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AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
- jmstfv 7mo agotangentially related, but as someone who built multiple internet businesses -- mostly unsuccessful, some mildly successful -- I barely have any new ideas to work on. I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.
- Cilvic 7mo agoI can relate to this, in the past I felt like I could write down pages of projects to try if only I had time. Now my mind immediately goes towards "do I want to manage this long term after the initial spark".
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Zealotux 7mo agoI'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.
- zemo 7mo agofull disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it
- jerf 7mo agoAI is in spitting distance of being able to do that too.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoI sometimes wonder if the random people sitting there hawking a pile of Amazon goods that pops up after every Amazon purchase are already AI.
- foldU 7mo agoThis sounds like a really unpleasant shopping experience to me.
- addandsubtract 7mo agoThis whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI’ve been car shopping recently, and I’ve found myself deliberately seeking out videos, because I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of what the thing is really going to look like from static photos. Unstaged photos make everything look uglier, staged photos require adjusting for the unknown staging.
- addandsubtract 7mo ago
- bearjaws 7mo agoI could totally see it, recently there has been a social club opened near me and it has 100+ people attending weekly. All younger, 20-30 year olds in their early career. Separately, I have a local camera repair shop and my friend told me its 2 months backlog to get your film based camera worked on. Ultimately if the deal we get online is infinite tracking, infinite scrolling and infinite enshittification, real life start to sound a whole lot better.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoGoing to the local movie rental shop with my kids is the highlight of my week. What a bizarre sentence to write in 2026 but it’s absolutely 1000% better than modern streaming (outside of my Plex setup). I gladly pay the (modest/token) late fees to help keep them open at this point. If someone set up a local arcade man…I’d be in heaven ha
- HWR_14 7mo ago> I gladly pay the (modest/token) late fees to help keep them open at this point Keeping movies longer and paying late fees may be hurting them more than helping them. It's entirely possible that the late fees are underpriced to avoid scaring away customers. New customers going away disappointed they movie they want wasn't returned on time hurts them more than your late fees help.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoNot keeping them on purpose, I’m just not sweating the fee because I’m happy to pay them. Additionally, the odds that my kids are holding on to exactly what somebody else wants in that timeframe is very small. It’s a small shop within a larger co-op situation with a modest following and pretty substantial stock. I know for instance we’ve never had an issue of wanting something that was rented. Has it happened? Maybe. But the fees I’ve paid probably net positive against that rare instance. They aren’t open half the week so I can’t return them once Monday passes for several days anyway. Owner certainly hasn’t expressed concern and has even waived the fee before because clearly it’s of little consequence.
- jemmyw 7mo agoThe question it raises is if this is the fake surge, the one we see, what is the real one we don't see? Renewable energy comes to mind. Robotics too but maybe that's too tied up with AI.
- schnitzelstoat 7mo agoI think robotics will be the next surge for sure. But I don't think it's really tied up with the LLM stuff either and it could be decades away. In the end, it'll probably require something like model-based RL like Yann LeCun talks about and that's totally different to the LLMs.
- pixl97 7mo agoEh, robotics is going through explosive growth right now with the same computing power that's being used on LLMs. You can take human motion capture of a task, dump it in a robotics simulator for a few hours and get a model that can operate autonomously better than something that would have taken a half a year to teach just a few years back.
- whizzter 7mo agoSpace (Space-X showed that reusable rockets are feasible), Programmable health (Covid vaccine and remember that mRNA curing that dog?),etc. Sadly, I think there's a risk we might also be heading towards a dark age with few advances since fundamental research has been squeezed away for being unprofitable or hobbled by a industrialized publishing/review-system for a while now and we've been coasting along on profitable applications rather than (expensive) breakthroughts in basics.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7mo agoI firmly believe that Renewable energy, the Solar+battery+EV stack, not LLMs, really is the biggest technology transformation of our times. Renewable energy really is surging, just it's on a longer timeline and unlike LLMs, it doesn't benefit venture capitalists to hype it. In fact many existing sectors deliberately downplay it. But we are in the middle of it. Robotics? lights-out operations in automated factories are already a thing, so I don't know if they're the "next thing". mRNA vaccines? Sure, they're a huge medical advance. With great potential, in that area. But it's just an area. Space? Maybe, if we get past LEO, find something useful to do there, and don't succumb to Kessler syndrome.
- hyperlambda 7mo ago[dead]
- schnitzelstoat 7mo agoThe theory doesn't seem to make much sense to me - like why can't there be simultaneous technological revolutions? And why would they last an arbitrary 50-60 years? > People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off. That could do with a solid citation tbh. The anti-AI people are really vocal on social media but personally I like having the AI results given how awful navigating the modern internet has become with all the cookie banners and anti-Ad Blocker popups etc. Honestly, the LLMs seem like the most transformative technology we've had since the release of the iPhone.
- parrellel 7mo agoI mean when I needed to look up something I used to just google it. Now, with the advent of LLMs I've had to pull out my old textbooks from storage.
- tom_ 7mo ago50-60 years is far from arbitrary: it's very roughly two generations (plus a bit of extra time, to ensure the process takes). 50-60 years gives enough time for a generation to grow up and reach adulthood who have never known anything other than the post-revolution state. Not unrelated: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
- dasil003 7mo agoIt seems really premature to talk about AI being the end of anything. What’s at an end stage is adoption of smart phones and monetizing human attention. That’s been the fuel that powered the last quarter century of tech gains, and while still huge in absolute terms it has been running out of steam as a growth engine and facing cultural pushback (eg. Social media lawsuits) for a while. AI so far has really only shown massive utility for programming. It has broad potential across almost all knowledge work, but it’s unclear how much of that can be fulfilled in practice. There are huge technical, UX and social hurdles. Integrating middle brow chatbots everywhere is not the end game.
- neals 7mo agoI had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.
- acedTrex 7mo agoIf this was me you couldn't waterboard this info out of me.
- marliechiller 7mo agoWhy? Is this is because of shame or fear of losing your job?
- jimbokun 7mo agoBecause the info is no longer in their brain.
- acedTrex 7mo agoBecause its incredibly embarrassing to admit you can no longer do very basic programming tasks as a "professional" in that field.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoI think it's a matter of what "very basic programming tasks" actually mean keeps sliding across the years. Surely in the beginning, being able to write Assembly was "very basic programming tasks" but as Algol and Fortran took over, suddenly those instead became the "very basic programming tasks". Repeat this for decades, and "very basic programming tasks" might be creating a cross-platform browser by using LLMs via voice dictation.
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago[dead]
- awongh 7mo agoI think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the losses of the former. History says these transitions aren't easy on society. But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?
- hnthrow0287345 7mo ago>That it's all about cost-cutting? Cost cutting has less uncertainty than making something new, so they do that first. If something else comes along, then great. This is also why the people should make the transition as difficult as possible for companies doing layoffs when the companies are paying proportionally very little in taxes compared to the people they are laying off.
- damnesian 7mo agoHard to understand, when essential human nature is so predictable? Sure, we will do novel things with it. But society in the main will use to it exploit labor. same as it ever was.
- anthonypasq 7mo agoare you under the impression life was better before capitalism?
- sweezyjeezy 7mo agoThat's a false-dichotomy. Capitalism was good for artisanal workers before the industrial revolution, and then it became pretty goddamn bad for them. We're worried we're staring down the barrel of that right now - just saying 'well it was even worse before capitalism' does nothing for us.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- techteach00 7mo agoI sort of agree with the premise of the article. I ask myself, did more non-technical people pick up AI chat bots when they were invented than picked up personal computers in the late 70s/early 80's? I think probably. From my conversations with others.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoPart of this is because we aren’t paying the actual cost of these chatbots. If ChatGPT wasn’t essentially free for casual users then we’d definitely see a much smaller/slower adoption rate. I wonder if a single person using them, even paying for tokens, isn’t substantially subsidized. Probably not but I’m speculating. If 3D printers could’ve given usage away for years directly in our homes then I bet we would’ve seen wider adoption there too.
- zozbot234 7mo agoChat bots can run on your local hardware these days, even mobile phone hardware. That's effectively free.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoI get this may seem nitpicky but that is by definition not free, and good luck running even the lightest LLM’s on 8gb ram consumer hardware. 16gb is barely sufficient and you probably need a new MacBook to really stretch that. People aren’t going to wait minutes per response for clearly inferior results compared to what they get for free on ChatGPT in browser in seconds, whether it’s logical or not. Not to mention they can’t ask more than a few questions tops before the whole thing crumbles. Expectations and reality are too far apart here. Let’s also address another real issue: what are they going to use? LM studio? Is that really a user experience most will tolerate?
- elAhmo 7mo agoWell, we are not paying for Gmail, Youtube, TikTok either, all sorts of other services that are free as well.
- aswegs8 7mo agoCould
- lkm0 7mo agoThese economic frameworks sure look like pareidolia to me
- tomhillson 7mo agoif this could last till a point where AI have actual automation ability, it's not a tool for humans anymore. it could have a identity and start to evolve literally. i don't understand why some people consider AI as tech revolution. maybe i'm into sf, but AI can be something other than just a tool.
- cyclopeanutopia 7mo agoSurprising number of people here and in tech general lacks any imagination.
- tomhillson 7mo agocuz youre focused on individual matters. it's the entire system, big picture. what human can do alone.
- a-dub 7mo agothis perez model thing completely misses the communications revolutions of the telegraph, radio and television not to mention demonopolization of bell. > Then came AI, revealing new dynamics. ChatGPT’s breakthrough didn’t come from a garage startup but from OpenAI, i thought the transformer and large language models came from google research. > There’s also social pushback—in the UK the campaigns against big ringroad schemes started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And perhaps we’re seeing some of that about AI. The U.S. map of local pushback against data centres from Data Center Watch covers the whole of the country, in red states and blue. People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off. the us had the highway revolts. in most cities where the revolts succeeded it is widely heralded today as a success. the data center hate is interesting. i think many people are just learning what data centers are. but that said, they've come to represent something different in recent years. previously they were part of the infrastructure that made industry hum, now public messaging from tech leaders and academics is along the lines of "this is how your livelihood is going to be replaced" while the institutions that are supposed to provide any sort of backstop are being dismantled or slashed to pieces by crazypants trumpist politics. i think focusing the energy on the tangible like mundane buildings is interesting, but the hate makes a lot of sense. addressing the core thesis, i'd argue that ai is not the next step in the 70s digital technological wave (especially considering the future of ai compute is probably hybrid digital-analog systems), but rather is something fundamentally new that also changes how technology interacts with society and how economics itself will function. previous systems helped, these systems can do. that's a fundamental change and one that may not be compatible with our existing economic systems of social sorting and mobility. the big question in my mind is: if it succeeds, will we desperately try to hold onto the old system (which essentially would be a disaster that freezes everyone in place and creates a permanent underclass) or will we evolve to a new, yet to be defined, system? and if so, how will the transition look?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- barrkel 7mo agoThe lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article. I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software. There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and signing up prodigious amounts of recurring revenue every month.
- surgical_fire 7mo agoAs far as I know Anthropic still bleeds money, as Open AI also does. They will keep bleeding money by the way.
- barrkel 7mo agoI don't believe the marginal customer of Claude Code is loss-making.
- nerptastic 7mo agoAnthropic today, who next week? If locally run models ever get to the point where they can reliably solve... 85% of what the frontier cloud models can do, I think many would be willing to accept slightly less problem solving ability and just run the thing locally. All hypothetical, but if compute + AI research continues at pace, in 5 years we should see extremely good local models.
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- josefritzishere 7mo agoIt could also be a huge bubble like everyone seems to agree about.
- LunicLynx 7mo agoAnd with robots, this also applies to the physical world.
- alexwebb2 7mo agoI view this post as primarily pattern-matching and storytelling. But I think there’s a buried truth there, and that they were nibbling at the edges of it when they started talking about the overlapping stages. There are some very interesting information network theories that present information growth as a continually evolving and expanding graph, something like a virus inherent to the universe’s structure, as a natural counterpoint to entropy. And in that view, atomic bonds and cells and towns and railroads and network connections and model weights are all the same sort of thing, the same phenomenon, manifesting in different substrates at different levels of the shared graph. To me, that’s a much better and deeper explanation that connects the dots, and offers more predictive power about what’s next. Highly recommend the book Why Information Grows to anyone whose interest is piqued by this.
- ETH_start 7mo agoHumanity has industrialized the production of intelligence. We're nowhere near the end of what this leads to.
- justonepost2 7mo agoit be the end of the paradigm myth, and eventually, the Anthropocene it be the beginning of vast and infinite potentia spreading out beyond us
- Invictus0 7mo agoItS thE eND of ThE InTeRwEbS
- himata4113 7mo agoEvery time I see these I am thinking to myself: Is microsoft copilot a problem of implementation or the capability of the models? I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one and you had copilot everywhere and I mean not the way it is now instead you're presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox rather than trying to figure out how to use a computer which is why I am not quick to discredit "microslop", they're most likely pivoting windows to how it will look like in the future. Obviously, the strongest argument here is that it should have been an entirely different product such as "Windows AI" where the entire system is designed around it. But if you look at their current implementation it's more of a copilot which is just there, letting you know it exists. Obviously not all of these features were thought through such as recall, that should have been dead and burried since it doesn't offer that much real value a magical box that takes in english sentences and does roughly what you want. At the end of the day it's a question if AI will/is doing more harm than good. AI has really only existed in this form for a little more than 3 years and really started shining since the advent of Opus 4.5. We went from having models producing more security vulnerabilities than one can count to fixing obscure human made ones and the capabilities will keep increasing (if anthropic is to be believed). We will enter an era where it will have 95%+ accuracy in doing what a typical computer user would want from AI and there's really nothing anyone can do to stop it. So my opinion is that AI will be the next big thing and it might spread way beyond what we can even imagine. I think that we will have things similar to non technical people that just talk on the phone with an AI agent to get a website done, register a domain and have a website done within a 1 hour phone call all for pennies while the AI has access to their financials, mail and other things. All of that is relatively possible today with the simple caviat of security and I do believe we have enough smart people in the world that can figure out how to make AI better at rejecting social engineering than 99% of humans.
- chromacity 7mo ago> I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one ... presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox I don't know. We've been telling ourselves things like that about user interfaces for a long time. For decades, it was pretty much universally understood that everyone would prefer to talk to their computer instead of using a keyboard. Now that you can, no one really wants to. In fact, now that we can text / email / IM other people, we don't talk to them as much as before. One obvious problem with the interface you're proposing is that sometimes, it's easier to do the thing than to explain precisely what you want. For example, it takes much longer to ask ChatGPT what's the weather forecast for this week, and then read the flowery response, than to press Ctrl-N, "wea", enter, and see it at a glance in a consistent format with pictograms.
- boh 7mo agoAI is destroying the economic premise that has drawn so much investment into Silicon Valley. It's going from a capital light business model with network driven moats that allow market domination, to a capital heavy, high burn-rate model with the potential to not only offer ZERO moat protection but destroy the ones that already exist. Cloud infrastructure + vibe coding now make it possible to quickly replace existing apps with custom fit alternatives. Open source+cheap Chinese LLMs may not be as good as Opus but maybe good enough turns out to be good enough ( Sun Microsystems Vs. Linux is a good example). Currently AI has just as much potential destroying Silicon Valley as it does building it up.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoYeah, I agree with TFA I think. Introduction of new mass production techniques often has an initial wave of high profit when early adopters have an initial advantage... existing workers are more efficient... but this will followed by a long term decline in the rate of profit as margins aggressively fall ... e.g. if every software company uses AI to double its coding speed, the price of software will eventually drop by half. As "AI" becomes a required and common commodity input, competition will drive prices down until the productivity gains are entirely captured by customers, leading to margin compression across the sector. Also... firms will be forced to invest in using AI just to stay in the same place. If you don't adopt it aggressively, you'll be priced out; if you do, your margins still shrink because everyone else did too. So... yeah, I don't think this is the next part of a "digital wave" if that means giant increase in new startup investments and SaaS companies etc, it's actually probably the start of I think a margin collapse and consolidation in our industry. If it's 2x easier to build e.g. a CRM, we’ll end up with 10x more CRMs, leading to a "race to the bottom" on pricing. The last 15 years of investment by people like YC etc seems to have been in businesses that were "like Uber but for <X>". Service businesses on which a small layer of software automated things, and drove some sort of explosion of customers. I don't really see how VCs are going to separate wheat from chaff on this front anymore? If anybody can do it.... what's the value of any particular approach over the others? I'd think the result would be consolidation? So I suppose if you're selling "the means of production" in the form of GPUs you're in a good spot, but even that is likely to be subject to aggressive downward pricing.
- jimmypk 7mo ago[flagged]
- hanyki111 7mo agoI don't really understand why they call it the end of the digital revolution.
- jimbokun 7mo agoMeaning software has eaten the world and there's nothing left to eat.
- DeepYogurt 7mo agoWe are collectively out of ideas
- wordspotting 7mo agoSo many diseases to solve, nuclear fusion, better materials, expanding the frontier of science, communicating complex ideas to public, climate change, helping disadvantaged communities better, better farming, better participation platforms for good governance. There are so many aspects we can improve on with AI. But it is contingent on our govts prioritizing progess over destruction.
- darkwater 7mo agoProbably a bit unrelated but I wondering if there is any economic theory that actually predicted something for real rather than extrapolate trends from past data in hindsight - even if crossing different kinds of events. Honest question, I'm not trying to mock economists or anything like that.
- negura 7mo agoany prediction requires a model/theory of some sort. and a lot of economists make correct predictions. a lot of them also make incorrect predictions
- krishna3145 7mo agohttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/403780821_Adversarial_Threats_to_AI-Augmented_Security_Operations_A_Systematic_Survey https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403780821_Adversari... Show HN: RedSOC – adversarial evaluation framework for LLM-integrated SOCs