The thing is: what is the steady state?

We kind of knew it for the internet and we basically figured it out early (even if we knew it was going to take a long time to happen due to generational inertia - see the death of newspapers).

For LLMs it looks a lot like deindustrialization. Aka pain and suffering for a lot of people.

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com2kid 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Computers ruined entry level jobs for a lot of people. Heck Outlook and PowerPoint put a lot of people out of work. Personal secretary used to be a solid reliable job for many women. Art teams used to exist to make real life presentations on actual paper. Large companies had their own private libraries and librarians to fetch documents.

Arguably we already saw some of the socially destabilizing impacts of computers, and more and more Americans were forced into poorly paying service sector jobs.

I actually suspect that right now, if we wanted to, we could automate a large amount of societies needs if we were willing to take a hit on quality/variety. For example, what % of the food chain could be 100% automated if we really wanted to? Obviously most foods could not, but surely a few staple crops could be automated 100% to the extent of robo-semis and robots loading and unloading crops?

That will be the eventual end goal. The question is what do we do as a society then?

	▲	pjc50 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		100% is an asymptotic goal, because someone still has to do the maintenance. But grain is probably closest, along with maize and soybeans. Staple crops, huge farms, single guy in a tractor, and the monotonous driving is already being automated away too. Leaving the role of the human to arguing with John Deere over right to repair. Soft fruit is probably furthest away. That depends on huge armies of immigrant pickers.

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ankit219 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i would disagree we kind of figured it out early. Early visions for internet were about things like information superhighway (with a centralized approach). What came to pass was the opposite. Its a good thing. There are lessons here in that we are not always accurate at predicting what the future would look like. But we can always identify trends that may shape the future.

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Nevermark 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

The first web browser was designed to be completely peer to peer.

But you are right about getting it wrong. The peer to peer capabilities still exist, but a remarkable amount of what we now consider basic infrastructure is owned by very large centralized corporations. Despite long tails of hopeful or niche alternatives.

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TeMPOraL 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

That's packet switching, which is layer 3. Layer 7 is only ever getting more centralized.

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Karrot_Kream 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

This is a bit naive. Until TLS, TCP traffic on down was sent in the clear. Most traffic used to be sent in the clear. This is what makes packet filtering and DPI possible. Moreover things like DNS Zones and IP address assignment are very centralized. There are cool projects out there that aim to be more decentralized internets, but unfortunately the original Internet was just not very good at being robust.

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degamad 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It was robust against disruption, but it was not secure against attacks.

The threat model that was considered was bombs blowing up routers, but at the time, intermediaries intercepting traffic was not considered.

	▲	skydhash 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe it was because they considered securing the physical apparatus. Are memo secured? Are books secured? At the small scale of the networks at that time, few things were worth securing.

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pmontra 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, if we look at the flow of most of internet traffic we don't have highways (I'm thinking about the USA East/West North/South highway matrix).

Instead we have roads that go straight from suburbs to a few big city centers. Sometimes a new center rise, but it's still very centralized. I'd say that the prediction was correct. What they failed to foresee is that we don't connect to libraries and newspapers, we connect to Netflix, FB, Instagram etc.