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The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom.

If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.

It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.

Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.

The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.

Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

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Industrial revolution was pretty much disaster for average workers. It took a lot of literal fights till things got better.
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Here's one: AI democratizes the ability to produce software, which has mostly been an arcane craft wielded by a priestly class. Now anyone, if they know what they want and it isn't too complex, can talk to AI and get working (if not also janky) software in a very short amount of time. Hopefully this breaks the grip that platforms/large corporations have on personal software and the internet.
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I would counter that:

a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use,

b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of people actually use (Android and iOS) is somewhere between hard and impossible, and

c) large corporations have a de facto grip on AI as well, local models require you to have the knowhow and beefy hardware to run them, and they’re not magic software machines like Claude.

All in all, it seems rathet optimistic that AIs could do much if anything to help consumers against corporations. But I concede that it is a viewpoint that’s at least less selfish than most.

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The funny thing is most of the evangelists aren’t really in the in group and will be just as exposed to the results as the rest of us.
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It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct.

The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.

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But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
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It really isn't. I'm not talking PhD grade R&D, I'm talking about everyday queries that take a long time manually and are easily automated with AI.

Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.

And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.

It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.

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