Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
> even though I have faster models available I still go to Fable or GPT-5.6 90% of the time
What about all the things you don't currently use an LLM for?
If a specialized chip can run a model 100 times faster, you can suddenly use it for a lot of things at sub-second latency. You can write "make white transparent and add a red outline to x.png" instead of the corresponding imagemagick invocation and perceive little to no latency difference. You can hook it up to your browser and have it yank out all advertisements live, or tell it to highlight anything that might interest you, again, live. There's probably thousands of latent use cases nobody has thought of that would be enabled by a truly fast LLM, even a mediocre one.
I don't think an on-device model needs to change much; it's already quite general in its capabilities.
Part of the issue with "shipping" AI-generated code is, what's the value of shipping something that your prospective customers could just make for themselves? Shipping a product used to be the gold standard of value, but I'm not sure it is anymore, the zeitgeist just yet has to catch up.
I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'm using it to make a web playground in which I can test the board game I'm designing, instead of asking people to pay for, and install Tabletop Simulator. I'm satisfied. I can tell the code sucks without even looking at it. But I wouldn't have had the time to do this myself, the token cost isn't prohibitive, and it works fine.
Maybe, maybe not. The point is that you can't simply will energy into existence. Its availability, including the ease of exploitation, is a physical given. Which is true of resources in general. Arbitrarily advanced technology can't simply make exploitation arbitrarily easy, so for example there can always be situations where the very best of all possible technologies will be less productive than setting fire to petrol would have been, if there had been any. It's complicated. It's not just what we do, it's not just what we have, it's both.
Probably the best test of how the future might trend long term is to see how well we can extract value from all the stuff and waste we are currently producing, because these will inevitably become the primary resources from which we have to build everything new. Unfortunately that shift is likely to happen extremely quickly and catastrophically, because typically you only start processing bad materials once you're done with the good.
> I'm assuming also, anything like a paper with data, can also be questioned in the same way. Don't object, I've seen that done.
Unless you've seen me do it, I don't see why I can't object. What a strange thing to say.
Look. You've supported your argument with vibes and anecdotes, so I'm offering contradicting vibes and anecdotes of my own. All that means is that it's not as obvious as you thought, and it is worth digging deeper (or not, it's not that important). A paper with data would certainly make a stronger argument. And of course it can be questioned, but it cannot be questioned in the same way. That you've "seen it done" is irrelevant.
> I didn't mean to include science fiction authors, or extreme futurists.
Science fiction authors are quite influential, and I don't think they were the only ones either. I expect that plenty of actual scientists had similar views. It wasn't extreme.
> In the 90's. I remember people talking about voice recognition will take 50 years.
Sure. Who? How many people said that? How many people said the opposite? If we're doing anecdotes, I remember that circa 2010 it was a fairly normal belief that fully self-driving cars would be widespread by 2020. I mean, I thought they would.
Point is, many people say many different things, there's never been any widespread agreement about what the future holds. They underestimate, they overestimate, but mostly reality moves sideways in directions nobody thought of and which are somehow simultaneously way more impressive and way less impressive than our expectations.
> We have advanced tremendously over the past 200 years
Would most of that have happened if we hadn't found oil, though?
It's difficult to precisely identify how much of progress is owed to intelligence, and how much is simply energy availability. Energy is intrinsically transformative -- the dumbest of organisms can take over the world in a blitz if they can process available energy better than the others, whereas the smartest of entities is going to be ineffective without fuel. Intelligence can, of course, unlock the capability to exploit new energy sources, but there's still an intrinsic physical distribution of it that's outside of anyone's control.
> Literally, things everyone said would take 30 or 100 years, happen within months.
"Everyone"? Plenty of people in the 50s said we'd have sentient humanoid robots before the year 2000. And flying cars. Sure, many people underestimate the rate of change. But techno-optimists have consistently overestimated it, and they still do.
I don't think there's good evidence that it directly jumps to truth. The aim of betting on a prediction market is to earn money. This incentivizes you to bet on whatever you believe is the most profitable, which is disproportionately going to be whatever you have insider information about, whatever you can influence the outcome of, and whatever you can most effectively fool other people into taking the wrong side of.
> unless you control the stack down to the hardware, it's basically a one way ticket to eternal slavery
Only if mind uploads are economically viable, which I doubt they ever will be. Organic brains are very efficient machines and it is far from clear that whole brain emulation could reproduce someone's intellect and consciousness within a smaller energy budget, or even accelerate it. The brain's behavior is so precisely adapted to its wetware that the emulation would have to reproduce many physical processes that are ultimately irrelevant to general cognition in order to not break the delicate equilibrium of the thing. The overhead would be gigantic.
Better just train from first principles, focusing on capabilities and skipping consciousness altogether. We can already see where this is going: LLMs in their current state would obsolete mmacevedo on many tasks. More likely than not, when it is possible to emulate brains, they will be terribly expensive, run like crap, and the only people interested in running them will be whoever had their own brains scanned.
> Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit.
I do tend to agree with you on that, but with lesser confidence. It doesn't necessarily matter whether they outperform us at "what we do best" if they perform well at doing things that we didn't evolve to deal with. For example, we drove many animal species to extinction, not because we were better than them at anything they were good at, but because we were a novel threat outside their adaptive range. AI could very well do to us what we did to these animals, by acting aggressively enough in a direction that challenges our capacity for adaptation. Basically we have to both perform in our niche, and maintain the relevance of the niche itself in the face of whatever completely unforeseen BS these new technologies may bring about.
I suppose. I think it depends on your tooling somewhat. I mean, looking at the feature article, Bonsai lets you define TUI elements with an HTML-inspired syntax -- so if you're using that, it's a similar difficulty as writing a web interface, minus starting a server, Electron, or styling stuff yourself. You can just stay in the terminal. That's nice! But if you don't have such facilities and you want something more elaborate than just sequentially printing information, TUIs can be a bit rough.
> and then there's just TUIs, which look retrocool and run blazing fast, and are really easy to write
I mean, I don't even think that's true. Many TUIs are bloated, dogshit slow, and it's not trivial to write complex TUIs without glitches or flickering. The more people start making TUIs because it's the current fad, the worse they will get.
The point is more that you can well imagine a future where AI is both better and cheaper than humans at basically all types of work, leading to a situation where we would be entirely unable to fight back in the eventuality that machine owners, or the machines themselves, were to repurpose the resources used for our sustenance to other ends. And this would still fit in the universe-old pattern you've observed.
To put it bluntly, if the economic value of human labour drops to zero, or below the value of human sustenance, it is plausible that the consequence of that, from the cold perspective of cosmic logic, would be the extinction of humans. That's not to say there isn't any way to keep the genie in the bottle and create a utopia for ourselves (I very much doubt it), but that would be against the grain of nature. Call me a pessimist, but if we ever get outperformed in our own niche, our days are numbered.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
People who use AI set the bar themselves when they claim they generate "very high quality work using Claude". Humans more rarely make such claims about the code they write themselves, but when they do, I expect they face similar scrutiny.
AI code is competent, but it's not great or high quality unless you have a good enough eye for quality to steer it with an iron hand. But if you do, you know the quality comes from proper guidance, so you still wouldn't say AI code is great. If you do say exactly that, it comes across as having low standards (which is fine if you own it) and people are going to jump on that just to bring you down a peg.