Having demoable technology is much different than having reliable technology. Take the history of driverless cars. Five teams completed the second DARPA grand challenge in 2005. Google started development secretly in 2009 and announced the project in October 2010. Waymo started testing without a safety driver on public roads in 2017. So we’ve had driverless cars for a decade, sort of, but we are much more cautious about allowing them on public roads.
Unreliable technologies can be widely used. GPT-3 is a successor to autocomplete, which everyone already has on their cell phones. Search engines don’t guarantee results and neither does Google Translate, but they are widely used. Machine learning also works well for optimization, where safety is guaranteed by the design but you want to improve efficiency.
I think when people talk about a “revolution” it goes beyond the unreliable use cases, though?
Having demoable technology is much different than having reliable technology. Take the history of driverless cars. Five teams completed the second DARPA grand challenge in 2005. Google started development secretly in 2009 and announced the project in October 2010. Waymo started testing without a safety driver on public roads in 2017. So we’ve had driverless cars for a decade, sort of, but we are much more cautious about allowing them on public roads.
Unreliable technologies can be widely used. GPT-3 is a successor to autocomplete, which everyone already has on their cell phones. Search engines don’t guarantee results and neither does Google Translate, but they are widely used. Machine learning also works well for optimization, where safety is guaranteed by the design but you want to improve efficiency.
I think when people talk about a “revolution” it goes beyond the unreliable use cases, though?