The obvious thing to do, if gen AI proves bust, is to funnel funding and other resources into miltech.
This will further alter the personality, intent, and product of Silicon Valley; refuseniks will be winnowed, and many people may find themselves working on projects they may find disturbing.
Silicon Valley, and computing technology in general, has its origins in the US military. It would not be surprising to see the industry return to those origins as great power competition heats up.
I wish we had p(doom) conversations that included factors other than AI. We've been living in a paperclip-maximization-ocracy for at least half a century (probably longer.)
Accounts of the exact nature of this system and who is to blame for it vary with political perspective, but we all feel it. We're all shaped by it. And we can all sense its perversity.
I came here to say this -- OP seems to be reacting not to the work itself, but to the framing. It reminds me of how my friends used to jump down my throat when I said 'AI' instead of 'Machine Learning' -- they had a point; 'Artificial Intelligence', as a coinage, is tendentiously animistic (just like Jensen's 'new forms of life'.)
Yet, of course, that's exactly how we encounter LLMs! The whole _point_ of ChatGPT isn't to do a "mechanical learning" (whatever that might be,) it's to create an experience that is more reminiscent of talking to another human being. An 'intelligence', if you will, but artificial.
At some point, we will need to tease out why engineering culture is so huffy about articulating its own goals; I have this mental image of a magician standing on stage, berating his audience for ever believing that rabbits could ever be made to come out of hats, all the while collecting a tidy sum for doing just that.
Thanks Breck; I watched the video and it's appealing; I assume the downvote (now cancelled by my upvote) was the HN aversion to self-promotion, but as the OP I hereby declare this comment relevant and useful.
As I understand it, Observable Plot also seeks to be the "higher-level abstractions on top of D3" layer.
The Vega docs address Vega vs D3 (https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega-and-d3/), but I don't see them compare Vega vs Observable Plot, which would seem to be a more apples-to-apples comparison.
