But not ubiquitous, we didn’t get one until the late 80’s. And OTOH we had internet in 1996, and were among the early adopters in my town.

Microwaves, or microwave ovens? Because I can name all sorts of ways that microwaves have improved communications. So many long-haul telco links, and remote radio/TV stations, have been accomplished by microwave. It's a powerful method of transmission.

Unless you're specifically meaning microwave ovens, which are of "limited utility" in a full-service kitchen. I'd have to agree there.

My previous microwave oven was so intensely powerful, that I needed to dial down the power to "7/10" so that it would not destroy my frozen meals. I could never run it at 10/10. My current appliance is very nice, and has an automatic button to run until doneness. Works every time now.

Well of course. That's like saying you can't make toast in the kettle, but it doesn't stop the kettle being useful

Microwaves are incredibly useful if you can do anything besides 100% power.

What's your point? What doesn't have limited utility?

This is democratization of information in the truest sense because the AI can not only find information for you, like Google does, but even patiently explain it to you. We never had that before.

Like, a normal person is not going to open up an arXiv preprint from Google search because for approximately the entire population, it's going to be way beyond the limits of their comprehension. They won't even glance at the link, if Google even serves it up as a result.

But, with a chatbot, they could actually ask questions and get answers in a format they can understand. They may get a very rough understanding of the topic, but I would bet it's 100 times better than the same reference explained by modern "science journalism," which insists on presenting the most clickbait-y interpretation they can find.

And this is not theoretical, I've seen my high-school level kids figure out undergrad (or higher) level concepts like locality sensitive hashing with the help of ChatGPT, and I know they understood it because they could sketch out working solutions using those concepts. They didn't get the Mathematical underpinnings, but they understood the high-level behavior and that was enough.

Everybody can now understand anything if they really want to. Nobody is doing it today because they don't know it's possible. But they can, and we should encourage them to do so.

Linux (the kernel) and Git have done more in this regard, but think of FOSS in general. Without it, there wouldn't be Android. Without it, Windows NT would've won server space in the same way Windows won desktop space.

It is tools which are the commons (such as FOSS) and tools such as Wikipedia. But also open standards. LLMs cannibalize on these tools.

Furthermore, no customer wants an AI as customer bot. Especially elder people who are a bit computer illiterate can't find the real support (dark patterns). Can AI help a customer support representative? Oh, absolutely. AI can help a skilled person become better/quicker at certain tasks. But it cannot replace them, and it shouldn't either. If we do, we get all these 'fantastic' tools like *claw.