This article lost all credibility with me here:

> ...this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this period...

This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of his bank account.

Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest.

It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.

Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots.

Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.

I find it extra surprising that people are advocating for transitioning to using AI while their proof of concept looks like this:

do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) && attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)

Only when looking at this through our common understanding of how societies work.

Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind of private property.

I’m not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be transforming beyond expectations.

The word you're looking for is 'dystopian'

IMO that disillusionment is rooted in identifying the myth of progress. But I tend towards Schopenhauer over Hegel

Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires.

The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.

Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices

To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency)

This is exactly correct technically and perfectly on the existing “paved path” of technology determinism.

My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the “Learning machine” which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of systems

It’s unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human feedback to SARSA.

The only remaining question is the persistent one “who benefits”

Almost nobody is working on what to do after