it’s funny to see how much the /isitAI subs have changed in the past year. It’s gone from pretty clear indicators of AI to people relying on like a tiny section of the image being the only indicator that it might possibly be AI.
But Redditors are stuck in 2024 and keep telling themselves the collapse is now
there are real reasons to be concerned about the rise of AI and the ridiculous pace of development, but one thing I can guarantee is it's not going to just go away because people on reddit really want it to
I think over reliance on AI is going to potentially be socially devastating. But short of massive legislative safeguards - it’s not going away. People like it too much and use it too muchZ
The reason people get fixated on AI is that the genuinely sound arguments for how it's fucking up society apply equally to "pre-AI" technologies they enthusiastically enjoy, like the Internet and computing in general
A lot of redditors really do vibe with the Unabomber Manifesto -- because he really was saying shit that resonates hard with the negative feelings people have about modernity that just won't go away -- but refuse to confront or admit that fact about themselves so that it can have an easy answer, "just cap technology at where it was in 1999" feels better than "reverse all civilizational development, return to monke" even though the latter is what is actually logically consistent
In 2011, everyone was convinced 3D printing would replace most factories by 2020 and technofanboys were running insisting "the economics of scale have been broken!" Now it's mostly dead and everyone moved on and not a single factory has been closed.
I don’t understand how someone so interested in tech is so eternally pessimistic any of it can ever work.
You can play this game about literally every single technology ever invented. If you look back in time and find the most extreme optimistic takes on a given technology, you can then say “oh well people said it would XYZ but it never did. FAIL”
That’s great and all, but also reductive and useless. I’m sure someone looked at the steam engine and said “we’ll have flying cars by 1930” and the fact he existed and was wrong doesn’t affect the merits of the steam engine as a technology in any way.
There will always be someone overestimating you can look back and laugh at, but there are just as many people who said 3D printing was too shaky or too fragile or too whatever to ever be more than a toy. And now it’s an industry
Yes, 3D printing is an industry. And LLMs will remain as an industry.
And the metaverse is also an industry. People still trade NFTs. Fucking Betamax still has a community of supporters.
All anybody is saying is that this shit is not nearly as "revolutionary" as the technofanboys claim it will be
Meanwhile, biotech will dominate the world and change literally every aspect of human existence. We just fucking cured pancreatic cancer for fucks sake! But because "biology bros" are not a thing (yet) and biotech never had a marketer like Steve Jobs, nobody cares and every one is focused on the shinny tech toy that's basically Clippy 2.0 .
In 2011, when tech bros were saying 3D printing would replace factories, the 3D printing industry was worth $1.7 billion.
In 2026, when you are proclaiming the market to be "dead", the 3D printing industry is worth $24 billion dollars.
Your "dead industry" has grown 17% year on year for over a decade. I don't know what to tell you here.
3D printing hasn't replaced factories. But it has been adopted en-masse by the end-user. It's the consumer and the small business, for whom the economies of scale which large businesses have do not exist.
And, I think, as we see a surge in local models and more people using AI in their day-to-day, we are seeing a similiar pattern in AI.
Much as how the New York Times still exists as a print publication, even as you link a digital article under a comment from 2000 saying the internet is a passing fad.
Of course it's worth more money today! And guess what? Newspapers are worth more today than they were in the 1970s. It's called inflation
And yes, it is still around. And it has yet to put a single factory out of business and it has yet to cause a "new industrial revolution." Heck, people are still on the metaverse. And?
LLMs will still be around, but the hype will die down and they won't be nearly as impactful as the technofanboys say it will.
If they saw the same growth as 3D printers, they'd be worth $54.9 trillion today.
Newspapers today are worth $0.2 trillion.
It's just a little bit short of your "all markets grow over time" projection there.
The metric isn't that 3D printers are "worth more". It's the rate at which the market has expanded. It expanded at a rate of 17%. It's predicted to continue expanding at a rate of 17%. The overall growth of the entire economy is about 3-5% annually.
Newspapers growing at 4.14% annually is bang in line with a rising market.
3D printing growing at 17% represents real, and massive, growth.
Imagine sitting in 1986 and saying "why haven't the newspapers shut down if this Internet isn't a fad?"
Factories have economies of scale that 3D printing can't yet match.
Where 3D printing works very well (rapid prototyping, small scale custom work), it's been adopted very strongly.
The tech isn't going away and the use cases are only expanding.
If you're asking why technology enthusiasts were overly enthusiastic about a new and unproven technology, a dictionary will help you more than any reddit post I can make. And if you're asking why the entire global manufacturing economy hasn't completely changed its most basic mechanisms of production in the past fifteen years, then I don't think that really needs addressing.
3D printing technology continues to improve. 3D printing adoptation continues to expand. The 3D printing industry continues to grow significantly faster than the market baseline rate.
3D printing (and AI) are more like the Internet than the canal system. Despite you and I having this discussion on the internet right now, print media still exists. We still have newspapers. The newspaper industry has even grown with the market. The internet hasn't replaced newspapers across the entire industry. Even if tech bros in the 1990s imagined that everyone would have a Star Trek style data screen where they could pull up the daily news on their hand-held device. Wait. Wait. Hmm.
You're right. Tech enthusasts overhype LLMs. You're right, the hype will die down. But you're fundementally wrong about the implications here. The Dot Com bubble of the late 90s bursting and the "hype" around the internet dying down does not mean the Internet is a "dead industry". It's a revolutionary industry that absolutely has pushed some print media out of business. The hype around 3D printing has not closed down the factories and put a Star Trek replicator in every home. But it's not a forgotten technology that's had no impact. It's had a massive impact and is still an area of massive, surge growth.
And LLMs are unlikely to replace judges and politicians in our lifetimes as we all live in a perfect society run by machines.
But the impact in terms of things like coding productivity, machine learning to detect disease, solving math problems is proven and expanding. AI has already fundementally improved our understanding of math. The fundemental building blocks of the universe.
When did I say it wouldn't have some impact? I didn't. Like I said, the developers I know say it somewhat streamlines coding and can do a few other things.
The difference between this and the early Internet is that companies did make money off of the Internet in the early days. Literally nobody is making any profit on LLMs and "AI." It's all built on speculation and investor money and has no path to profitablity.
They said 3D printing would replace most factories by 2020 and they said "the economics of scale have been broken." That didn't happen.
NFTs have not replaced contracts and blockxhain does not run everything including my toaster over.
We do not live in the metaverse full time.
3D printing and the metaverse are still around. They just didn't turn out to be world changing. Same with 3D printing, and it will be the same with this *AI" fad.
They said the revolution was happening back when that AI beat the best chess player on Earth. That was 30 years ago. I've seen this movie before
5
u/c3p-bro 19d ago
it’s funny to see how much the /isitAI subs have changed in the past year. It’s gone from pretty clear indicators of AI to people relying on like a tiny section of the image being the only indicator that it might possibly be AI.
But Redditors are stuck in 2024 and keep telling themselves the collapse is now