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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"

#101

Post by tristor »

joe_mamba wrote: post #99
jerhewet wrote: post #87

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 re…

[flagged]

That is not what the GP said at all. I am definitely not a Boomer, and I fully agree with them. They are lamenting the loss of control over your own general purpose computing system, and how our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. There is nothing in their comment that praises their hard work, intelligence, or claims younger people are incapable.

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

#102

Post by joe_mamba »

tristor wrote: post #101
joe_mamba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That is not what the GP said at all. I am definitely not a Boomer, and I fully agree with them. They are lamenting the loss of control over your own general purpose computing system, and how our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. There is nothing in their comment that praises their hard work, intelligence, or claims younger people are incapable.

> our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures.

Which the people retiring soon, like the one I'm replying to, helped build with their labor, funded with their investments to get rich and enjoy their 401ks, leaving the current generations holding the bag.

Nobody's innocent here. When Zuckerberg brought out his checkbook to poach engineers to build the Spybook 9000 social network, everyone flocked there without thinking, "hey, are we fucking up the future of the world?".

When people here were flaunting Crypto as the second coming of Jesus, they weren't thinking "hey, are we maybe helping people get scammed?"

Every past generation of workers has their own guilt in to how we got here to the present situation.

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

#103

Post by mjr00 »

Insanity wrote: post #49
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.

Students score lower on standardized tests in the 2020s than those in the 1990s. So your stance feels misguided. Although I don’t think Google and Calculators are the main culprits, I do think it’s due to larger technology/internet landscape.

> Although I don’t think Google and Calculators are the main culprits, I do think it’s due to larger technology/internet landscape.

That's extremely speculative, especially given there was a major event in 2020 which massively disrupted education worldwide.

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

#104

Post by newobj »

bluegatty wrote: post #82

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 s…

all those words and not one concrete claim made. in other words, FUD. the whole point of the article.

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

#105

Post by sublinear »

jojomodding wrote: post #14

I sympathise with the author and the argument. I know the text is a rant. As such, I can understand that the proposed consequences might not make sense. Yet still, there is a fun game you can play, where you replace AI by "chess engine" and you get a text that would be fitting for a late 90s chess grandmaster but seen as totally anachronistic today: "Chess players who don't use engines will be left behind", they say.…

That is a really accurate analogy.

Deeper reasoning, longer term planning, and more efficient solutions have always separated amateurs from experts. That experience cannot be applied asynchronously or reduced to supervision. It has to be "in the loop" and there is always a lot of out-of-band information that only an experienced eye would notice and can't be trained into a model.

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

#106

Post by hmokiguess »

jerhewet wrote: post #87

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 re…

Going full circle is what we do, it's everywhere throughout human history. Actually, one could argue it's how life works. Nature has seasons to help life grow and be balanced. We're only starting to understand how this affects us in a larger scheme of things. Who knows, maybe we will wipe ourselves to dust and be discovered by the next iteration until we reach v1.0.0

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

#107

Post by ducttape12 »

jojomodding wrote: post #14

I sympathise with the author and the argument. I know the text is a rant. As such, I can understand that the proposed consequences might not make sense. Yet still, there is a fun game you can play, where you replace AI by "chess engine" and you get a text that would be fitting for a late 90s chess grandmaster but seen as totally anachronistic today: "Chess players who don't use engines will be left behind", they say.…

The problem is AI is being pushed and used as the equivalent of using a chess engine to tell you the best move during a match.

Maybe there's a way AI can be used to make developers better but it mostly just seems to be the equivalent of grand masters saying how great vibe playing is because now they can play 1000x more games every day. But don't worry, they're still steering the games.

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

#108

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

People who can only use AI will be left behind. It is easy to shut off your brain when using AI and then get overwhelmed by the amount of code it produces. Worse is though when people replace programming experience with AI. I have seen a lot of really bad AI code. I can spot and repair it. Others can not. And that is a problem. And I am not talking about purist principles. I am talking about bad unoptimized code that I can spot with just one look.

It is a tool just like syntax highlighting, code completion and refactoring tools before it. You need to know how to use them, where their usefulness ends and you should probably have an idea how to do it yourself without the tool. It is okay if you will be less efficient, but it's bad if you just can't.

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

#109

Post by dingaling »

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.

On the contrary, using AI is like outsourcing your DIY to a professional joiner.

Sure, he'll get it done twice as fast and you might notice some tricks as you look over his shoulder. But when you need a second door hung, you'll either have to start learning from scratch or call him again.

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

#110

Post by sshine »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #80
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

The better you are at architecting or even directing a junior developer, the better your output too. Dont let AI make decisions, its supposed to take your decisions and turn those into code. When AI makes decisions, well the unexpected outcome is always on you.

> Dont let AI make decisions, its supposed to take your decisions and turn those into code.

I let the AI make decisions all the time. I often approve them, and I sometimes revert them. Most of the time they’re really good decisions based on my initial intent, but followed by analysis I didn’t make but agree with.

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