Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?
There is quite opposing discourse on the internet as to whether AI is going to take everyone's job, or if we are witnessing one of the greatest pre-IPO PR jobs in history. Or both.
I'm wondering what people smarter than me believe or don't believe.
What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.
In a way I wish this would become true, and to some extent I believe it will (excitement will go down, and some part of the bubble will burst). But I can't fully see it happening this way, these tools are just so disruptive in so many different areas... perhaps not all, but it can speed up the development of almost anything so I don't see it disappearing. I hope it'll help improving its own efficiency as well so we can still get rid of some of the datacenters (or at least stop building more of them), but I don't see it going away as "just another tool", it really sits on top of other tools I think.
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.