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I was just thinking about this. I'm really not sure. I think technological progress is not the core issue but rather a sudden paradigm shift in how you interact with what you use on a daily basis.
For instance, there was a generation that grew up without cars and never learned to drive even after they became commonplace. Just too big a jump from previous methods of transportation. But their children who grew up with cars didn't have any issues as the technology matured and new features were added.
So the question is will there be another significant paradigm shift in our lifetime that isn't just an evolution of current interfaces and tools, but rather a sudden change in how we interact with technology?
Who knows...
There's a neat phenomenon where people born before a life changing technology will never see it as being life changing.
Anyone who grew up before the internet only sees it a some place to chat with friends and not the de facto way international business is now conducted. Anyone who grew up before planes only see them as some way to get to a holiday destination quicker and not as the way a huge amount of cargo shipping is done today.
To these people, going back in time seems simple. They could certainly live without the internet or planes or any other new fangled devices! They might, but society wouldn't be able to. I can see AI being the new thing that changes society that we all think of as being some silly little toy.
I think this is right. I've been thinking about this a bit as I watch who in my office starts using LLMs and more importantly how they are using them. The folks in their 40s or 50s have largely ignored it, I remember a gen xer sending an email around in may talking about this neat new ChatGPT her middle school kid showed her. I know one xer in my office whose straight up afraid to even try it. Those closer to gen z will use it, but in a very basic way - just asking straight questions seeking information, get frustrated when it can't handle complex questions or they get lied to, then quit. Millennials seem to be better about using it for what it's good at, generating ideas, startingn places for documents, editing/proofreading, etc. Maybe it's because millennials were in that sweet spot between the older folks who didn't grow up with tech and the younger folks who are used to apps that just work without having to think through how to make the thing do what you want. Maybe millennials are more interested in tech generally since we saw it change so rapidly in our lifetimes. Maybe it's just my small sample size of a 40ish person office.
Generative AI is definitely this. You can tell by how personally offended people got instantly. How they freaked out about what this could change, and how despite their strong feelings towards it, they don't learn to use it.
Also, it's a paradigm shift - it basically lets you grab a random high schooler and ask them to do any task at 1000x speed. Maybe it'll be great, maybe it'll be done all wrong and full of made up facts. It's a random high schooler, you're not sure what they know and you can't trust what they give you, and if you try to blame mistakes in your work on them no one is going to accept that as an excuse - but if you hand them appreciate tasks and properly check their work, you can accomplish tasks drastically faster