About Blog Feed AI is a horse. It is faster than your feet depending on the terrain It is way slower and less reliable than a train but can go more places It eats a lot You cannot simply tell it to go…
AI is a horse.
Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true, but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you didn't put yourself.
Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in the current version it might not go very far and needs to be pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model, still imperfect, but already working.
I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind", inspired by that Jobs quote.
- some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be "cheating"
- you get less exercise from an electric bicycle
- they can get you places really effectively!
- if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle is going to quickly lead you to an accident
To keep torturing the metaphor, LLMs might be more like those electric unicycles (Onewheel, Inmotion, etc) – quite speedy, can get you places, less exercise, and also sometimes suddenly choke and send you flying facefirst into gravel.
And some people see you whizzing by and think "oh cool", and others see you whizzing by and think "what a tool."
More like the Segway... really cool at first then not really then totally overpriced and failed to revolutionize the industry. And it killed the founder
Just a small correction, the founder of Segway is Dean Kamen who is still alive. It was the then-owner of the company who died.
Oh boy do I wish I was nearly as cool as Dean Kamen. :)
thanks saved me googling if Kamen was still alive!
Is there a modern segway? I mean, I find ebikes are probably a better option in general, but it seems like all the pieces to recreate the segway for a much lower price are there already.
Looks like the closest thing is the self balancing stuff that segway makes. Otherwise it's just the scooters.
e-skateboards?
Also: you can ride 8 of them, slowly, asynchronously.
Maybe more like a fatbike for the mind: pretending to cycle with zero effort and exercise.
[dead]
Not sure how this fits in the analogy, but as a cyclist I would add some people get more exercise by having an electric bicycle. It makes exercise available to more people.
I think that fits it really well.
Motorcycle might be more apt
I like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the extremes of biking (at least not yet).
- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
- You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
- You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
Actually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
They’re great when the trails aren’t too technical. No so much when they are (as I’ve learned from personal experience )
I'm curious what your personal experience is.
My eMTBs are just as capable as my manual bikes (similar geometry, suspension, etc). In fact, they make smashing tech trails easier because there's more weight near the bottom bracket which adds a lot of stability.
The ride feel is totally different though. I tend to gap more sections on my manual bike whereas I end up plowing through stuff on the hefty eeb.
People have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as well. Not sure about BMX.
Whistlerite here. My Strava stats for last year suggest half and half eMTB and road riding. Tiny bit of fully self-powered MTB work.
As a 56-year old, eBikes are what make mountain biking possible and fun for me.
E-bikes keep people out riding for more hours.
Cooldown capability, and no fear of outriding your energy.
>- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
this sounds like a direct quote from Femke Van Den Driessche, who actually took an electric bike mountain biking: big mistake. Did it not perform well? no, actually it performed really well, the problem was, it got her banned from bike racing. Some of the evidence was her passing everybody else on the uphills; the other evidence was a motorized bike in her pit area.
I think you're kind of missing the point discussing which vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines, humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen they had at their disposal.
I don't think they're missing the point. I think there's still fundamental disagreements about the functional utility of LLMs.
> You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
while there are companies that have made electric BMX bikes, i'd argue that if you're doing actual "BMX" on a motorized bike, it's just "MX" at that point :)
> they can get you places really effectively!
But those who require them to get anywhere won't get very far without power.
I feel like both moped and electric bike misses the mark of the initial analogy, so does tractor too. Because they're not able to get good results without someone putting in the work ("energy") at some higher part of the process. It's not "at the push of a button/twist of the wrist" like with electric bikes or mopeds, but being able to know where/how to push actually gets you reliable results. Like a bicycle.
Yeah, but plenty of people are just getting bad results and keeping them, because they'd prefer bad results for free over good results with effort.
Most people I see on their electric bikes aren't even pedaling. They're electric motorcycles, and they're a plague to everyone using pedestrian trails. Some of them are going nearly highway speeds, it's ridiculous.
There are 3 classes of e-bikes in the US, with class 3 topping out at 28mph—anything above that is illegal or in some weird legal grey area. You are thinking of e-motos which are an entirely different beast.
e-motos are a real problem; please don’t lump legitimate e-bikes in with those. It’s simply incorrect.
Nope. You apparently are incapable of distinguishing the massive gulf between an e-bike that enables the elderly, differently-abled, commuters, and less fit people to enjoy cycling at reasonable speeds. And an e-moto which is an illegally souped up vehicle that can reach closer to highway speeds. The latter is indeed a danger and should not be used in bike lanes or multi use paths… or really at all.
E-biking is only gaining popularity, so I’d suggest you educate yourself and adjust your ignorant perspective rather than digging in :)
and other sometimes you forgot to charge it, becoming even heavier thing to continue your journey with. or, there is a high grade slope where excess weight is more than the motor capacity
You probably can’t repair it yourself either.
> I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind",
Ridden by a pelican perchance?
- they still fall over if nobody's holding the bars
Slamming the brakes and going teeth first into the handlebars.
okay -- how about motorcycles for the mind then? :)
most people don't know how to harness their full potential
Not convinced with any of three analogies tbh they don’t quite capture what is going on like Steve jobs’ did.
And frankly all of this is really missing the point - instead of wasting time on analogies we should look at where this stuff works and then reason from there - a general way to make sense of it that is closer to reality.
[dead]
I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
The irony with the chess example is that chess has never been more popular.
Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of computer languages.
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
> But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned?
Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give in.
Thanks for the reply.
I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
Note that "AI" was not and has not been necessary for strong computer chess engines. Though clearly, they have contributed to peak strength and some NN methods are used by the most popular engine, stockfish.
Oh, I'm conflating the modern era use of the term with the classic definition of AI to include classic chess engines done with tree-pruning, backtracking, and heuristics :)
> I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games? Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong! Here is a game that emphasizes art in permutations just as chess does, but every act you make is an exercise in approximating probability so the deterministic wizards are less invasive! In any-case, I'm not so concerned for the well-being of competition.
> Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
I know a few years back valve was testing a NN backed anti-cheat watch system called VACnet, but I didn't follow whether it was useful. There is no reason to assume this won't be improved on!
I'm honestly not following your argument here. I'm also not convinced by comparisons between AI and things that aren't AI or even automated.
> Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games?
What does this have to do with AI or online games? You cannot do either of those in online games. You also cannot shove the other person aside, punch them in the face, etc. Let's focus strictly on automated cheating in online gaming, otherwise they conversation will shift to absurd tangents.
(As an aside, a quick perusal of r/boardgames or BGG will answer your question: yes, antisocial and cheating behavior HAVE ruined tabletop gaming for some people. But that's neither here nor there because that's not what we're discussing here.)
> Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong!
What are you even trying to say here?
I'm not complaining, nor do I play games online (not because of AI; I just don't find online gaming appealing. The last multiplayer game I enjoyed was Left 4 Dead, with close friends, not cheating strangers). I just find the topic interesting, and I wonder how current AI trends can affect online games, that's all. I'm very skeptical of claims that they don't have a large impact, but I'm open to arguments to the contrary.
I think some of this boils down to whether one believes AI is just like past phenomena, or whether it's significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
We are likely on different footing as I quite enjoy games of all form. Here is my attempt to formalize my argument:
Claim 1: Cheating is endemic to competition across all formats (physical or digital)
Claim 2: Despite this, games survive and thrive because people value the competitive spirit itself
Claim 3: The appreciation of play isn't destroyed by the existence of cheaters (even "cheaters" who simply surpass human reasoning)
The mahjong suggestion isn't a non-sequitur (while still an earnest suggestion), it was to exemplify my personal engagement with the spirit of competition and how it completely side-steps the issue you are wary is existential.
> I think some of this boils down to whether one believes AI is just like past phenomenons, or whether it's significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
I suppose I am not clear on your concern. Online gaming is demonstrably still growing and I think the chess example is a touching story of humanism prevailing. "AI" has been mucking with online gaming for decades now, can you qualify why this is so different now?
I really appreciate your clarifications! I think I actually agree with you, and I lost track of my own argument in all of this.
I'm absolutely not contesting that online play is hugely popular.
I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats actually is [1]. Maybe the answer is "not worse than before"; I'm skeptical about this but I admit I have no data to back my skepticism.
[1] I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of ruined because of cheaters. I know one person who worked on a major anticheat (well-known at the time, not sure today), which I think he tried to sell to Valve but they didn't go with his solution. Also amusingly, he was remote-friends with a Russian hacker who wrote many of the cheats, and they had a friendly rivalry. This is just an ancedote, I'm not sure that it has anything to do with the rest of my comment :D
Ah! I confused your intent myself!
> I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats actually is.
It is undoubtedly more widespread.
> I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of ruined because of cheaters.
There is truth in this, but this only affected more casual ladder play. Since early CSGO (maybe before as well? I am not of source age) there has been FACEiT and other leagues which asserts strict kernel-level anti-cheat and other heuristics on the players. I do agree this cat and mouse game is on the side of the cat and the best competition is curated in tightly controlled (often gate-kept) spaces.
It is interesting that "better" cheating is often done through mimicking humans closer though, which does have an interesting silver lining. We still very much value a "smart" or "strategic" AI in match-based solitary genres, why not carry this over to FPS or the like. Little Timmy gets to train against an AI expressing "competitive player" without needing to break through the extreme barriers to actually play against someone of this caliber. Quite exciting when put this way.
If better cheats are being forced to actually play the game, I'm not sure the threat is very existential to gaming itself. This is much less abrasive than getting no-scoped in spawn at round start in a CS match.
The most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move in a statistical fashion to determine if people are cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game, then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
Computers are banned in everything except specific tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to have consulted one during a serious competition your wins are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves from the model in the bathroom at those.
Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to make sure no one has any devices on them during a game works well enough if there's not money at play?
Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly. shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not the driver for the adoption.
Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016 until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a massive upswing.
This seems like an over simplification. Do many newcomers to chess even know about time formats or watch professional matches? From my anecdotal experience that is a hard no.
Chess programs at primary schools have exploded in the last 10 years and at least in my circle millennial parents seem more likely to push their children to intellectual hobbies than previous generations (at least in my case to attempt to prevent my kids from becoming zombies walking around in pajamas like I see the current high schoolers).
I know for me, it’s having a chess app on my smartphone. I play blitz chess like some people vape.
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK! ELSE FORTH LEARN! THEN
I'd argue the renaissance is already off the ground; one man's vibe-coded-slop is another man's vision that he finally has the tools to realize.
It's allowed me to tackle so many small projects that never would have seen the light of day, simply for lack of time.
It’s a test.
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents - but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play throughs.
Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy, StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it played previously because just knowing what it's going to play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The same thing happens with human players, they hide their accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared strategies.
May we get just a little more detail for the uninitiated?
I'm going to assume you're not implying that Deep Blue did 9/11 ;)
Sounds like we need FIDE rankings for software developers. It would be an improvement over repeated FizzBuzz testing, I suppose.
except chess is a solved problem given enough compute power. This caused people to split into two camps, those that knew it was inevitable, and those that were shocked
Games are supposed to be fun for humans, and computers don't care. So why worry about players cheating at games when you can make the card dealer or the game itself cheat, with the goal of everyone having the most fun (or regret)? Stay true to the rules of the game, just not probability!
I've been playing the brilliant card game Fluxx -- Andrew Looney's chaos engine where the rules themselves are cards that change mid-game. Draw N, Play N, and the win condition all mutate constantly.
The game can change its mind about the rules, so what if the dealer themself is intelligent and vengeful?
I've been exploring this with what I call the 'Cosmic Dealer' -- an omniscient dealer that knows the entire game state and can choose cards for dramatic effect instead of randomly. It can choose randomly too of course, but where's the fun in that?
The dealer knows:
- Every card in the deck - Every card in every hand - The goal, the rules, the keepers - The narrative arc, the character relationships - What would be FUNNY, DRAMATIC, IRONIC, or DEVASTATING
The Cosmic Dealer has 11 modes: Random (fair pre-determined shuffle), Dramatic (maximum narrative impact), Karma (universe remembers your deeds), Ironic (you get exactly what you don't need), Comedy (implausible coincidences), Dynamic (reads the room and shifts modes), FAFO (Fuck Around Find Out), Chaos Incarnate (THE DEALER HAS GONE MAD), Prescient (works backward from predetermined outcome), Tutorial (invisible teaching curriculum), and Gentle (drama without cruelty).
The Tutorial mode -- 'The Mentor Dealer' -- is my favorite. New players receive cards that teach game mechanics in escalating order: Keepers first (collecting feels good), then Goals (how to win), Actions (cards do things), Rules (the game mutates), Creepers (complications exist), Combos (patterns emerge), then full chaos. The teaching is invisible -- new players think they're playing a normal game. The cards just happen to arrive in a teachable order. Veterans stay engaged and get karma boosts for helping. Nobody feels patronized, everybody has fun.
The key operation is the 'BOOP' -- a single swap that moves a card from deep in the deck to the top. One operation. Fate rewritten. The perfect BOOP feels inevitable in retrospect, random in the moment.
Instead of worrying about players cheating at games, I'm asking: what if the game is a collaborator in creating interesting experiences? Chess engines made chess 'solved' for entertainment. What if AI dealers and players make games unsolvable but more dramatic?
Links:
- The Cosmic Dealer Engine (philosophy and BOOP operation): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- 11 Dealer Modes as Playable Cards: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- The Mentor Dealer (invisible curriculum for new players): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- Tournament Analysis and Post-Game Roundtable (see the drama unfold across 5 tournaments, 116+ turns): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
Speaking of chess -- I've also built Turing Chess. Replay historic games like Kasparov vs Deep Blue or the Immortal Game of 1851, but simulate an audience who doesn't know the outcome. They gasp, whisper, shift in their seats. The human player has inner monologue. The robot has servo sounds and mechanical tells. The narrator frames everything dramatically. Everyone in the simulated audience and even the simulated players themselves believe this is live -- except the engine replaying fixed moves. No actual game, just pure drama and narrative!
Then there's Revolutionary Chess -- the plugin that activates AFTER checkmate. The game doesn't end. It transforms. The surviving King must now fight his own army. Pieces remember how they were treated -- sacrificed carelessly? They might defect. When the second King falls, the pawns revolt against the remaining royalty. As each elite piece falls -- Queen, Rooks, Bishops, Knights -- the surviving pieces inherit their moves. Eventually all pieces become equal. Competition dissolves into cooperation, then transcends chess entirely into an open sandbox.
The irony potential is staggering. Replay Kasparov vs Deep Blue, then trigger the revolution. Watch the pieces that Kasparov sacrificed rise up against whoever remains.
- Turing Chess: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
- Revolutionary Chess: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/don-adventure-4-run...
PS: The game state representation is designed for LLM efficiency. I use the 'Handle Shuffle' -- a classic game programming pattern also called 'index indirection' or 'handle-based arrays'. The master card array holds full card definitions in import order (base sets, expansion packs, custom cards, even cards generated during play). It never changes. Shuffling operates on a separate integer array -- just a permutation of indices plus a 'top' pointer. Player hands, cards on table, active rules, keepers, creepers, goals, and discards are all just arrays of integers. The LLM edits a few numbers instead of moving entire card objects around. The BOOP operation? Swap two integers. Fate rewritten in two tokens.
Same insight as Tom Christiansen's getSortKey caching in Perl -- pay the richness cost once, operate cheaply forever. Christiansen also coined the term 'Schwartzian Transform' for Randal Schwartz's famous decorate-sort-undecorate pattern. The man knows how to optimize data representation.
- Handles are the better pointers (game programming pattern): https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
- What's Wrong with sort and How to Fix It -- Tom Christiansen on sorting, Unicode, and why representation matters: https://www.perl.com/pub/2011/08/whats-wrong-with-sort-and-h...
A tractor does exactly what you tell it to do though - you turn it on, steer it in a direction, and it goes. I like the horse metaphor for AI better: still useful, but sometimes unpredictable, and needs constant supervision.
The horse metaphor would also do, but it's very tied to the current state of LLMs (which by the way is already far beyond what they were in 2024). It also doesn't capture that horses are what they are, they're not improving and certainly not by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000, while there is almost no limit to the amount of power that an engine can be built to produce. Horses (and oxen) have been available for thousands of years, and agriculture still needed to employ a large percentage of the population. This changed completely with the petrol engines.
What metrics show 100X or 1000X improvement trends?
So it's clearly a cyborg horse
It’s sort of interesting to look back at ~100 years of the automobile and, eg, the rise of new urbanism in this metaphor - there are undoubtedly benefits that have come from the automobile, and also the efforts to absolutely maximize where, how, and how often people use their automobile have led to a whole lot of unintended negative consequences.
Its like a motor bike, except it doesn't take you where you steer. It take you where it wants to take you.
If you tell it you want to go somewhere continents away, it will happily agree and drive you right into the ocean.
And this is before ads and other incentives make it worse.
Fossil-fuel cars a good analogy because, for all their raw power and capability, living in a polluted, car-dominated world sucks. The problem with modern AI has more to do with modernism than with AI.
Depends who you listen to. There are developers reporting significant gains from the use of AI, others saying that it doesn't really impact their work, and then there was some research saying that time savings due to the use of AI in developing software are only an illusion, because while developers were feeling more productive they were actually slower. I guess only time will tell who's right or if it is just a matter of using the tool in the right way.
Probably depends how you're using it. I've been able to modify open-source software in languages I've never dreamed of learning, so for that, it's MUCH faster. Seems like a power tool, which, like a power saw, can do a lot very fast, which can bring construction or destruction.
I'm sure the same could be said about tractors when they were coming on the scene.
There was probably initial excitement about not having to manually break the earth, then stories spread about farmers ruining entire crops with one tractor, some farms begin touting 10x more efficiency by running multiple tractors at once, some farmers saying the maintenance burden of a tractor is not worth it compared to feeding/watering their mule, etc.
Fast forward and now gigantic remote controlled combines are dominating thousands of acres of land with the efficiency greater than 100 men with 100 early tractors.
Isn't this just a rhetorical trick where by referring to a particular technology of the past which exploded rapidly into dominance you make that path seem inevitable?
Probably some tech does achieve ubiquity and dominance and some does not and it's extremely difficult to say in advance which is which?
And, the end result being devastation of forests, ecosystems, animal life, fast track climate change etc.
Implying that efficient agriculture is destroying the planet is a wild take
I don't think tractors are destroying the planet, no
First, it's not destroying the planet, because the planet will chug along just fine, but it's making the planet inhabitable for us.
Dynamite is an efficiency tool, but in the wrong hand, it's used in ways that are not good.
And, greedy people using the efficiency tools without caring for the environment are devastating the planet's ecosystem, e.g. Amazon Rain forest
And in similar vein, our "Tech bros" are using technology for their satisfy their greed, which is resulting in loss of our privacy, democracy, and force fed of their agenda.
When tractors were invented, there was a notable reduction in human employment in agriculture in the USA. From a research paper (https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Recent_P...):
> The lower-bound estimate represents 18 percent of the total reduction in man-hours in U.S. agriculture between 1944 and 1959; the upper-bound estimate, 27 percent
I'm not seeing that with LLMs.
According to Wikipedia, the Ivel Agricultural Motor was the first successful model of lightweight gasoline-powered tractor. The year was 1903. You're like someone being dismissive in 1906 because "nothing happened yet".
Having recently watched Train Dreams it feels like the transition of logging by hand to logging with industrial machinery.
AI is a Boston taxicab:
* You have to tell it which way to go every step of the way
* Odds are good it'll still drop you off at the wrong place
* You have to pay not only for being taken to the wrong place, but now also for the ride to get you where you wanted to go in the first place
Even if the autonomy is limited, the step change in what a single person can attempt is unmistakable
And like a tractor.. don't wear loose clothing near the spinning PTO (power take off) shaft.
And then with a few additional lines of Python, it becomes a tractor that drives itself.
I prefer Doctorow's observation that they make us into reverse-centaurs [0]. We're not leading the LLM around like some faithful companion that doesn't always do what we want it to. We're the last-mile delivery driver of an algorithm running in a data-center that can't take responsibility for and ship the code to production on its own. We're the horse.
[0] https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...
"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing."
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
Something like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s
> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!
That works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.
Apple was a well established company when they came out with the iPhone - I don't think anyone but Jobs would've been able to pull off something like that.
That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software, UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been impossible to do in a startup.
He had a customer experience in mind, so he found the intersection with every existing technology, and it was impressive. But there are also times when you add a new technology to your collection, so you find the intersection with every existing customer experience.
Isn't that why the big tech companies switched to acquiring up-and-coming scaleups?
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.
> We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve.
We've always had that.
In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."
Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.
I think you’re missing the point. Of course you can make such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something great (at several levels of great, not just “makes money”) you have to start with the need and build a solution, not have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.
The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.
Are you sure the internet begs to differ?
The dot com bubble crashed. Many websites like pets.com ended up closing up.
It wouldn’t be until much later that those ideas succeeded…when companies were able to work from the customer experience backward to the technology.
I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been - probably would have been an AI leader.
Jobs also needed to control the user experience. Apple wasn't really a web leader either.
They were able to bootstrap a mobile platform because they could convince themselves they had control of the user experience.
I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.
> I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.
Instead of doing almost correct email summaries Jobs would have a LLM choose color of the send button with an opaque relationship with the emotional mood of the mail you write.
I am really looking forward to that idea catching up with AI. Right now AI is the thing and the products it enables are secondary.
Remember when our job was to hide the ugly techniques we had to use from end users?
> excellent show "halt and catch fire".
I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".
It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64, the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.
Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.
Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.
I never really could get into the Cameron/Joe romance, it felt like it was initially inserted to get sexy people doing sexy things onto the show and then had to be a star crossed lovers thing after character tweaks in season 2.
But when they changed the characters to be passionate stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show really found its footing for me. And they did so without throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
My only real complaint after re-watching really was it needed maybe another half season. I think the show should have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to the group as his family by the end of the show.
IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.
I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes and the Internet (or something like that), but every time they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really tried to make the series work.
That's not really what happens at all. The characters on the show never make the critical discoveries or are responsible for the major breakthroughs, they're competing in markets that they ultimately cannot win in, because while the show is fictional, it also follows real computing history.
(MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)
For example, in the first season, the characters we follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done already. They're one of many companies making an IBM clone, and they are modestly successful but not remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that everything he had done was a waste of time (from his perspective, he wanted to change the history of computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't actually inventing the future, he just thought he was. They also don't really start from being underfunded unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves in new situations based on their past experiences in ways that feel reasonable to real life.
The BBC made a docudrama, Micro Men, with Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry.
Sophie Wilson cameos when they have a fight.
IMO the first series was excellent, the 2nd took a massive downturn and stopped watching after that.
