Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron
XLE@piefed.social 1 day agoWe had that before AI. Where’s this industrial revolution in concrete terms: specifically without having to say “if” or “when” or pointing out anywhere past a few weeks into the future for it
deft@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
No we did not.
Computers gave us calculators and suddenly we had rockets. Then we made them smaller and went into space. They became prevalent and we got automation. They connected and we got the Internet.
All of that merged together and made something that became very good at making models of anything with strong predictive capabilities because it can now run massive computing sequences logging immense variables regular people and even advanced computers before could not. You get our ability to understand protein folding, human behavior, economics and aspects of geometry we couldn’t.
Are you expecting AI and then suddenly a bunch of change? The industrial revolution started in the mid 1700s, it wasn’t until over 100 years later did we have full on industrial style warfare and electricity use became more common in everyday use(still to this day not everywhere has electricity). The understanding of nuclear energy started at the break of the 20th century but it wasn’t until 60/70 years later that it was common.
AI as a breakthrough tech only really started 16 years ago and already it’s established itself as a fledgling key tech. I’ll bet you $500 the majority of technological advancement ahead of us will be tied to AI - it has already impacted how we diagnose people, accelerating understanding of drugs through it’s ability to understand protein folding and drug discovery. It’s given scientists the ability to expand our visual understanding of the universe and weather with it’s predictive capabilities, and it’s also threatening to advance automation to an insane level where we might have actually decent robots to perform human tasks.
Look at the combine harvester for instance. Almost 200 years old, came from the industrial revolution, took teams of animals to pull, advancements allowed it to be fueled with oil, then the introduction of computers made it manage itself, satellites allowed more precise control, now it’s reaching a point where it can even monitor the health of the field for you and require such a minor amount of human interaction compared to it’s original introduction. That’s fucking insane. We might have a means to grow food that require almost no human involvement.
You’re being intentionally obtuse over this because I think you just don’t like the tech.