First of all, 20 years ago, many aspects of computer technology were better. Sure, CPUs are faster, traces are smaller, monitors are clearer. But every core Internet age technology is practically identical to what it was in 1990, even. There is no email 2.0, still no easy large file sharing, and on on. Things that need improvement cannot be improved anymore because monopolies dont improve things, they entrap. Everything’s proprietary inside a walled garden and not interoperable. We’d probably be close to electronic telepathy by now if not for Big Tech.
And secondly, the previous poster said nothing anything like the current technologies will be AI. The LLMs we have now are a combination of plausible sentence assemblers, code auto-completers, travesty generators, and “Actually Indians”. That is not a stepping stone to a thinking machine, it is as he said, a sidetrack that leads to a dead end.
There are many things in tech that have stagnated, or become standards that we’re stuck with. But we’re stuck with them not because nobody can do better, but because replacing them requires convincing the whole world to replace them.
Like email 2.0? You’d need it to be fully compatible with email 1.0, or nobody’s switching. And if it is fully compatible, you’re probably making compromises on how much it improves over 1.0.
On the other hand, as an end-user, my experience with email is easier than it was 20 years ago. This isn’t the technology changing, but email clients making things better and more accessible for the end user.
As to your other point, we don’t need “thinking machines” or “electronic telepathy” to consider the feasibility of technology replacing or reducing the need for certain types of jobs. Like I said, 20 years is a long time. Some things stay the same, yes, but many change.
First of all, 20 years ago, many aspects of computer technology were better. Sure, CPUs are faster, traces are smaller, monitors are clearer. But every core Internet age technology is practically identical to what it was in 1990, even. There is no email 2.0, still no easy large file sharing, and on on. Things that need improvement cannot be improved anymore because monopolies dont improve things, they entrap. Everything’s proprietary inside a walled garden and not interoperable. We’d probably be close to electronic telepathy by now if not for Big Tech.
And secondly, the previous poster said nothing anything like the current technologies will be AI. The LLMs we have now are a combination of plausible sentence assemblers, code auto-completers, travesty generators, and “Actually Indians”. That is not a stepping stone to a thinking machine, it is as he said, a sidetrack that leads to a dead end.
There are many things in tech that have stagnated, or become standards that we’re stuck with. But we’re stuck with them not because nobody can do better, but because replacing them requires convincing the whole world to replace them.
Like email 2.0? You’d need it to be fully compatible with email 1.0, or nobody’s switching. And if it is fully compatible, you’re probably making compromises on how much it improves over 1.0.
On the other hand, as an end-user, my experience with email is easier than it was 20 years ago. This isn’t the technology changing, but email clients making things better and more accessible for the end user.
As to your other point, we don’t need “thinking machines” or “electronic telepathy” to consider the feasibility of technology replacing or reducing the need for certain types of jobs. Like I said, 20 years is a long time. Some things stay the same, yes, but many change.