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Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP

Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents. If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see. I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end. It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.

randomdrake 7mo ago
Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?
greysphere 7mo ago
Another interesting thing about the steam engine is much of science in the 1800s was dedicated to figuring out how steam engines actually worked to improve their efficiency. That may be similar for AI, or it may not!
qsera 7mo ago
The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.
- libraryofbabel 7mo ago
  I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much. It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.
  - qsera 7mo ago
    No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight. It is generating large amount of power on demand. From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!" And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time. So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.
    - usrnm 7mo ago
      > No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us
massysett 7mo ago
Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.
- jodrellblank 7mo ago
  You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine? The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative? That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?
  - Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
    There's potential there (with the pocket-PhDs), the question is whether it'll actually make a measurable difference in the long run. I mean I'm sure it will make a difference, the question is whether it's what they say it will be, and whether it'll be financially viable. At the current burn rate of the AI companies, it isn't - before long the first ones will have to give up. They won't die, they'll be subsumed into their competitors. Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume. Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more? This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use. I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.
    - 7mo ago
Gooblebrai 7mo ago
> They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see Would you mind expanding on this?

randomdrake 7mo ago

Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?

greysphere 7mo ago

Another interesting thing about the steam engine is much of science in the 1800s was dedicated to figuring out how steam engines actually worked to improve their efficiency. That may be similar for AI, or it may not!

qsera 7mo ago

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.

libraryofbabel 7mo ago
I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much. It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.
- qsera 7mo ago
  No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight. It is generating large amount of power on demand. From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!" And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time. So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.
  - usrnm 7mo ago
    > No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us

massysett 7mo ago

Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.

jodrellblank 7mo ago
You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine? The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative? That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?
- Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
  There's potential there (with the pocket-PhDs), the question is whether it'll actually make a measurable difference in the long run. I mean I'm sure it will make a difference, the question is whether it's what they say it will be, and whether it'll be financially viable. At the current burn rate of the AI companies, it isn't - before long the first ones will have to give up. They won't die, they'll be subsumed into their competitors. Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume. Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more? This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use. I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.
  - 7mo ago

Gooblebrai 7mo ago

> They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see Would you mind expanding on this?