres such as cyberpunk. Because cyberpunk basically got everything right. Unfortunately.
- ericjmorey 2y agoWhat examples of getting everything right do you know of?
- snozolli 2y ago
- onionisafruit 2y agoEverything else aside, I’m impressed his grandfather was born in 1896. My most recent ancestor whose grandparent was born before 1900 was my grandmother, and she died 25 years ago. Some families have much longer generations than mine. I already knew we aren’t a hearty stock, but this difference seems ridiculous.
- dotancohen 2y agoMy father (still alive) has a grandparent born in the 19th century. I should go find out exactly when, thank you.
- croisillon 2y agoMy grandfather was born in 1895, AMA ;)
- mixmastamyk 2y agoIt’s not how long they live, for the most part, but how early/late they have kids.
- elric 2y agoAlso depends on how old you are ... if you're 80, a grandparent born in 1890 isn't particularly impressive.
- incanus77 2y agoI’m 47. My dad’s mom, who I knew well, was born in 1910. Her father was born in 1857, before the Civil War. I always thought the span on that side was fascinating.
- bruce511 2y agoJust yesterday I had a "what's coming" discussion with a couple older (non technical) folk. They thought flying cars and fusion power were coming soon. I contrasted saying that the energy equation for flying cars doesn't work, not to mention the penalty for mechanical failure. (I mentioned helicopters, they mentioned autonomous drones.) Fusion power is famously "10 years away" but I maintain its simply too capital intensive. If I have 10 billion to invest do I want to make a stunningly complicated fusion power plant, (which will produce power 10 years after the project starts) or do I just buy a bunch of desert, a mountain of solar panels and enough wire to connect it to the grid? Staffed by some cleaners and electricians. Where the worst that can happen is it goes offline. With no moving parts, no sun-like pressures or temperatures. And yet back in the 50s "free" energy and flying cars were "imminent".
- mikewarot 2y agoWe had fusion power 35 years ago[1], but "The Science"(TM) says it can't possibly work, so it doesn't. Instead we're forced to receive fusion energy via sunny days and big photovoltaic panels. I've recently come to believe this stuff (cheap energy) was figured out in the 1950s, but they quickly realized that it would enable anyone to make a "gadget" that would make the "super" look like a firecracker, and put a very, very strong lid on the whole thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
- creativenolo 2y agoThe lenses that we view the questions also change. In the 1950s, people likely imagined that by the 2020s, roads would be rebuilt with technologies like magnets or rails to support self-driving cars. But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development. Our roads remain largely the same, and this stagnation is what we need to band aid with for autonomous vehicles today.
- mhog_hn 2y agoImagine dedicated single lane highways between major cities across the world only accessible to self-driving vehicles
- chrislo 2y agoTrains?
- langcss 2y agoTrains... but they end up at your house.
- elric 2y agoThose are calles "buses". Though trams can be even better.
- andrewflnr 2y agoThey're not. You still have to go to and from the bus stop, and on the bus's schedule rather than yours.
- dredmorbius 2y agoWith sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8 minutes such that waits are minimal. With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles. Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
- ksec 2y agoMissing 2017 in the title.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tossandthrow 2y ago> And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother - wanted to work. As written out, it is suggested that it is a lack of imagination. I think a better narrative is just that it is work, and who would vulontarily have to work if they don't have to. This is the more compassionate narrative.
- passion__desire 2y agoI have a Young Adult fiction example supporting this which I read 14 years ago. J.K. Rowling has Hermione going to forbidden library to read dangerous books. But J.K. Rowling couldn't think of searching books like Google search does. On the other hand, J.K. Rowling could think of time turner i.e. a time travel device. Considering physical laws, time travel is impossible but google search is possible. Still JKR couldn't think of google search.
- Jordan_Pelt 2y agoI don't know. That's kind of like saying J.K. Rowling couldn't think of just shooting the bad guys with guns.
- passion__desire 2y agoIt is said most of the premises of modern movies and television would dissolve if people just resolved their misunderstandings by a phone call.
- Sakos 2y agoAlso, plenty of women worked. In 1950, women were 32% of the work force (in the US), earned 60% of what men earned and had little room for advancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_labor_force_from_1945_to_1950#After_WWII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_lab...). So either his grandfather was simply completely unaware of how many women actually held jobs even then or he wondered why they'd want to work the same terrible jobs men do, because they certainly didn't do it for fun.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoThe author is asking the wrong questions by judging what was present 53 years ago and giving unkind subjective opinions about experts with limited knowledge of the time because their predictions were also true. Today's expert can't be 100% correct if someone from 2017, 53 years in the future says they are asking the wrong questions. The world is changing very fast in modern times.
- makeitdouble 2y agoThis could also be just asking the wrong people. The predictions we have left are from industry expert or pretty successful people. Fundamentally they fit well in their current world and aren't envisioning social or technical shifts that will completely change the world as they know it. This is most apparent in the telephone and international fax part, where they see the future of networking through telephone, and not some other technology making it obsolete. We'd have had a different prediction asking AM amateurs how they see the world of telephone communication in 50~100 years (might not have been correct either, but would have been different)
- urbandw311er 2y agoI do wish the writer would stop justifying the relevance of their experiment by saying “a human would conclude that their time was being wasted long before the LLM”. This is a fallacy. A better analogy would be a human who has been forced to answer a series of questions at gunpoint. At this point it becomes more obvious that the LLM is not “falling short” in some way.
- nyanpasu64 2y agoreply to wrong post?
- urbandw311er 2y agoThank you! It was.
- bambax 2y agoWe're obsessed with flying cars, and hang gliders, and drones, and space travel, because gravity sucks. I often daydream about what life would be like if we could just regulate gravity at will, just at the individual level, so we can modulate our own weight, up to 0 -- or even negative.
- smiley1437 2y ago> modulate our own weight, up to 0 -- or even negative. Wolff's law suggests that if you set your own weight to zero or negative, your bones would become fragile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law
- andrewflnr 2y agoOnly if you do it long term. Astronauts survive months of microgravity. A couple hours or even days would be easy to compensate for.
- Jordan_Pelt 2y ago>and computerised taxation (except in the USA). I don't understand this. Does he not think the IRS uses computers?
- benedictevans 2y agoAmericans generally still have to compile and file tax returns. In other countries that is often entirely automated.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoTheir primary user interface is the paper form. Finally being rectified in 2024, forty+ years after same country invented the internet and thirty+ after the web. No, potentially malicious, rent-seeking “e-file” third-parties aren’t good enough.
- lazyant 2y ago"plenty of people have pointed out that vintage scifi is full of rocketships but all the pilots are men. 1950s scifi shows 1950s society, but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.) " Yes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he wrote the first novels). There was movable sidewalks and other transportation devices though.
- snozolli 2y agoYes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he wrote the first novels). The stories also have to be marketable to contemporary audiences. There may have been brilliant sci-fi at the time about strong, health-minded female protagonists, but I doubt it would have risen to popularity in 1950s society, and thus would have been forgotten. You can see the effects today with some of the backlash against certain Disney IP. I don't think sci-fi is a good predictor because of both the author's bias and society's (i.e. the The Market's) bias against topics that upset it.
- ghodith 2y agoA similar point can be made for the physical newspaper aspect; not every author is trying to impart accelerando-esque future shock on their readers. And presumably there isn't infinite market demand for that either. All different aspects of selection bias.
- bilater 2y agoI think this is an important lens to look through especially about predictions of AI. It is likely we will have downstream effects/platforms/interfaces that most of us can't even think about right now.
- dredmorbius 2y agoScience fiction (novels, short stories, or by the 1950s films, and 1960s telvision) doesn't have a primary goal of predicting the future but rather of selling entertainment. To the extent it is speculative, it's almost always discussing contemporary circumstances sufficiently distant setting (in time and space) to be able to comment on it in a way which both minimises social censure and reaction and gives a potential for a fresh perspective (in the best cases). Of course, much of it is simply, or at least largely, escapist space opera / space westerns (Buck Rogers, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (original series). And yes, some of the escapist content does have real science or predictive value. But in balance it's an exceedingly poor prospecting ground for hard-nosed, realistic, and/or accurate predictions. For much the same reason that most space ships are laid our horizontally, with gravity working on the frontal rather than coronal plane is that sets built on Earth are far more easily built and filmed that way, SF addresses its creations, narrative, and audience-appeal needs over any putative scientific or prophetic accuracy. And sure, there are notable counterexamples. E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is frighteningly accurate in a world much like that of the 2010s / 2020s. Arthur C. Clark in some works hits on some remarkably accurate depictions of at least parts of a future world. Imperial Earth envisions both handheld computers and a culture obsessed with recording every passing moment in a way that's nearly selfie-culture (though he seems to have missed influencers). 2001: A Space Odyssey predicts tablet computers and video telephony with reasonable accuracy (though all but completely ignores their social implications). Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game presages blogging to some degree (though generally overstating its influence, as Randall Munroe spoofed: <https://www.xkcd.com/635/ https://www.xkcd.com/635/>). And there's a whole slew of dystopian SF which has materialised in some form or another, from Ray Bradbury ("The Veldt"), Philip K. Dick (too many to mention), William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc., etc., etc. I and others suspect that's to some extent less prophetic than direct stimulus, with contemporary techbros aping their favourite adolescent sci-fi universes without asking "are we the baddies?" or whether they should. But if you want hard predictions about the future, it's probably better to look to the literature which specifically and seriously attempts to do this, outside of a fictional context. One such book is Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, now 54 years old.[1] I'd read that, for the first time, on its 50th anniversary. I was struck by much, and found it on balance to have stood the test of time quite well, and much better than is typical for the genre. As to accuracy, there seem to be three general cases: - Specific proponents of specific technologies virtually always overestimated the acceptance and impact of those technologies. The notable exception is, of course, information technology, though even for it the specific ways in which it has and hasn't advanced is worth close study. - Virtually all of the social dynamic predictions seem laughably modest today --- developments in racial, gender, and sexual equality and acceptance, amongst others. Though on reflection this isn't so much that the predictions were bold, but that they've come to pass. We are on the far side of the singularity for these changes, for the most part. What was written in the context of a world in which these changes lay in the future reads much differently now that the inflection points are in the past. At the same time, it's also clear that such changes need not be permanent, and that perhaps such dynamics tend more towards cyclical patterns or pendulum swings, with greater and lesser liberalisation at different points in time. - Much of the psychological and sociological concerns over advancing technology, faster paces of change, and an ever-growing onslaught of information seem to me to have been extraordinarily prescient, and largely born out. The disruptive effects, both on a personal psychological level and on a collective sociological one, appear to be profound, and we're still in the midst of discovering just how much so. In thinking about how technological change manifests, I've come up with an ontology of the types of technological mechanisms which operate: fuels, materials, information (receipt, processing, storage, transmission), networks, systems, process knowledge, causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, and hygiene (dealing with unintended consequences).[2] Much of the Industrial Revolution (~1800 -- 1950 or so) was fundamentally grounded in new fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) and power transmission and transformation (particularly electricity and magnetism), with strong secondary effects through improved and expanded materials (Bessemer steel, aluminium, plastics), communications (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) and recording (rapid print advancements, photography, phonography, film). Since 1950, it's been information technology which seems to have been in the forefront, making some profound advances (overall processing and storage capacities) whilst remaining stubbornly stagnant in others (forecasting, meaningful automation and controls). Networks and systems have been primary secondary effects. Hygiene is the ninth factor I'd come upon, and falls out of the recognition that all technologies have both intended and unintended effects. As technologies increase in complexity, I strongly suspect the latter dominate, exacting something of a drag on overall progress. The element that's missing from my typology is the interaction between technology and society as a whole. I don't have much to say on that at the moment, though I feel it's quite significant. I'm noting that lapse for the moment. ________________________________ Notes: 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock> <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644 https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644> 2. I've written on this a few times at HN and elsewhere, searching Algolia for "tech ontology" or "technological ontology" should turn up some references. I'm increasingly feeling that the idea probably needs a book-length treatment discussing each mechanism, how it applies (some of the mappings I make may strike some as obscure, e.g., that knowledge is in some ways a network function, as expressed in the phrase "web of knowledge"), and what the capacities and limitations of each mechanism are.
- anonymous247 2y ago[flagged]
- mikewarot 2y ago>There's no prediction for when everyone on earth would have a pocket computer connected to all the world's knowledge (2020-2025). It strikes me as tragic that the connection to all of the worlds knowledge has an end date like that, but it seems to be the trajectory we're on. Google's gone to shit, the Internet Archive is going away. Censorship is on the extreme uptick. I think we should add "Napster - Connected to all of the world's music" (1999-2002)