I think a lot of it is because the majority of improvements are not seen by those who already comparatively have so much. AIDs used to be a death sentence, and now it's a manageable disease, and there is a lot of work going on to vaccinate against it. These are massive things that I think a lot of people ignore. It's always easier to see when things are on fire rather than to celebrate the victories along the way.

In part, sure. From drug discovery to crop yields to education, compute and AI have material benefits. It's kind of shocking that anyone could doubt this.

Evidence:

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09809

* https://phys.org/news/2016-12-mobile-money-access-percent-ke...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3893351

This being HN, I hasten to add they also have massive downsides, we're all doomed, nobody programs the right way anymore, those poor people just think compute & AI are improving their lives, etc, etc.

Absolutely computer driven. It's hard to say the impact of AI, let's give it the same 25 years of computer advancements.

AI in the sense of LLMs is too new to really make an impact yet. But it is compute driven. Modern science and engineering would be impossible as we do it now without high-end compute.

That's not quite the case. Effort and focus by amazing groups, governments and individuals are the reasons for improvements, not just that producing more or costs being driven downwards.

Innovation with AI is happening as well, but it obviously will need more time. It's already being used to diagnose tumors and disease earlier in the process, which will improve outcomes for patients, but obviously it's going to take time to see the results of those efforts.

I think of AI (especially self hosted) as the most helpful computer assistant that can do things I otherwise wouldn't dedicate time to do. I have a massive media library that is a mess of naming conventions and want to clean it up. Writing specific scripts and processes for doing that is possible, but I don't want to invest the time. Or I can ask the local Qwen model to go through and do it for me with a single prompt, "Please rename these files in each folder following this specific format, and when needed access this local service to look up the additional information needed" and then extend that to when I dump new media in, it's automatically organized and renamed. Works pretty darn well and I spent a whopping 5 minutes getting it going, rather than the hours of writing scripts and doing it by hand.

You're right, probably nothing to do with moving all manufacturing out of the country or Reagan's union busting.

Why in the world are you choosing to live that way?

I'm writing the best music of my life, realizing games and art projects I never had time for, and writing higher quality software in addition to dramatically more of it. Who has time for pablum?

How exactly are you using these tools that you have that experience?

You can do both. I still find time to read a couple books a month.

You have agency and can choose your own adventures. If you don't like something, don't do it.

Your legs broke? Go do that

Who is stopping you?