Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?

I'm not that old, but literally no engineer I work with is "overwhelming pro-AI". Befitting engineers, they understand that AI is a tool and while it has its uses, it also has its limits. The enthusiasm that exists stems from AI solving actual hard engineering problems in front of our faces, but everyone using it has also encountered AI doing something very stupid as well.

Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.

I first started with a TI/994a and I like AI. Programming is not my job, and never has been. Is that all you're asking?

90s highschool hobby programmer here. I see LLMs as what it is. Not a bit more, not a bit less.

90's high school hobby programmer. I'd rather not use AI for programming if given the chance. For everything else I am pro AI.

Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64.

The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.

Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.

From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.

We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.

Please, go back and read more science fiction.