(Roughly) Daily

Anil Dash, with a grounded view of artificial intelligence…

Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years now, we’re in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.

Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren’t the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.

And what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up:

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

What’s amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a “normal technology“, as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The Majority AI View,” from @anildash.com.

Pair with: “Artificial Intelligences, So Far,” from @kevinkelly.bsky.social.

For an explanation of (some of) the dangers of over-hyping, see: “America’s future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints,” from @noahpinion.blog.web.brid.gy.

And for a peek at what lies behind each GenAI query: “Cartography of generative AI,” from @tallerestampa.bsky.social via @flowingdata.com.

While the arguments above are practical, note that a plethora of tech experts have weighed in with a a note of existential caution: “Statement on Superintelligence.”

Further to which (and finally), a piece from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, projecting the economic impact of AI. It suggests that AI could provide a modest but meaningful boost to GDP over the next 25 years… if The Fed’s “Goldilocks Scenario” (in which, per Dash’s and Kelly’s comments, AI makes consistent incremental contributions to “keep living standards improving at their historical rate”) plays out. You’ll note that they also considered two other scenarios: a “benign singularity” scenario in which “AI eventually surpasses human intelligence, leading to rapid and unpredictable changes to the economy and society” and an “extinction singularity” in which “machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence at some finite point in the near future, the machines become malevolent, and this eventually leads to human extinction.”

Interesting times in which we live…

* Edsger W. Dijkstra

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As we parse pumped prognostication, we might recall that it was on this date in 4004 BCE that the Universe was created… as per calculations by Archbishop James Ussher in the mid-17th century. Ussher, the head of the Anglican Church of Ireland at the time, attempted to calculate the dates of many important events described in the Old Testament. His calculations, which he published in 1650, were not that far off from many other estimates made at the time. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that the world was created in 4000 BC.

When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial [see here], he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles.  (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.)  The King James Version of the Bible introduced into evidence by the prosecution in Dayton contained Ussher’s famous chronology, and Bryan more than once would be forced to resort to the bishop’s dates as he tried to respond to Darrow’s questions.

– “Bishop James Ussher Sets the Date for Creation”

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