Herons steam "engine" had no power whatsoever and was not scalable. And even if it would have been scalable, they had had no fuel to drive it.

Imagine industrial revolution Roman Empire, thank fuck they didn't connect the dots.

This.

There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it's really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn't be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn't fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there's hardly a point).

So when looking at the technology in an early state, it's really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.

The problem isn't the "AI". It is people praising its babbling as the solution for everything.

I'm not impressed by today's AI and I also fully understand that the tech is going to completely upend society and will eventually be a part of our picture of utopia, or our picture of actual hell on Earth.

The people who are screaming it's wild wonders and benefits are at least as closed-minded as the people who think we're going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The actual direction this tech moves is going to be far more like the discovery of radio, in that at the time of it's discovery and early implementation, the people then had no idea the implications down the road and we're at the same point. Except the big difference and why this is contentious is that radio was far less dangerous to society broadly.

Radio was a fundamental force that always existed around us, we learned to use it the way our ancestors used rivers and waters to move goods and people. AI is completely human-made and doesn't exist without human engineering, so it's not neutral, it's a tool shaped by man to do whatever a man wants with it.

Funnily enough, Faraday seemingly also understood that the Electric Field only possesses a potential in the absence of changing magnetic fields. Because only in the absence of changing magnetic fields, the rotation of the Electric Field is zero, and only then it has a potential.

Here's a little known fact that is not true, which will bring some nuance to the previous anecdote, Benjamin Franklin ate babies.