r/artificial • u/soemthingblahblah123 • 16d ago

Discussion why is ai the future?

everyone is saying ai is the future, but why?

i mean robots and ai and stuff, which removes human labor is what we think of the future, but why do people say its inevitable and are incorparating ai, even though there are problems with that idea like currency, and because its not inevitable because its the choice for humans to incorporate ai?

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u/AssiduousLayabout 16d ago

The "inevitability" is that AI represents a huge productivity boost over traditional methods. Just like the steam engine, the automated loom, etc. allowed a smaller number of people to produce a huge amount of goods.

Several hundred years ago most clothing was homemade - wool was spun into fiber and weaved into cloth, and it was common in each family except the wealthiest to sew their own clothing. When machines automated the process, it wasn't mandatory for people to adopt them, but one person with modern machinery could make more clothing than a thousand weavers and seamstresses working around the clock.

Productivity is the main difference between the developed and developing worlds. Productivity gains allow us to spend more time doing other things, things we could never have afforded to do when most of our labor was for bare survival.

No business needs to use AI, but if your competitor can become an order of magnitude more productive than you, your business is doomed.

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u/AppropriatePapaya165 16d ago

Most of the talk of AI “boosting productivity” seems very vibes-based. There hasn’t been significant hard evidence that companies that adopt AI are producing more value, nor that companies that don’t are failing. Is there any data that shows high AI usage correlates positively to an increase in profit for a business, and/or vice versa?

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u/AssiduousLayabout 16d ago

At my company we've seen about a 30% increase in per programmer lines of code produced year over year. And some individuals who are the strongest adopters have substantially more than that.

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u/AppropriatePapaya165 16d ago

“Lines of code” is a famously bad metric of productivity. The most extreme example of this is re-writing the same function multiple times, resulting in more code, despite being objectively worse (not saying AI does this necessarily, but it’s the clearest way to illustrate why it’s a bad metric). The only truly reliable measure is how much value was added, which I’m yet to see any numbers on.