[HN Gopher] Asking the wrong questions (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Asking the wrong questions (2017)
Author : adamc
Score : 178 points
Date : 2024-09-05 17:19 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ben-evans.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ben-evans.com)
| adamc wrote:
| Something I've been thinking about, and then I noticed this
| essay.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| >Something I've been thinking about, and then I noticed this
| essay.
|
| Probably Baader-Meinhof
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| User23 wrote:
| It's an interesting claim, but it appears to just baldly
| assert that the frequency is an illusion. It sounds perfectly
| plausible to me that something should start cropping up just
| after you learn about it. For example I started thinking
| about LLMs not so long ago and then I just started seeing
| papers about them everywhere. Is that a frequency illusion,
| or did I just learn about an interesting new technology at a
| time when lots of people had things to say about it?
| ordu wrote:
| Well... I believe that the illusion is a real thing, but a
| lot of people started talked about it also may be a real
| thing, and they could happen at the same time. But there is
| one more piece of the puzzle: probability to learn
| something raises when people start talking about it. And
| when it happens to someone there is one more person to talk
| about it, so it is a chain reaction. So if you learned
| something recently on Internet, and now you see people
| talking about it everywhere, then it is probable that the
| most of people talking are like you, who just learned about
| the thing recently.
| schoen wrote:
| (2017)
|
| "A Logic Named Joe" is a fascinating story, which has also been
| discussed on HN occasionally.
| justinclift wrote:
| For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe
| xmprt wrote:
| With the increasing adoption of AI into people's workflows I
| think this is something that's really important to be thinking
| about. AI is a paradigm shifting technology whether you like it
| or not.
| isodev wrote:
| Or is "AI" just a kind of a fax machine (from the post) which
| Big Tech is trying to morph into something profitable (e.g.
| loading it up with ads/commercial responses "optimised" just
| for you)
| jsemrau wrote:
| The question is "What if AI is a platform like the smart
| phone?" and then "What are the apps that make multi-billion
| dollar businesses?".
| camillomiller wrote:
| What ifs are quite bad questions to predict anything. Also,
| AI is not. A platform like the smartphone needs building
| blocks and distribution systems for those apps. Whatever
| you build with the current llm is not an app, is an
| interface to a black box you have absolutely no control
| over. A black box that, on top of that, people can access
| directly with a chat interface. I don't think that's a
| sustainable way to build a platform, nor it is a good idea
| to build a business on top of such a liability that you
| can't control in any possible way.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Whatever you build with the current llm is not an app,
| is an interface to a black box you have absolutely no
| control over. A black box that, on top of that, people
| can access directly with a chat interface.
|
| so that means there are no apps built on top of search?
|
| An app in this context is something that allows you to do
| something much quicker than trying to putter around and
| figure out what prompt to use.
|
| There are apps that are essentially interfaces with a few
| frills on top.
|
| However I do agree that based on the platform the apps
| you get will not be multi million dollar apps, they will
| be more like browser plugins. Low value propositions that
| does not make you rich, but maybe does well enough that
| you can spend your time on it.
| john2x wrote:
| LLMs are like the capacitive touchscreen that the iPhone
| introduced. A novel way to interface with computers. It's
| being hyped like it's the iPhone itself. But it's really
| just one piece of it.
| rf15 wrote:
| It also feels kind of garbage at some major tasks we
| actually want to use it for - just like typing text on a
| capacitive touchscreen.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Maybe like the Pentium back in the day?
| edent wrote:
| Or they're like the 3D TV screen. Something revolutionary
| and awesome which eventually fades into irrelevance.
| isodev wrote:
| LLMs don't feel like a transformative piece of tech. It's
| more like the CD changer system you can install in the
| trunk of your car - "oh yeah that's cool" but still CDs
| and sometimes it would lock up.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's to be expected. We are not plugging anything to
| it.
|
| Try to do that with a capacitive screen.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Isn't this the sort of "wrong question" the author is
| talking about? If you're stuck thinking in the frame of
| smartphones, you're going to ask about apps and not the
| more interesting ways AI can generate revenue?
| roenxi wrote:
| > And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in
| the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother -
| wanted to work.
|
| In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where
| nobody worked. The strategic goal, never yet realised although AI
| might finally manage it, is to push people out of the workforce
| rather than in to it. Signing your daughter up to be a wage slave
| may be an improvement on the 1950s it isn't really the sort of
| thing that makes a good long term goal.
| sorrybutno123 wrote:
| Working is so much more than being a "wage slave".
|
| Women had to work anyway, except that it was isolated, lonely
| and without respect. Try to spend your (entire) existence
| cooking, cleaning and looking after kids while having a good
| set of brains. It will destroy your soul.
|
| Being an educated "wage slave" is a massive improvement. Work
| in any way shape or form cannot be avoided. Not because it is
| physically necessary, but because of who and what we are.
| renox wrote:
| While I agree with the first part of your post, I disagree
| with your second part, there are a few rich people who don't
| need to work..
|
| > Work in any way shape or form cannot be avoided. Not
| because it is physically necessary, but because of who and
| what we are
| nurettin wrote:
| > there are a few rich people who don't need to work
|
| There are a huge number of land owners and trust fund kids
| who will never have to work. Focusing on a tiny minority
| does nobody any good.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| The actual problem is not "destroys your soul", but rather
| the fact that women working for home have no financial
| autonomy; they depended on their husband entirely. Divorce
| was worse than losing your job.
|
| "Nobody works" is a bit naive, indeed. "Nobody has to work,
| but can if they want" is a bit more realistic, but I believe
| a not-so-bad possible future is "nobody has to work, but you
| have to compete with others to get the job you want".
| Capitalism and workers would have to stop being 19th century
| husband and wife, though.
|
| This could be helped by the challenge ahead of us: managing
| the stabilization of world population count. We've been
| talking about the necessity to do that for years, just like
| climate change - and just like climate change it will
| eventually happen, inducing slow changes in our societies.
| rocqua wrote:
| World population is rising, but most prosperous countries
| have falling birth rates and are either shrinking, or
| barely kept from shrinking by immigration.
|
| This is a problem. It means many more people are born into
| poverty and a life where they will barely scrape by, whilst
| the people with any kind of access to effective production
| get fewer, and spend more time taking care of dependents
| than on improving the lives of others.
|
| We don't just need to drop birth rates in poor countries
| (by reducing child mortality, and increasing prosperity).
| We also need to increase birth rates in the prosperous
| countries.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where
| nobody worked.
|
| pretty much all Sci-Fi of that time imagined a future with
| jobs, perhaps that was because the center of power had shifted
| to the U.S, perhaps it was just because they did not imagine
| Utopias or Dystopias that much, but rather just worlds with
| some additional technical advancements and generally 1 big
| problem/opportunity brought on by the advancement.
|
| The earlier writers were more apt to imagine Utopias.
| Sakos wrote:
| > perhaps that was because the center of power had shifted to
| the U.S
|
| How does that follow? For as long as we can remember or we
| have written records for, we've had jobs. So it's natural to
| assume that a million years in the future, if we still
| inhabit roughly similar form as we do now, we'd have
| something resembling jobs (for a multitude of reasons). What
| does envisioning a future with jobs have to do with the US?
| benedictevans wrote:
| He didn't object to jobs. He objected to a woman having a job.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Partially related/"obligatory" xkcd: xkcd.com/1425 (Tasks).
|
| (What appear to be) Hard problems can be very easy, and (what
| appear to be) easy can be very hard.
| rblatz wrote:
| Now both are "easy"
| Animats wrote:
| He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang
| gliders. There are also plenty of trolleys around, although most
| new ones use pantographs instead of trolley poles.
|
| Very few saw a world dominated by giant advertising firms. Or
| computing becoming a branch of advertising. Even in science
| fiction. There was Fowler Schocken Associates, in _The Space
| Merchants_ (1952). The company behind the simulated world in
| Simulacron-3 (1964) builds it so they can do market testing and
| opinion polls. As late as "AI" (2001), the tie between search
| and ads hadn't appeared. In "AI", the "Dr. Know" search service
| is an expensive pay service.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Philip K. Dick predicted it in Ubik.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Great book, although I'm not sure 'predicted' is the right
| word. By that logic 'Flow my tears the Policeman said' is a
| prediction that by 1988 the US would have had a second civil
| war.
|
| 'Prescient', perhaps?
| devjab wrote:
| It's a little unrelated but I always thought it was odd that
| people looked to things like science fiction for glimpses into
| possible futures rather than into the more social and political
| genres such as cyberpunk.
|
| Because cyberpunk basically got everything right.
| Unfortunately.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| What examples of getting everything right do you know of?
| snozolli wrote:
| Not GP, but _Cryptonomicon_ stands out as predicting a lot
| about markets around cryptography, and the relationship
| between nations and technology. Stephenson didn 't predict
| Blockchain and Bitcoin specifically, but he got closer than
| anyone I know of.
|
| More generally, the Gibson style of "independent hackers
| versus the corporate overlords" seems increasingly
| accurate.
| burningChrome wrote:
| William Gibson - Neuromancer (1984)
|
| _Writing in F &SF in 2005, Charles de Lint noted that
| while Gibson's technological extrapolations had proved
| imperfect (in particular, his acknowledged failure to
| anticipate the impact of the cell phone), "Imagining story,
| the inner workings of his characters' minds, and the world
| in which it all takes place are all more important."[18]_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cult
| u...
| fbhb wrote:
| Isn't that quote talking about something different? The
| F&FS article is saying that "Gibson was never trying to
| be prescient" and that this is irrelevant for writing a
| good story: "he has always been more concerned with story
| and character". I don't think that's wrong, but it still
| doesn't answer the question what books did make accurate
| predictions.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Personally I started reading hard SF in the early 70s so it
| was all I had then for glimpses of the future, and a lot of
| near-future SF then was based around post-nuclear situations,
| or robots, or similar, albeit with some superb exceptions
| from authors such as Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and others.
|
| Cyberpunk didn't really get consolidated as a genre until the
| 1980s although dystopias had been written about before then.
| It was in the 80s that the core cyberpunk themes of computer
| hackers and evil corporations really came together in their
| current dystopian form.
| wslh wrote:
| Not only from the cyberpunk movement, but also from history
| and the classics! Societies should rethink formal education
| entirely and focus on connecting the dots between different
| sciences and activities.
|
| I'll play the contrarian here regarding the article: it's
| likely that many people did actually predict the future, but
| they lacked the platform to broadcast their message.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Maybe not the exact workings of the modern ad industry, but I'd
| say that as early as Metropolis and possibly some time before,
| a feared future of mass production and consumption had entered
| the public eye. It is fascinating though, how little (ad) space
| advertising itself was warranted in fictional works till
| relatively recent (late 70s/early 80s) -- Blade Runner made it
| look as beautiful as it would be inescapable.
| elric wrote:
| By the time Alien came out, corporate evil was certainly well
| established. Everything on the space ship had Weyland
| branding, and the corporation treating its employees as
| expendable was par for the course.
|
| I'm struggling to come up with an older example of prominent
| ads in sci fi, but I'm drawing a blank.
| GJim wrote:
| So what you are saying is... "even the most dystopian Sci-
| Fi didn't predict modern Silicon Valley led advertising &
| surveillance capitalism"!
| elric wrote:
| I guess we as a species (and sci-fi writers)
| underestimate the banality of evil and its cumulative
| effect. Nearly 25 years ago, I ran a couple of banner ads
| on my website to help pay for the hosting costs. Back
| then it didn't cross my mind that such a trivial bit of
| HTML would eventually lead to surveillance capitalism. I
| wonder if any sci-fi writers predicted where this
| could/would lead...
| dleeftink wrote:
| "Tuesday is Soylent Green day.."
|
| And not to forget how "colors of the real world only seem
| really real when you viddy them on screen.."
| qhwudbebd wrote:
| "He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang
| gliders."
|
| Off-topic I know, but 100% this. Modern hang-gliders are
| amazing: easy to learn, unbelievable glide performance and
| handling, cheap to buy and learn. The 'whoosh' of energy
| retention as you pull in and push out has to be felt to be
| believed.
|
| The same goes for paragliders: their speed and glide makes a
| mockery of my intuition as a ex-physicist and they fit in a
| rucksack. I'm a rubbish pilot and I've still managed to fly
| over a hundred kilometres on a paraglider.
| langcss wrote:
| Thats odd because I remember people saying "when will Google
| start ads". Although probably thinking of the Yahoo style slow
| loading mess.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Or AOL, I remember breakfast TV hosts mentioning AOL keywords
| a lot
| avg_dev wrote:
| > Or computing becoming a branch of advertising.
|
| wow. such a succinct way of putting it. ugly too. and probably
| at least mostly truthful.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Plenty of computing happens without any advertising
| whatsoever.
|
| They just don't get noticed by the general public or mass
| culture, this is practically a tautology.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Everything else aside, I'm impressed his grandfather was born in
| 1896. My most recent ancestor whose grandparent was born before
| 1900 was my grandmother, and she died 25 years ago. Some families
| have much longer generations than mine. I already knew we aren't
| a hearty stock, but this difference seems ridiculous.
| dotancohen wrote:
| My father (still alive) has a grandparent born in the 19th
| century. I should go find out exactly when, thank you.
| langcss wrote:
| Im guessing paternal grandfather.
| bambax wrote:
| My parents were born in 1931 and 1932 and are both still
| alive and well. One of their four parents was born in 1899.
| All of their eight grandparents were born in the 19th
| century.
| croisillon wrote:
| My grandfather was born in 1895, AMA ;)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It's not how long they live, for the most part, but how
| early/late they have kids.
| elric wrote:
| Also depends on how old you are ... if you're 80, a
| grandparent born in 1890 isn't particularly impressive.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I'm 47. My dad's mom, who I knew well, was born in 1910. Her
| father was born in 1857, before the Civil War. I always thought
| the span on that side was fascinating.
| drewg123 wrote:
| My grandmother was born in 1901 and passed away in 1995. It was
| an amazing span of years to be alive, in terms of progress.
|
| She saw computers go from room-size to PCs. She saw the birth
| of aviation and people walk on the moon. She saw
| electrification and indoor plumbing. She saw cars go from rare
| toys for the super rich to commonplace.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Not to mention old enough to witness two world wars and the
| Cold War. I wonder what could we have learned from her about
| how human nature flows from one conflict to another...
| drewg123 wrote:
| She was remarkably untouched by the world wars, as she
| lived her entire life in the USA, and my grandfather was in
| college and was not drafted into WW1, and was too old for
| WWII (Nor did she have any sons).
|
| In fact, WWII was probably a positive for her. She worked
| as a "Rosie the Riviter" building P40 at the Curtiss plant
| in Buffalo, NY.
| layer8 wrote:
| It easily happens when two generations in sequence father a
| child in their 40s. That happens more frequently than you'd
| think.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Just yesterday I had a "what's coming" discussion with a couple
| older (non technical) folk. They thought flying cars and fusion
| power were coming soon.
|
| I contrasted saying that the energy equation for flying cars
| doesn't work, not to mention the penalty for mechanical failure.
| (I mentioned helicopters, they mentioned autonomous drones.)
|
| Fusion power is famously "10 years away" but I maintain its
| simply too capital intensive. If I have 10 billion to invest do I
| want to make a stunningly complicated fusion power plant, (which
| will produce power 10 years after the project starts) or do I
| just buy a bunch of desert, a mountain of solar panels and enough
| wire to connect it to the grid? Staffed by some cleaners and
| electricians. Where the worst that can happen is it goes offline.
| With no moving parts, no sun-like pressures or temperatures.
|
| And yet back in the 50s "free" energy and flying cars were
| "imminent".
| creativenolo wrote:
| The lenses that we view the questions also change. In the 1950s,
| people likely imagined that by the 2020s, roads would be rebuilt
| with technologies like magnets or rails to support self-driving
| cars. But they didn't anticipate the inertia in infrastructure
| development. Our roads remain largely the same, and this
| stagnation is what we need to band aid with for autonomous
| vehicles today.
| mhog_hn wrote:
| Imagine dedicated single lane highways between major cities
| across the world only accessible to self-driving vehicles
| chrislo wrote:
| Trains?
| ivalm wrote:
| Trains where train cars separate for better last mile
| logistics.
| igornadj wrote:
| Like the channel tunnel train?
| langcss wrote:
| Trains... but they end up at your house.
| OtomotO wrote:
| I don't want my house to be at the end of a highway ;-)
| elric wrote:
| Those are calles "buses". Though trams can be even
| better.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| They're not. You still have to go to and from the bus
| stop, and on the bus's schedule rather than yours.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| With sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated
| transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley
| busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus
| stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both
| disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park
| would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8
| minutes such that waits are minimal.
|
| With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete
| with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further
| enhancements give priority signalling to transit
| vehicles.
|
| Sufficient density also means that services and functions
| are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping,
| entertainment, healthcare, government services, and
| employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or
| similar space).
| frogpelt wrote:
| You've given me an idea: tiny houses that move on
| rails... the trains are the houses!
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Yeah, but then imagine if we took all these separate vehicles
| and stuck them together to increase efficiency. And now we
| could regularly send such vehicle groups, making travel
| predictable for everyone.
|
| Wait...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| But that means the government controls my movement! Oh no!
|
| (It totally doesn't control it via the network of public
| roads... /s)
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It's a bit like some people were complaining about the
| "Covid dictatorship" at the time. Apparently seeing only
| what's right in front of their noses, not all the other
| government actions and policies that are on a spectrum
| from less to more important than Covid policies and which
| happen for worse to better reasons as well. At least
| that's how I think one "notices" a sudden dictatorship of
| democratically elected parties.
| hug wrote:
| I find the kind of responses you're getting wildly ironic,
| given the article.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| People are joking about how this is trains or busses, but I
| think you hit on something fundamental:
|
| - engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge
| engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many
| small engines works just as well.
|
| - removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person
| needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically.
|
| - the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to
| shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or
| trains.
|
| So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-
| driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles
| must be below some specified size.
|
| This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput,
| and good safety.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How will these very shrunken cars be survivable in a crash
| at highway speeds?
|
| Plus modern crossovers are already very size efficient, A
| 2024 compact crossover like the Rav4 is pretty much already
| the smallest possible space that can comfortably
| accommodate 4 adult men in seated positions and 4 large
| suitcases.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > But they didn't anticipate the inertia in infrastructure
| development
|
| On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly
| positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the
| 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of
| dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains,
| submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the
| moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board.
| People just assumed this would continue.
|
| What very few SF writers understood was that all of these
| exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how
| much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast
| you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved
| atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world,
| never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the
| stars sense, at least.
|
| Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the
| laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced
| massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency,
| affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships
| actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| > What very few SF writers understood
|
| "Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction
| manuals.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Well yes, of course, but I was trying to point out one of
| the reasons for their blind-spots with such predictions. Of
| course, some hard-SF authors (e.g. Arthur C Clarke) _did_
| try to make their stories technically plausible, which
| gives to some superb anachronisms nowadays, e.g. the
| classic combination of rocket ships whose crew used slide
| rules for astronavigation.
| Sakos wrote:
| Science fiction that took place in space weren't
| necessarily predictions. They were imagining what life in
| space could be like, whether human or not. I don't see
| how any of us would benefit if every SF author had
| "realized" that it was unfeasible and just wrote about
| earth. There was no blind spot, just it did nobody any
| good to hamper themselves by things like "well, it'll
| never happen, no point in imagining it". Fiction would be
| boring if we always only limited ourselves to being
| completely realistic and true to our current state of
| knowledge.
| saghm wrote:
| They were writing _science_ fiction. Not all of it has to
| be realistic, but presumably there's at least attempt to
| ground things in what would be recognizable to readers as
| science.
| heisenbit wrote:
| > Our roads remain largely the same
|
| Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality
| seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to
| coming down are another related issue.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| People in the 1950 has just gone through around a bit more of
| century of industrial revolution. Things were moving fast,
| everywhere..
|
| Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved
| during this timeframe.
|
| Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other
| sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car.
| They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had
| 80 years ago.
|
| I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going
| to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to
| know that the industrial revolution was ending.
| ksec wrote:
| Missing 2017 in the title.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| > And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in
| the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother -
| wanted to work.
|
| As written out, it is suggested that it is a lack of imagination.
|
| I think a better narrative is just that it is work, and who would
| vulontarily have to work if they don't have to.
|
| This is the more compassionate narrative.
| passion__desire wrote:
| I have a Young Adult fiction example supporting this which I
| read 14 years ago.
|
| J.K. Rowling has Hermione going to forbidden library to read
| dangerous books. But J.K. Rowling couldn't think of searching
| books like Google search does. On the other hand, J.K. Rowling
| could think of time turner i.e. a time travel device.
| Considering physical laws, time travel is impossible but google
| search is possible. Still JKR couldn't think of google search.
| Jordan_Pelt wrote:
| I don't know. That's kind of like saying J.K. Rowling
| couldn't think of just shooting the bad guys with guns.
| passion__desire wrote:
| It is said most of the premises of modern movies and
| television would dissolve if people just resolved their
| misunderstandings by a phone call.
| Sakos wrote:
| Also, plenty of women worked. In 1950, women were 32% of the
| work force (in the US), earned 60% of what men earned and had
| little room for advancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wome
| n_in_the_United_States_lab...). So either his grandfather was
| simply completely unaware of how many women actually held jobs
| even then or he wondered why they'd want to work the same
| terrible jobs men do, because they certainly didn't do it for
| fun.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| The author is asking the wrong questions by judging what was
| present 53 years ago and giving unkind subjective opinions about
| experts with limited knowledge of the time because their
| predictions were also true.
|
| Today's expert can't be 100% correct if someone from 2017, 53
| years in the future says they are asking the wrong questions.
|
| The world is changing very fast in modern times.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| This could also be just asking the wrong people.
|
| The predictions we have left are from industry expert or pretty
| successful people. Fundamentally they fit well in their current
| world and aren't envisioning social or technical shifts that will
| completely change the world as they know it.
|
| This is most apparent in the telephone and international fax
| part, where they see the future of networking through telephone,
| and not some other technology making it obsolete. We'd have had a
| different prediction asking AM amateurs how they see the world of
| telephone communication in 50~100 years (might not have been
| correct either, but would have been different)
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I do wish the writer would stop justifying the relevance of their
| experiment by saying "a human would conclude that their time was
| being wasted long before the LLM".
|
| This is a fallacy.
|
| A better analogy would be a human who has been forced to answer a
| series of questions at gunpoint.
|
| At this point it becomes more obvious that the LLM is not
| "falling short" in some way.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| reply to wrong post?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Thank you! It was.
| bambax wrote:
| We're obsessed with flying cars, and hang gliders, and drones,
| and space travel, because gravity sucks.
|
| I often daydream about what life would be like if we could just
| regulate gravity at will, just at the individual level, so we can
| modulate our own weight, up to 0 -- or even negative.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| > modulate our own weight, up to 0 -- or even negative.
|
| Wolff's law suggests that if you set your own weight to zero or
| negative, your bones would become fragile
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Only if you do it long term. Astronauts survive months of
| microgravity. A couple hours or even days would be easy to
| compensate for.
| Jordan_Pelt wrote:
| >and computerised taxation (except in the USA).
|
| I don't understand this. Does he not think the IRS uses
| computers?
| benedictevans wrote:
| Americans generally still have to compile and file tax returns.
| In other countries that is often entirely automated.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Their primary user interface is the paper form. Finally being
| rectified in 2024, forty+ years after same country invented the
| internet and thirty+ after the web.
|
| No, potentially malicious, rent-seeking "e-file" third-parties
| aren't good enough.
| lazyant wrote:
| "plenty of people have pointed out that vintage scifi is full of
| rocketships but all the pilots are men. 1950s scifi shows 1950s
| society, but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have
| paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental
| technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as
| make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now
| have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.) "
|
| Yes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical
| newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when
| arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in
| his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he
| wrote the first novels).
|
| There was movable sidewalks and other transportation devices
| though.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Yes, Asimov 's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical
| newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when
| arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in
| his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he
| wrote the first novels)._
|
| The stories also have to be marketable to contemporary
| audiences. There may have been brilliant sci-fi at the time
| about strong, health-minded female protagonists, but I doubt it
| would have risen to popularity in 1950s society, and thus would
| have been forgotten.
|
| You can see the effects today with some of the backlash against
| certain Disney IP.
|
| I don't think sci-fi is a good predictor because of both the
| author's bias and society's (i.e. the The Market's) bias
| against topics that upset it.
| ghodith wrote:
| A similar point can be made for the physical newspaper
| aspect; not every author is trying to impart accelerando-
| esque future shock on their readers. And presumably there
| isn't infinite market demand for that either. All different
| aspects of selection bias.
| bilater wrote:
| I think this is an important lens to look through especially
| about predictions of AI. It is likely we will have downstream
| effects/platforms/interfaces that most of us can't even think
| about right now.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Science fiction (novels, short stories, or by the 1950s films,
| and 1960s telvision) doesn't have a primary goal of _predicting
| the future_ but rather of _selling entertainment_. To the extent
| it _is_ speculative, it 's almost always discussing contemporary
| circumstances sufficiently distant setting (in time and space) to
| be able to comment on it in a way which both minimises social
| censure and reaction _and_ gives a potential for a fresh
| perspective (in the best cases). Of course, much of it is simply,
| or at least largely, escapist space opera / space westerns (Buck
| Rogers, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (original series). And
| yes, some of the escapist content does have real science or
| predictive value.
|
| But _in balance_ it 's an exceedingly poor prospecting ground for
| hard-nosed, realistic, and/or accurate predictions. For much the
| same reason that most space ships are laid our horizontally, with
| gravity working on the frontal rather than coronal plane is that
| _sets built on Earth are far more easily built and filmed that
| way_ , SF addresses its creations, narrative, and audience-appeal
| needs over any putative scientific or prophetic accuracy.
|
| And sure, there are notable counterexamples.
|
| E.M. Forster's _The Machine Stops_ is _frighteningly_ accurate in
| a world much like that of the 2010s / 2020s.
|
| Arthur C. Clark _in some works_ hits on some remarkably accurate
| depictions of at least _parts_ of a future world. _Imperial
| Earth_ envisions both handheld computers _and_ a culture obsessed
| with recording every passing moment in a way that 's _nearly_
| selfie-culture (though he seems to have missed influencers).
| _2001: A Space Odyssey_ predicts tablet computers and video
| telephony with reasonable accuracy (though all but completely
| ignores their social implications).
|
| Orson Scott Card's _Ender 's Game_ presages blogging to some
| degree (though generally overstating its influence, as Randall
| Munroe spoofed: <https://www.xkcd.com/635/>).
|
| And there's a whole slew of _dystopian_ SF which has materialised
| in some form or another, from Ray Bradbury ( "The Veldt"), Philip
| K. Dick (too many to mention), William Gibson, Neal Stephenson,
| etc., etc., etc. I and others suspect that's to some extent less
| prophetic than direct stimulus, with contemporary techbros aping
| their favourite adolescent sci-fi universes without asking "are
| we the baddies?" or whether they should.
|
| But if you want hard predictions about the future, it's probably
| better to look to the literature which specifically and seriously
| attempts to do this, _outside_ of a fictional context.
|
| One such book is Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_ , now 54 years
| old.[1]
|
| I'd read that, for the first time, on its 50th anniversary. I was
| struck by much, and found it _on balance_ to have stood the test
| of time quite well, and _much_ better than is typical for the
| genre. As to accuracy, there seem to be three general cases:
|
| - Specific proponents of specific technologies virtually always
| overestimated the acceptance and impact of those technologies.
| The notable exception is, of course, information technology,
| though even for it the specific ways in which it has and hasn't
| advanced is worth close study.
|
| - Virtually all of the social dynamic predictions seem laughably
| modest today --- developments in racial, gender, and sexual
| equality and acceptance, amongst others. Though on reflection
| this isn't so much that the predictions were bold, _but that they
| 've come to pass_. We are on the far side of the singularity for
| these changes, for the most part. What was written in the context
| of a world in which these changes lay in the future reads much
| differently now that the inflection points are in the past. At
| the same time, it's also clear that such changes need not be
| permanent, and that perhaps such dynamics tend more towards
| cyclical patterns or pendulum swings, with greater and lesser
| liberalisation at different points in time.
|
| - Much of the psychological and sociological concerns over
| advancing technology, faster paces of change, and an ever-growing
| onslaught of information seem to me to have been extraordinarily
| prescient, and largely born out. The _disruptive_ effects, both
| on a personal psychological level and on a collective
| sociological one, appear to be profound, and we 're still in the
| midst of discovering just how much so.
|
| In thinking about how technological change manifests, I've come
| up with an ontology of the _types_ of technological mechanisms
| which operate: fuels, materials, information (receipt,
| processing, storage, transmission), networks, systems, process
| knowledge, causal knowledge, power transmission and
| transformation, and hygiene (dealing with unintended
| consequences).[2]
|
| Much of the Industrial Revolution (~1800 -- 1950 or so) was
| fundamentally grounded in new fuels (coal, petroleum, natural
| gas) and power transmission and transformation (particularly
| electricity and magnetism), with strong secondary effects through
| improved and expanded materials (Bessemer steel, aluminium,
| plastics), communications (telegraph, telephone, radio,
| television) and recording (rapid print advancements, photography,
| phonography, film). Since 1950, it's been information technology
| which seems to have been in the forefront, making some profound
| advances (overall processing and storage capacities) whilst
| remaining stubbornly stagnant in others (forecasting, meaningful
| automation and controls). Networks and systems have been primary
| secondary effects.
|
| Hygiene is the ninth factor I'd come upon, and falls out of the
| recognition that all technologies have both _intended_ and
| _unintended_ effects. As technologies increase in complexity, I
| strongly suspect the latter dominate, exacting something of a
| drag on overall progress.
|
| The element that's missing from my typology is the interaction
| between technology and society as a whole. I don't have much to
| say on that at the moment, though I feel it's quite significant.
| I'm noting that lapse for the moment.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock>
| <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>
|
| 2. I've written on this a few times at HN and elsewhere,
| searching Algolia for "tech ontology" or "technological ontology"
| should turn up some references. I'm increasingly feeling that the
| idea probably needs a book-length treatment discussing each
| mechanism, how it applies (some of the mappings I make may strike
| some as obscure, e.g., that knowledge is in some ways a network
| function, as expressed in the phrase "web of knowledge"), and
| what the capacities and limitations of each mechanism are.
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