Can you name 3 ways is positively impacted the average non tech persons life in a meaningful way? Meaningful would be more than the invention of the microwave, but not as important as a vaccine.
Help with health issues is turning into a big one.
My mother-in-law has a complicated set of medical conditions and sees half a dozen different doctors. Fable with max thinking came up with a bunch of interactions between drugs and conditions that her doctors hadn't considered. We've run its recommendations by one doctor so far and he agreed with everything.
My brother has one friend who used a frontier AI to diagnose his wife's uncommon cancer, and insisted on a test for that. It was correct and she's fine now since they caught it early. Brother has another friend whose wife had back pain after surgery; medical team didn't find what was wrong, he uploaded the scan, and the AI said "oh they left in a staple," which turned out to be correct.
I've started using it to work on a cookbook for the medically prescribed diet I'm on.
Sure it has replaced Google for a lot of people. But was that driven more by Google breaking search and actively ranking down good results and putting blocks in the way of seeing even the bad results?
Google had (have?) people using their service out of habit but built a hostile enough environment. We have this "contradiction" where non-tech folks are supposed to be difficult to move off "what they know" yet here we are where they are using ChatGPT to search and be a doctor.
- File taxes and find issues that "accredited", "certified" entities missed. In one instance, my federal refund increased by nearly $5k. At $20/mo, just the refund is two decades worth of value.
- Appeal health, home and car insurance claims successfully
- Find out details of interesting plants without forking out tens of dollars for an app that claims to do the same but fails to do so most of the time
- Summarize never ending email threads with 20 disinterested parties who would rather not be on the email but have to respond to show they are "engaged"
- Write a convincing email to my mother in law why I cannot meet her this weekend and hold her hand through the tough times she's having with her ethnic neighbor who annoys her with their "ethnic" music and "smell of fish" BBQ
- Locate the user manual for my microwave and what that rapid 3 beeps every 1s for 2 minutes that starts at 10AM since the last 2 days mean
Microwaves, or microwave ovens? Because I can name all sorts of ways that microwaves have improved communications. So many long-haul telco links, and remote radio/TV stations, have been accomplished by microwave. It's a powerful method of transmission.
Unless you're specifically meaning microwave ovens, which are of "limited utility" in a full-service kitchen. I'd have to agree there.
My previous microwave oven was so intensely powerful, that I needed to dial down the power to "7/10" so that it would not destroy my frozen meals. I could never run it at 10/10. My current appliance is very nice, and has an automatic button to run until doneness. Works every time now.
I'd argue they're the most useful kitchen appliance, except possibly for air fryers. You can cook almost anything in a microwave, usually faster and with less cleaning up than otherwise.
We're at the dot com boom stage of AI. You could say it didn't deliver because boo.com didn't make a profit or because the average person still used paper maps, but that was just because of momentum.
It's the same with AI. The technology is here now. My friends in financial advice and market research have not lost their jobs immediately, because of momentum.
I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either.
This is democratization of information in the truest sense because the AI can not only find information for you, like Google does, but even patiently explain it to you. We never had that before.
Like, a normal person is not going to open up an arXiv preprint from Google search because for approximately the entire population, it's going to be way beyond the limits of their comprehension. They won't even glance at the link, if Google even serves it up as a result.
But, with a chatbot, they could actually ask questions and get answers in a format they can understand. They may get a very rough understanding of the topic, but I would bet it's 100 times better than the same reference explained by modern "science journalism," which insists on presenting the most clickbait-y interpretation they can find.
And this is not theoretical, I've seen my high-school level kids figure out undergrad (or higher) level concepts like locality sensitive hashing with the help of ChatGPT, and I know they understood it because they could sketch out working solutions using those concepts. They didn't get the Mathematical underpinnings, but they understood the high-level behavior and that was enough.
Everybody can now understand anything if they really want to. Nobody is doing it today because they don't know it's possible. But they can, and we should encourage them to do so.
Linux (the kernel) and Git have done more in this regard, but think of FOSS in general. Without it, there wouldn't be Android. Without it, Windows NT would've won server space in the same way Windows won desktop space.
It is tools which are the commons (such as FOSS) and tools such as Wikipedia. But also open standards. LLMs cannibalize on these tools.
Furthermore, no customer wants an AI as customer bot. Especially elder people who are a bit computer illiterate can't find the real support (dark patterns). Can AI help a customer support representative? Oh, absolutely. AI can help a skilled person become better/quicker at certain tasks. But it cannot replace them, and it shouldn't either. If we do, we get all these 'fantastic' tools like *claw.
Why? Dwarf Fortress only exists because it was given away for free for decades, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and eventually leading to a fandom popular enough to bring others onboard with the project to produce a GUI and paid steam release version.
If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.
Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.
Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.
I can’t wait for the equal coal reckoning. What is it 20k direct deaths a year? 2 million early deaths? The Great Barrier Reef 100% dead after this El Niño. A deliberate cover up of the science?
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.
In the UK there are fairly strong rules against advertising junk food to kids.
Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).
Fast food and snack companies are the absolute masters of marketing to children. If the United States really cared they'd put a blanket ban on advertising to children like some jurisdictions (Quebec) have done.
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