This is offshoring all over again.

Curious, what revolutionary products would you cite, that existed within 4 years of the underlying technology? I feel like within that time frame, you're looking at "AOL chatrooms" for the internet, and I'm not even sure what the killer app was for smart phones - GPS was around before that.

Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s

I think that a fairly significant amount of the "revolutionary" ideas or usecases for specific technologies will come with maybe not the most optimized of solutions as people that aren't career programmers who have ideas and can now figure them out increasingly pick up on using AI to get what they want to exist

not everything needs a unicorn product to validate it's existence. even just moving the field forward is sometimes enough to clear the air. what is clear is that we aren't going back.

> "where's the amazing product that couldn't have been done without AI?"

My phone can search my photos with text based on what's represented in the photo. That wasn't a thing for computers from 1950 through about 2012, and now it's just normal. Google Lens will tell you what a plant is, Merlin app will identify birds from birdsong.

In 2000 we had Dragon Naturally Speaking and Kurzweil VoicePad, now we have voice recognition and machine transcription that works usefully well. 'Now' being sometime after 2012.

I don't remember what we had for human language translation, but since transformers and LLMs and GP-GPU, we have Google Translate and a lot of competitors, such that usefully good translation is everywhere - in the right click menu in FireFox, for example. Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text, overlay it on the photo.

Useful programming language porting, it's gone from basically impossible or unusable, to very usable.

Text synthesis, my employer has an AI generated newsletter. It's not something I want, but it's also not something you could do at all ten years ago.

Script synthesis, it's now easy to one-shot a few lines of script or command line to do something, faster than opening the ffmpeg man pages or whatever. "that didn't work, here's the error: <>" "the codec is not supported in this mode, try --work-please" and

Image synthesis. My local daily newspaper has at least one full page AI image, that's not something you could do at all ten years ago.

Camera drones, now they can clock onto your face, fly while following you and keeping the you in shot, and respond to gestures for things like landing.

> "By now we should have seen some major new invention"

There's no law of the Universe which says this, "you should see a new invention k years after the invention of a transformer architecture". Solar electricity generation was first noticed in 1839, first commercialised in 1954, and it's only just (give or take a few years) become a significant percentage of world power generation (6% in 2022) and the cheapest form of electricity.

"AI" was considered a hundred years ago with 'Robots' and Turing Tests, wasn't usefully progressed until computers in say the 1950's with LISP and chess, the 1970s with Prolog, but had a huge shift around 2012 with GP-GPU and powerful enough video cards to crunch large amounts of data and with the internet providing large amounts of data, then again with transformer architectures and LLMs, and then with tensor flow and TPU/NPU dedicated accelerators.

Do you expect the world will look the same in 2036? 2046? That all this investment in AI datacenters will just stop and go away? That all the dedicated cores in mobile devices will fall unused? That Waze and Tesla Full Self Driving will just stop where they are even if processing power 10x's? That Amazon will stop rolling out warehouse robots because humans are better? That drones and robo-mowers, robo vacuums, Alexas and OK Google's are going to be no different? That nobody will train anything else, connect up any other inputs or outputs, try any new uses, or make use of any changing costs?

Claude Code.