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> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate... The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someon
by al_borland 5mo ago
> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate...
The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?
- koe123 5mo agoExpertise in naval gazing and science fiction writing is a prerequisite.
- andsoitis 5mo agoThey have been wrong in a way that's bad: underestimating the speed and size of progress. So if the "experts" claim a timeline and magnitude, it would be safest to assume an even faster timeline and a bigger impact.
- mikepurvis 5mo agoIn fairness, they've been operating with a lot of built up cynicism from major breakthroughs that have been 3-5 years away for the past five decades.
- 3edd 5mo ago[dead]
- m463 5mo agoI wonder... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoDo you have an example of a prediction they’ve made in the last 3 years that was drastically wrong? This is not my impression.
- al_borland 5mo agoDo you think all white collar work will be replaced by AI in 18 months? https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-predicts-ai-automation-18-months/ https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s... Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions. https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoAgain, do you have an example of a prediction that was drastically wrong? I don't think it's productive to speculate about which things might or might not come true in the next 18 months. There were people last year making fun of Dario for predicting that writing code would be automated in the next year.
- al_borland 5mo agoFrom the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough? Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoYes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ianm218 5mo agoDo you have a source on aggregate predictions of experts being drastically wrong? I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents
- Retric 5mo agoDo you have specific and objective examples of things people got right? From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.
- MattRix 5mo agoThe idea that progress is “slow” in the AI space is absurd. These are some of the fastest growing products and companies of all time. The models are still improving a surprising amount.
- Retric 5mo agoI suspected you felt that way even though it hasn’t been my personal experience. I’ve heard people say older models can’t do X, when I used that way etc. I suspect people are applying their own learning curve as part of their assessment of progress, you get better at writing prompts and it feels like the model improved. Which is why I’m saying we need some objective metrics to judge predictions of actual capacity.
- fnordpiglet 5mo agoIt’s hard to take seriously a statement like this that’s grounded in “the last three years” when trends have tended to play out over decades. The fact the goal posts have moved from thousands to hundreds to decades to single digit years for massive transformation should give you a moment of pause in your bag saying. I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when. In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.
- bdamm 5mo agoAutonomous weapons are actually a really interesting branch of this and deserves a little more. Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end. This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either. That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
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- Waterluvian 5mo agoThose are the experts who were wrong. These are the experts who are right. We sacked the experts who are wrong and replaced them with the experts who are right. “How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.
- mdp2021 5mo agoNamely? Who sacked who, who confirmed who?
- holmesworcester 5mo agoThe AI experts who started the AI labs that are about to IPO were right, at least.
- DrBazza 5mo agoChanneling your inner Douglas Adams.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo agoGot a Monty Python vibe: https://youtu.be/79TVMn_d_Pk?si=x2yAyxKNJDow8enp&t=124 https://youtu.be/79TVMn_d_Pk?si=x2yAyxKNJDow8enp&t=124
- heresie-dabord 5mo agoWe had to put good people in charge to get rid of the bad people. The bad people were ruining our economy. They needed to be punished. Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating. Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway. There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good. That magazine published a long text that said, > It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules. And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.
- raincole 5mo ago> The predictions of these "experts"... last 3 years. Which ones? Please be specific.
- somesortofthing 5mo agoHave they? I don't like it either but the headline bull predictions(reliable agents and most code written by AI by mid-2026, dramatic progress against jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, etc., major improvements despite pretraining data exhaustion, continued exponential growth on the METR trendline) did come true, often ahead of even aggressive schedules. What major wrong predictions did you have in mind?
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoLiterally none of the predictions you listed in your post came true. We don't have reliable agents, AI isn't writing most code, hallucinations still happen all the time, improvement has been basically non-existent. Despite the constant claims of these experts and AI boosters, AI is still not a tool one can use to get meaningful work done.