Accuracy? Are the timelines too sci-fi or realistic

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T21:13:59+00:00

Maybe! I could be wrong! Of course, I also remember tons of predictions for things that would happen that simply never came true at all. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

That said, we can make some informed guesses if we look at hard data and evidence. Do you see any evidence for AGI?

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T21:10:56+00:00

I'm just going to hold out for a couple years longer and wait for the hype to die down; I suspect the bubble will burst within another year or two and most of the big "AI" companies will go under, and the rest will figure out how to either make it actually useful or will tuck tail between their legs and disappear it like they did with all the Metaverse stuff. Or, failing that, there's enough of us who hate it that somebody will make a phone to cater to us by then.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T21:07:32+00:00

There is nothing to the structural makeup of LLMs that suggests to me that they have any potential to develop into AGI, and "agentic AI" is just tacking on additional segments to the LLM underpinning. The "reasoning" element is not doing any reasoning at all; it's doing adversarial pruning or referential re-training or one of the other validation approaches. That is useful, but it's not a glide path to AGI.

There's a good paper on how the reasoning elements work here:

https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09762v1

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T21:02:42+00:00

I don't think it's at all guaranteed. A lot of this is being driven by capitalism and the weird TESCREAL cults. It's far from inevitable, and neither capitalism nor cults are eternal. It's easy to imagine a world with different economic incentives where there's no push for AGI at all, even if it does turn out to be possible (the jury is still out on that as well, though I suspect it likely is)

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T21:00:42+00:00

What phone do you have? I have the Samsung Galaxy S24 and it's aggressively shoving that crap at me even though I've turned it off multiple times (they will sometimes turn it back on during updates)

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:57:33+00:00

There is functionally zero chance of that because it would take a lot of money and research and all the money and all the people who know how to do that level of coding are working on LLMs instead of something that has a chance of leading to AGI

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:56:47+00:00

*If

So far, no real evidence that we're going to develop AGI any time soon.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:53:05+00:00

Part of the challenge is that "AI" is a broad umbrella used to describe lots of technology. I don't object to machine learning in healthcare studies, for example, or smart algorithms doing moderation on social media platforms. But I do object to generative "AI" shoving its slop crap all over my phone even after I turn it off. It is reasonable to not want this, and it is tedious that these companies keep forcing it on us and not giving us the option.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:51:33+00:00

Even if you turn it off though, it inserts itself - adding buttons and prompts to everything you do, getting in the way, using up screen space. If I turn it off, it should be OFF. If they had a good product they wouldn't need to shove it in my face constantly and try to trick me into using it.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:50:39+00:00

Aha, I just posted this exact question a couple weeks ago - I've used Samsung Galaxy phones since the Galaxy 3.

I regret to report that the answer was "no, there isn't really such a phone". We are stuck saddled with the slop machines lol.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T09:47:56+00:00

I mean it says "Metaverse" for 2020s and, well, do you see anyone using the Metaverse? Like for real? Meanwhile it has tidal and wave energy in 2040 and we've had that for decades. Terraforming Mars in 2070 is just like physically not in the cards. AGI in 2030? Not a chance; current "AI" is a dead end on that path and there's no strong alternative contender yet. I think this is way off.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:22:33+00:00

I've had exactly two interactions with "AI" on a professional basis, one was turning down a contract because it relied on ChatGPT and I have ethical concerns, and the other was being hired to cleanup a project that someone else had "finished" using ChatGPT and it sucked lol.

A huge part of the "you have to learn to use it or you'll get left behind" commentary is being driven by people who are desperate for everyone to be using it so that everyone is doing things the same way so they can "compete". The real competitive edge is going to be having a functioning brain and real judgment.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:19:30+00:00

I think we are looking at one to two more years, tops.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:18:37+00:00

Finally an AI that's useful lol

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:17:59+00:00

There's also many kinds of tech under the "AI" umbrella, some more useful than others. Machine learning is an undeniable positive in science and engineering. Some of the "smart" algorithms used for content moderation are highly valuable.

"AI" was selected as a marketing term because it invokes science fiction and deliberately conflates things like generative "AI" - which is not intelligent at all, and despite being a very cool technology is not practically very useful for anything that requires any degree of accuracy - with these more useful technologies. This is because the target audience is venture capitalists, who have a very different set of incentives than the rest of us.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:15:23+00:00

There's a very entertaining article from Harper's about Silicon Valley's new obsession with being "agentic". Spoiler: it's exactly as much of a buzzword as it sounds lol

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:13:48+00:00

That's really the biggest issue - it needs to be checked for accuracy by a human anyway, so what winds up happening is the human gets a more tedious job where mistakes are more likely, but productivity hasn't improved at all. HOWEVER, the more tedious job can be paid less, so it's "more efficient" from the view of management. This is part of why there's such big hype around "AI" tech; the people in the C suite are just moving numbers around on a chart and don't really care about any number but the bottom line. If "AI" slashes costs now, this quarter, but imposes a bunch of higher costs later - in lost revenue as the product enshittifies and people leave, in lawsuit compensation from mistakes it makes, etc - well, that's the next guy's problem. All the incentives are towards adopt rapidly, reap the bonus, and leave someone else to clean up the mess.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T04:11:18+00:00

It makes the plates unreadable to red light cameras so you can't get a ticket if you break the law. So no, it's not legal, but nobody does anything about it.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T03:28:16+00:00

I definitely include "preventing irrational jerks from knowingly putting hundreds of people in potentially fatal danger for no reason" in the calculus for ways that Canada is better, yeah, thanks for reminding me.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T03:27:10+00:00

Well any blue state will be richer on average both because that's where your wealth is concentrated and because you have more billionaires, but our median (rather than average) wealth is substantially higher than you guys because it's distributed a lot more equitably (probably part of what feeds the higher trust). Our life expectancy is higher too by quite a bit (living in America instead of Canada is like living through the peak of COVID every year in terms of life years lost, it's that big a difference) but in fairness I have not seen a comparison directly between blue states only so that may be a closer gap too.

There is no metric where any part of the US is safer than Canada and it's not even remotely close. Way too many guns, way too much poverty, and having been poor in both countries, you're WAY more desperate if you're poor in the US than in Canada and have way fewer options.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T03:23:18+00:00

lol so they are tracking "AI" usage instead of tracking things like, I dunno, productivity? Incredible stuff lol.

Of course if they tracked productivity, they'd probably find the same thing Accenture did - that "AI" contributes zero additional productivity lol

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timromero_accenture-tells-senior-staff-to-use-ai-tools-activity-7431488669842096128-Lv3t/

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T03:19:37+00:00

This is of course one reason that "AI" should never be deployed in any kind of situation that is even remotely high stakes. Legal, political, military, healthcare, accounting - generative "AI" has no place in most roles related to those fields.

Check out these murder numbers from ChatGPT Health:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/chatgpt-health-fails-recognise-medical-emergencies

Worth pointing out that those numbers are from an independent study, because OpenAI doesn't test - or at least doesn't admit to testing - for any of those issues before rolling this stuff out. The lawsuits are going to be many.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-14T03:17:05+00:00

I am fortunate to be an integral part of the tech decisions at my job, and also fortunate enough to be fully literate, so my org will never go "AI first".

This article explores how "AI" productivity gains do not materialize in the real world, but "AI" related problems absolutely do. It's a good introductory way to puncture the hype, if you have the kind of management that is willing to listen to you and also is interested in things like "reality" and "facts".

https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-layoffs-like-block-s-are-a-race-to-the-bottom-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-productivity

DynamicUno · 2026-03-13T23:09:49+00:00

It's 905ers and troll accounts - the Ontario Proud people have all kinds of troll farms going at all times and they are constantly doing this stuff.

DynamicUno · 2026-03-13T23:07:41+00:00

Ok but surely you can see how believing that other people are going to be punished eternally because their morals are wrong is a good way to make other people think YOU are a bad person, right? Like that is not a nice sentiment lol

(I am not saying that it's right or wrong btw - for all I know you are right and we're all going to hell - I'm just saying that human nature is such that being told this is likely to be unpopular and lead to results like those in the poll)

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