by ben_w | 2025-10-18 21:03:27+00:00
> How is taking your phone out of your pocket, logging in, and tapping it on a terminal significantly different from pulling a credit card or cash from your pocket and tapping the terminal or handing it to the checker?

Biometric ID to make the payment. I don't so much "log in" as "touch the fingerprint scanner built into the button that switches the screen on". Though if I cared to wear it, I do also have an Apple Watch and would therefore not even need to take anything out of my pocket.

> You're young, I guess. We had GPS in cars well before iPhone. GPS navigation in cars was taking off mid-90s to mid-2000s. I had a Garmin in 2002.

Just about to turn 42. I saw GPS in use only a little later than that, 2005 I think. But:

1) dedicated GPS was never in everyone's pocket until smartphones became normalised; and even then, location precision was mediocre until assisted GPS got phased in (IIRC the first consumer phone with A-GPS was about a year before the iPhone?)

2) the maps were incredibly bad; my experience in 2005 included it thinking we were doing 70 miles an hour through a field because the main road we were on was newer than the device's map.

3) Phone map apps also include traffic alerts, public transport info including live updates for delays, altitude data (useful for cyclists), ratings and hours for seemingly most of the cafes/restaurants/other attractions, and simply has a lot more detail because it can afford to (e.g. many of the public toilets).

> I was doing that on my laptop and desktop before iPhone. Heck, I was doing free video conferencing with European friends in 1995.

Critical point: "with anyone I want". Almost every independently functioning person in Europe, has a smartphone, and can be contacted without waiting for them to sit down at a desk terminal connected to a fixed line internet connection that was currently switched on.

Back in 1995, most people didn't have the internet at all, so no possibility at all to call them over the internet; those who did have it were either academics (yay JANET), had a relatively expensive wired ISDN line, or were on dialup (charged by the minute and had just about enough bandwidth for 3fps greyscale at 160x120 or so if the compression was what I think it was), and while mobile phones did exist back then, they were (1) unaffordable unless you were a yuppie, (2) didn't have cameras, (3) even worse bandwidth than dialup because 2G.

> This is an improvement over pocket electronic translators I was using in Japan in the early 2000s, but really the improvements are mostly in fidelity and usability, not in function.

I count "point camera at poster, see poster modified with translations overlaid over all text" as very much a change of function.

I mean, I don't need to translate Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic, but sometimes they come up in films and I get curious, but I can't type any of those alphabets in the first place so the only way to translate it is with something like Google Translate (and its predecessor Word Lens) that does it all as a video stream.

> focusing on when these tasks became easy and in everyone's hands, rather than when the tasks actually became possible and were in reasonably widespread use.

For much of this, that's the point. As the quote goes, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed". I assumed it would be clear video calls can only be had with other people that also have video call equipment.

Or forward looking, look at how there are cars with no-steering-wheel-needed (even if Waymo has not actually removed them) full-self-drive, but they're geofenced. It's there, it's not everywhere.

With AI and human labour? Well, that's a two-part thing, the hardware and the software.

Hardware? I can buy a humanoid robot right now — it would be a bit silly, but I could, e.g.: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009127396247.html

Software? The software running these robots can (just about) fold laundry, or tidy up litter and dishes — you know, all the things that people keep sarcastically listing to dismiss AI, saying "wake me up when they can XYZ": https://www.youtube.com/@figureai/videos

It's just… these robots are expensive, kinda slow, and the software gives me the same vibes I got from AI Dungeon (I think I saw it shortly after they changed away from GPT-2?), so I ask the same question of those today as I asked myself of a 3D printer in 2015, of an iPhone in 2010, of a multi-language electronic travel dictionary in 2009, of a dedicated GPS unit in 2005, of a laptop in 2002: can I really justify spending that much money on this thing? And my answer is the same: no.

I can't run the fanciest AI models on any of my devices, they won't fit, I'd have to buy a much beefier machine. There's a whole bunch of things that the SOTA AI models themselves can't do yet, but which can be done by tools that AI do know how to use, but I can't run all of those tools either. Any tool that gets invented in the next 20 years (or indeed ever), if it's documented at all in any language current LLMs can follow, those LLMs will be able to use them.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not holding my breath or saying this will be soon. I've opined before that the minimum gap between "a level-5 self driving car" and "a humanoid robot that can get into any old car and drive it equally well" is 5-10 years just because of the smaller form factor having less room for compute and battery. Also, it seems obvious that "all human labour" is a harder problem than "can drive". If (if!) it is necessary to have humanoid robots in order to render all human labor obsolete, then I would be surprised if it takes any less than 15 years from today, but could be more — easily more, and by an arbitrarily large degree. I don't think humanoid robots are necessary for this, which reduces my lower bound, but at the same time it is just a lower bound.