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Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#42Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever? So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
> housing and food for everyone
This obviously won't happen, because we could do it now, could have done it already, long before AI.
Let me know when AI solves greed and cruelty.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#43Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty - witness video games. The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist... Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, a…
I didn’t know that theory but makes sense.
When I was little, I was surprised to find that using a Game Genie made a lot of Nintendo games instantly become boring.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#44Your brain, your values. Only you can know why you ascribe less value to things that AI readily produces, but it is fundamentally a choice you get to make.
In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.
You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#45Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result. Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became re…
> there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition. E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc. It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any o…
Yes, although the folks that said "this is the worst it will ever be" have some evidence in their court. The best models now are much better than the best models a year ago.
Some big gnarly problems remain (e.g. continual learning), but I think the fact of AI existing and being better than humans at cognition no longer seems like something out in the far future.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#46Programming was the thing that clicked for me most out of anything I've done in my life. That's not to say I was an exceptional programmer, probably a bit above average among professionals but not by much. However for some reason I am absolutely having the time of my life using AI tools to build all kinds of fun and useful (to me) things.
I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#47[dead]
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't immediately get the reference. He is the Korean Go player who lost to AlphaGo in 2016.
Why not Kasparov when he lost to Deep Blue though?
Why not Goliath when he lost to David's new-fangled technology?
Wikipedia[1] says Deep Blue had 30x 120Mhz CPUs and 480 custom VLSI chess chips, and could do 11 GFLOPS. HN[2] says that's roughly an iPhone 5s.
Wikipedia[2] says 11 GFLOPS of compute power cost about half a billion inflation-adjusted dollars in the mid 1980s when the Deep Blue project was started; cost about half a million in 1996 when it was playing Kasparov; costs about 12 cents today. (Of course it's daft to compare custom chess chips and CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers and mobile SoCs, but it'll do).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626731
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_...
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#49First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional. Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to…
> If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing
I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#50I don’t think it has anything to do with AI.
My thoughts:
1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest
2. Not special any more. I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I was doing something special. That might be egotistical but whatever. I felt like I didn’t have as much to say
Similarly I made games for decades. Then Unity and Unreal made it trivial. New games are posted hourly on itch.io and 1000 other sites. I no longer felt special making a game
If anything I think AI might contribute here. It used to feel special to code. Now, anyone can do it. Yes they are not perfect. But I’ve met non coders making really impressive apps. and, it will only get better at it.
That said, LLMs have made me pick up and complete 6 projects in the last 6 months. They removed the tedium and frustration of dealing with bad docs, version breaks, etc and let me build the things I wanted to build without getting stuck in the weeds
all of this is the long way of saying, whatever issue you’re having with motivation it’s got nothing to do with AI. It’s something else and you’re just using AI as an excuse because it’s the new thing