I think of early voice recognition

at first everyone was going to talk to their computer

and there were programs that would let you do just that!

and then it all fizzled

except it didn't. Phone trees quietly started to use voice recognition, and some devices used it, and now it is pretty commonplace.... but it seeped into place, not a giant wave.

Funny thing - lots of computers are losing their jobs to AI. I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

and new computer jobs are being created. The AI summaries of amazon product reviews are pretty good.

> I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

I really don't get this one. Between the ludicrous energy waste and answers that are confidently wrong, I don't see why anybody would prefer to get their information from am LLM.

Voice recognition is an apt example though. It has it's place, like texting my wife from the car without having to look at my phone, and it's obviously a boon to accessibility, but I wouldn't want to have it needlessly jammed into every workflow. I don't get people's willingness to place so much trust in a statistical language model that does a pretty good job of pretending to know things.

Even better example, dragon naturally speaking took us overnight from 50% accuracy to 90% and we've spent the past three decades chasing the last 10%. AI is the same