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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#81

Post by dylan604 »

virissimo wrote: post #37
saadn92 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also used to say that Google or calculators will make you dumber. Neither happened. Won't happen with this either.

People are worse at mental arithmetic than they were in the recent past, so it's not clear that they aren't "dumber" in the sense people meant at the time.

Well, with anything, practice is key. When I was in school, I was in a math competition where you had to do everything in your head. There was no scratch paper, you could not modify your answer once written, and erasing was obviously not allowed either. I wasn't the greatest at it, but I didn't suck at it either. That was decades ago, and I no longer do math in my head that way. What I used to do in seconds for a result now takes a couple of seconds to think about what needs to be done and then the time to come up with the result.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#82

Post by bluegatty »

People not using AI will 100% get left behind as sure as those refusing to 'cars' or 'computers'.

There is absolutely not doubt; and it will be impossible to avoid as using 'plastic' or 'electricity'.

The narrow challenges of 'AI aided development' or 'AI aided creative work' are legitimate - that part is real and fair, but it'd be an over-statement to contemplate 'not using it'.

The cyclists who keep their muscles strong the 'hard way' ... will win the delivery war vs. cars!?

The carpenter who hammers every nail and saws every plank by hand 'the hard way' ... will win over the guys using power saws and nail guns!?

No - AI is changing the landscape.

What is 'hard and easy' are changing.

We won't need some skills, we will need others.

It maybe harder to maintain some critical skills, but the upside is obvious.

What is fundamentally missing from this treatise is that 'there is always a hard way'.

Personally - I have never been more 'cognitively overloaded' than ever. The AI 'amplifies' the depth of complexity one can reach, it's just at 1/2 a layer of abstraction above the code.

Driving a 'race car' at the highest speeds - is as challenging - and perhaps more so - than riding a horse.

The 'instinct to push back' is fair and there are innumerable legit criticisms ...

... but AI is just a new part of the stack and it will be as horizontally applied as 'software or the transistor' - it's not reasonable to think one could or should avoid it entirely.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#83

Post by mlinhares »

spamizbad wrote: post #33

The statement is absurd because the skill curve for AI tooling is so small you can can mess around for a day or two and get "caught up" with the zeitgeist. And what you need to know to get started is actually far less these days than it was 1.5 years ago thanks to all the product refinement that took place in the space. The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI exp…

You're discounting the "being able to write properly and put ideas into inteligible text" skill piece here.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#85

Post by hmokiguess »

This energy would be better directed anywhere else.

The author chose to take offense by connecting with a false dichotomy presented vaguely in a way that serves no purpose other than dividing and poorly labeling everyone in an area where much nuance applies.

I think this is perhaps a side effect of consuming too much content and feeling overwhelmed with it.

Engaging with stuff like this only amplifies its effects, how about do anything else instead? Maybe learn something new, like how to channel your anger.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#86

Post by elevatortrim »

sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

Just learn, sure. But the difference between my efficiency of using it on my day 2 and month 6 is significant. Yet I feel I am barely scratching the surface of it.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#87

Post by jerhewet »

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months.

I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it.

IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place.

I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#88

Post by vehemenz »

stevenou wrote: post #45

I think not using AI is a manifestation of one's inability or unwillingness to LEARN. To your point, if you can't learn, you will fall behind.

Yes, but it goes both ways. Using AI can be a great way to be productive while purposefully NOT learning how the sausage is made—say, boilerplate code in some devops system that you don't care about—allowing your attention to be focused on the part of the stack you actually care about.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#89

Post by keithnz »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #47
beastman82 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> I thought people here got excited about technology. I am passionately excited about technology that serves people , but the current hype around AI is not that. LLMs are, fundamentally, a super cool development. That we can now generate large regions of text that are statistically likely to be perceived as accurate is phenomenally neat. But that's all they are: statistical text prediction engines. They do not think…

I find the people who go "its just statistical" "its just picking the next word" have probably not really understood what the actual tool can do. Ultimately its arguable whether humans are just statistical also, our brains are pattern matching machines. It's just not sensible to boil it down complex behavior to a fundamental building block. It's not hype (though there is hype), vast amounts of people are getting real value out of it. I've been coding 40+ years, it's super obvious to me the utility of AI tools.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#90

Post by Tade0 »

Friendly reminder that we're still in the hype phase, even if it's the late stages.

To me the idea that a GPU which costs as much as a car must read its entire VRAM just to output a word sounds incredibly wasteful. I'm exaggerating here, but it is literally reading gigabytes of data and processing it to produce relatively little information.

Some data is truly worth the effort, but the majority won't be able to afford this long term - especially when those who capture the market increase prices.

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