202402251213 Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.¹

A self-referential adage about how 202402251224 Delays are ubiquitous. It has continued to gain popularity in programming culture in particular connection to The Mythical Man-Month and the concept of estimating how long any sufficiently complex task will take to complete.

In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter talks about the difficulty in creating a chess engine that could beat the top grandmasters. For years, the proponents of engines claimed that they would be able to win at the highest levels within the next few years. Such predictions always came to pass, then doubled or more and the goal was not achieved. Compare this to the AI bulls today. There are claims that artificial general intelligence is upon us and we can expect that breakthrough any day now. More than likely it will take a long time to ever achieve (if it's even truly possible technically or philosophically #thread)

Why is it so difficult for us to accurately predict things like this? #thread