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> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shi
by dwroberts 7mo ago
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term
Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get out of the kitchen”
Microwaves have already won. There will be a microwave in every home over the next few years.
It’s time to start microwave cooking or drown
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gruez 7mo agoA better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
- archagon 7mo agoThey cannot improve; humans can improve them. To what extent can they improve them? No one really knows.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoMy microwave is 30 years old and still works fine. Nothing to improve.
- ctoth 7mo ago[flagged]
- dwroberts 7mo agoIt’s a great analogy because it is something that is everywhere, that everyone does use from time to time, but the idea that it magically displaces everything forever (with no downsides) is naively optimistic (The original phrase was not just made up, it was sourced from actual news articles and marketing about microwave ovens, that’s why it feels relevant to a hype cycle like this) You also see this kind of naive optimism if you go look at illustrations from the early 1900s. People believed everything would eventually be a machine: that a machine would feed you, wake you up in the morning, physically move everything within your home etc. And yeah those things are possible to do, but in reality they aren’t practical and we do not actually use machines to do everything because it has costs
- Volker-E 7mo ago"everywhere" – look twice.
- ctoth 7mo agoSo, you know how people talk about AIs as dumb pattern matchers? So, you know how looking at one pattern and then just saying "this one will be like that one?" without considering the similarities and differences is similar to what people complain about AIs doing? Consider: Unlike my Microwave, Claude can work on Claude. Unlike my Microwave, Claude gets better at more things. Unlike my microwave, we do not know what causes Claude to work so well. My Microwave cannot improve the process that makes my microwave. Also, um. I'm not sure if you noticed? But machines are everywhere. I'm typing on one while another one (a microwave, in fact!) heats my breakfast, while another one washes my clothes, while another one vacuums my floor, while another one purifies the air in my room, while another one heats the air in my room, while another one monitors my doors and windows for unauthorized entry and another one keeps my food cool and another one pumps the Radon gas out of my basement and another one scoops my cat's poop.
- dwroberts 7mo ago> I'm typing on one while another one (a microwave, in fact!) heats my breakfast, while another one washes my clothes, while another one vacuums my floor, while another one purifies the air in my room, while another one heats the air in my room, while another one monitors my doors and windows for unauthorized entry and another one keeps my food cool and another one pumps the Radon gas out of my basement and another one scoops my cat's poop. You’re kind of missing the point a bit. Yes, machines are everywhere but the details are very different. The machines don’t magically do that stuff for you. You have to buy them, plug them in, turn them on and off. Lots of people don’t have any at all. They can’t do most things unsupervised. There are still lots and lots of tasks for which a machine exists, that people will still do entirely manually There is a naivety to these predictions that is chipped away by the mundane details of having to exist in the real world. Cost, effort etc
- gtr 7mo agoI know it's not the point of the comment but it's a bit of a flawed analogy. Microwaves have wone to a large extent, such that people without them are a bit of an oddity, and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jvanderbot 7mo agoThey won at automating a task and becoming indispensable in the larger ecosystem of related tasks.
- codeulike 7mo agoDefinitely not going to dinner round your house
- pluralmonad 7mo agoYour social circles must be very different from mine if everyone you know uses their microwave for cooking, rather than just reheating leftovers.
- kaicianflone 7mo agoThere’s a bit of irony here. A lot of commercial kitchens already rely heavily on microwaves and rapid heating equipment. In many restaurants the microwave is a very important tool in the workflow rather than something unusual. Do your friends not eat out much?
- StilesCrisis 7mo agoThis was a real, unironic mindset for a while: https://a.co/d/0iYb8mlz https://a.co/d/0iYb8mlz
- nlawalker 7mo agoRe: kitchen appliance analogies, I stand by my "AI is a dishwasher" analogy. It's annoying that the dishes still have some pooled water in them when the cycle finishes; it doesn't always get everything perfectly clean; I have to know not to put the knives or the wooden stuff or anything fancy in it. But in spite of all of that, I use it every day, it's a huge productivity boost, and I'd hate to be without it.
- gzread 7mo agoAnd other people choose to wash dishes by hand and they're fine with it and not significantly less productive. The use of a dishwasher wasn't forced on everyone.
- ericmay 7mo agoIt's actually less productive for dishwasher-safe dishes, there's simply no question about that. Hand-washing dishes also, from what I understand, uses more energy and water than the dishwasher does.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- wiether 7mo agoIt depends. I use the time I spend to hand-wash my dishes as a time to pause and to let my mind wander. Having the hands in water is soothing. And its a pleasant feeling, where cleaning is part of the food workflow : I cook, I eat, I clean (the kitchen, the dishes, my teeth). I hate home dishwashers: you have to play Tetris after each meal to fill them, trying not to get your hands/arms dirty, then you have to let it do the work, and now you have to spend a few minutes to get the dishes out and store them where they should be, even though most of them are not linked to a meal you just had. Maybe worse, you could unload the dishwasher at a time completely unrelated to food, so that breaks the link. On the other hand, having worked in restaurants, industrial dishwashers are awesome.
- LamaOfRuin 7mo ago
- gzread 7mo agoThis is a great analogy, because just like AI, microwaves are good for quick fixes, tasks where you don't really care about the quality and would rather minimise the effort.
- j3k3 7mo agoBut a microwave does exactly what it says on the tin, every time, without fail. LLMs require a lot more effort.
- beanjuiceII 7mo agohow is it a great analogy? do microwaves improve as fast as AI has been?
- gzread 7mo agoYes, they did, back in their day.
- 7mo ago
- PeterStuer 7mo agoWhat is the argument here? Someone had a wrong take on something completely unrelated, so it somehow applies to this? You think "there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term" is wrong?
- pjc50 7mo agoMicrowaves are the trend of the past! It sounds like you don't own an air fryer.
- democracy 7mo agoIt looks like a template with placeholders. Before it was "big data", then "Crypto", now they used "AI"