• MudMan
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    31 year ago

    I guarantee your Roomba will not walk around in a little maid uniform with a feather duster while balancing on a single wheel and making snarky comments in 40 years. I’ll bet any amount of money on that. Also no bubble flying cars or Rube Goldberg machines to wash your teeth. I don’t even know what point you’re trying to make at this point.

    Transfer speed records are not what I meant. Admittedly I should have thrown the word storage in there, I thought I had. The idea is that while online infrastructure was exploding it outpaced the needs for storage and transmission, so we went through a very fast rise in specs. Google was out there giving people free storage left and right because their capacity was growing faster than the needs of users. Now every cloud service is monetized, including Gmail’s storage, because storage growth no longer outpaces storage demand. ISPs tapped out by the time Netflix was chugging a quarter of the bandwidth with 4K video and Youtube has been throttling resolution since the pandemic. Turns out, Google won’t be adding zeros to your available free storage forever.

    As for AI, again, my entire point is that it’s not easy to know when it will flatten out growth. I’d argue it already has, at least in terms of consumer access. We keep getting incrementally better image generation, but a future where every image is created by a computer and every search is done via a chatbot interface does not seem to be materializing the way early knee-jerk reactions suggested.

    Which is not to say that ML applications won’t be ubiquitous. There are tons of legit uses where the changes will be groundbreaking. But it being on a straight line that takes you to the holodeck? That line may bend down a lot sooner than that.