5 ms·
Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction
by tptacek 1mo ago
Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.
- socalgal2 1mo agoI'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was wrong. AFAICT he was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.
- wesammikhail 1mo agoWhat? no human in history has gotten anything 80% right. You're doing exactly what this piece complains about.
- blululu 1mo agoIt’s linked in the article. The 85% accuracy is just shameless self promotion. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/#:~:text=flowing%20into%20Microsoft-,Ray%20Kurzweil,-Ray%20Kurzweil%20has https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/#:~:text=flowing%20i...
- jibal 1mo agoI'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.
- Jblx2 1mo agoI think you missed a "I won't respond further." https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%20jibal%20%22I%20won%27t%20respond%20further%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- dinfinity 1mo ago> He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything Is he, though? It seems to me that a lot of his predictions were surprisingly close to the mark, especially given how long ago they were made.
- nl 1mo agoLuu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy. If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/
- scarmig 1mo agoReading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%. One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
- roenxi 1mo agoFair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is. We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions. I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats. And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.
- pembrook 1mo agoThe fact that you know Ed Zitron's name means that, regardless of his predictions being consistently wrong (which they are), his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct. The question is whether he sincerely believes his own predictions or if he cynically is aware that you can create a career for yourself being a guy who says bombastic clickbait-worthy things people emotionally want to be true, instead of measured assessments of reality. Problem is, you wouldn't know Ed Zitron's name if every piece he wrote basically said "AI might be a bit overhyped short term but will have lasting economic impacts." Booooorrrring. The reverse is also true. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't going to get much media attention if they don't make silly claims like "all white collar jobs gone in 2 years." And no, this isn't a new problem due to "the algorithm." Media has always been like this. Zitron is just another Peter Schiff with younger skin. The problem is human nature in general. Hence why AI isn't going to kill media. We don't actually want sober, rational assessments of all available information from hyper-intelligent LLMs. This is unsatisfying. We want emotional validation, drama, adversarial identity and spectacle. Truth is rarely what we are seeking.
- tptacek 1mo agoI don't care whether he believes his own predictions, only that they're so frequently incoherent and false.
- mbesto 1mo ago> his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct. "Correct" is not the word you're looking for here. More like "very effective". His strategy for manipulating human attention is very effective, but the correctness of his strategy isn't relevant here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.
- pembrook 1mo agoBecause a sincere discussion of media (a fundamentally insincere medium with perverse incentives) is silly without addressing this. Autistically pretending the world is rational and not factoring this in is just as false as Zitron’s predictions.
- getnormality 1mo agoAltman and Zitron are like pro wrestlers. Their speech acts aren't for truth, they're for some spectacular effect on your feelings and your imagination that keeps you coming back for more. I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.
- notatoad 1mo agoEd Zitrons wild claims might be for entertainment value, but Altman’s are for his own valuation. He’s bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars off those claims.
- jfb 1mo agoTalking one's own book is a grand and ancient American tradition!
- NeutralCrane 1mo agoEd Zitron is also making money off of his claims. It may be orders of magnitude less than Altman, but it’s still his income source
- conductr 1mo agoI think it’s appropriate in this day that people have to really shout and lament on and on about their thing just to get a few people to listen and/or consider parts of their argument. Nobody listens if you’re just casually proselytizing your grift.
- woodruffw 1mo agoWithout reference to either person, I think this is essentially a misunderstanding of Frankfurt’s analysis: On Bullshit is about expressing sentiments without caring about their truth value, i.e. the concept of a “bull session.” Both Altman and Zitron are the opposite of Frankfurt’s bullshitter, because they both appear to evince genuine care for the truth value of their position. (Frankfurt is very subtle about this, in that he distinguishes the kind of performative lying you’re suggesting as distinct in moral and rhetorical content from bullshitting. The liar wants you to believe a specific thing; the bullshitter wants to regale you.)
- bpodgursky 1mo agoKurzweil made one big claim — Singularity around 2045. Everyone at the time thought it was a total joke and hundreds of years off, if even possible. Now, that is seen as a laughably long timeline. The rest is noise, I don't care what minor predictions he was wrong about, he called the big trend back when nobody else could make a trendline.