What a nonsensical argument. Improved locomotion was an obvious result of steam engines. What followed from that could be reasonably predicted.
With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before. Messaging can be controlled. Given that the main drivers of this technology (zuck, nadella, altman, and others) have chosen to make befellows of autocrats what follows is surely not a surprise.
The water from mines was then put into canals, which floated canal boats loaded with coal from the mines into towns. This cheap energy allowed the populations of towns to grow, and soon later powered factories in those towns.
The trains thing did come a bit later, but the steam engines were already causing a revolution.
You're confused and not even contradicting what I said. Read it again.
Steam engines (which rocked a bar, not rotated a shaft) were put to use draining water out of coal mines. They were powered by that same coal, and the water they pumped out was put right into the canals (where else would you put it?). This made coal cheaper, which in turn allowed more people to move from the country to the cities because cities were no longer reliant on firewood. Growing urban populations was demanded and supported by growing industry in those cities.
My whole point is that all of these factors complimented each other, they created a feedback loop that was the industrial revolution. Trains came later, after the industrial revolution was already well underway. That's what I said already.
Perhaps I misread. I took your comment to imply that the dewatering pumps were used to fill the canals, thus providing transportation infrastructure.
My original comment was in response to the statement that improved locomotion was an obvious consequence of the steam engine.
I contend that is was not obvious. The first walking beam engines were more like buildings, built in place (largely of masonry) and not portable at all.
The steam engine certainly revolutionized transportation, however I doubt that Newcomen or even Watt looked at their work and thought "this is going to change shipping forever".
Like I said, it took a generation to get to revolving shaft, and then another to get to revolution.
Today is probably like that with regard to AI. The pace of change is much faster now, but we still have no idea what the world will be like after this tech matures.
Even legal advice, to the extent that lawyers have to be reminded to pay more attention to the results to make sure it's not made something up. It can and does give medical diagnosis, but I have yet to see a news story where a doctor had to be reminded of the same.
Now, I don't claim that any given actor in this space is "nice" or "moral". Even saying the right words don't make it so, as evidenced by e.g. Musk signing the Pause AI letter while building his data centres and developing his humanoid robots.
People say Altman gives them bad vibes? Well, they said that about Musk and I didn't see it until way too late, so now I believe them about Altman.
But the tech is way broader than just propaganda. It's also propaganda.
I'm saying the category of things LLMs do is *significantly broader* than misinformation, and not *limited to* misinformation.
Even within the domain of "how can this go horribly wrong?", even limited to assistance rather than full automation, and even while constrained to the truth, there's a lot of business value (and in at least some of those cases, a lot of potential harm) simply due to their capacity to automate tasks up to the level of a student or a graduate.
But for businesses? The only reason that the opportunity isn't already "net cost (pay + insurance + employer-paid taxes) of every junior desk job on the planet" is that they're competing with each other and the free models are kinda OK, so the price they can charge is already racing to no profit.
With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before. Messaging can be controlled. Given that the main drivers of this technology (zuck, nadella, altman, and others) have chosen to make befellows of autocrats what follows is surely not a surprise.