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

migrainebrain.bearblog.dev

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

#131

Post by vehemenz »

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…

> But that's all they are: statistical text prediction engines. They do not think or reason; they generate next tokens based on prior context[1]. Unfortunately, because they predict really convincing text, a lot of people are willing to believe them to be more capable than they are. As a consequence, the companies developing these technologies have chosen to lean into rhetoric that exacerbates these beliefs because it means more money for them. The people running these companies fundamentally do not care about the human experience when they could instead care about profits[2].

The reductionist, mechanical explanation of what AIs do is not the full picture, and it almost belies first-hand experience with frontier models. AIs know more and can reason better than most humans in increasingly many contexts.

Yes, this means they produce "convincing text." But there's more than one way LLM output can be convincing. The easiest way isn't with rhetorical tricks or sycophancy—it's arguing compellingly, solving difficult problems, and producing good code. The frontier models have all improved dramatically in these respects over the past 1.5 years.

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

#132

Post by dudisubekti »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #76
dudisubekti wrote: post #7

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy. You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal. Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

Once you write something and publish it, its just out there, it doesn't really get healthy or unhealthy. I do not think all writing is meant to be, or needs to be, the representation of someone's mind and its health. We write to have the opinion exist outside of ourselves. Why would we even read things if what we read didn't have strong beliefs or opinions? It sounds so boring!

Well I'm not saying that the blog writer shouldn't have written the article.

I've read the article and to me it reads like a very angry rant, which is why I commented with something akin to "bro calm down"

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

#133

Post by jckahn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #70
jckahn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if all the good jobs are only in hell?

a good job is one that brings you joy and improves your creativitiy, they by definition can't be in hell. if you mean well paying, that's a different thing entirely, ditch the fancy car and adjust your lifestyle

I have a fancy car? News to me. I'm just trying to pay my bills and live a sensible and reasonably comfortable life. These days that requires a lot of money.

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

#134

Post by bluegatty »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #94
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…

this is definitely not true. with AI agents, you're obtaining a mildly lossy perspective of the code itself. whereas if you wrote it by hand, you'd have a more concrete understanding. This is not too different from an engineering manager directing junior developers. The stereotype of the engineering manager who forgot to write a line of code is not wrong.

That's a fair point, but you're i) radically underrepresenting the broader impact of AI ii) under estimating the power it will have over the short horizon, and iii) missing the fact that 'abstractions are real'.

i - AI is going to interject in so many things and so many ways beyond 'helping you write some modules' so consider that.

ii - AI 2 years ago was useless for code, you can see how well it works not, and this progress is still very real. By this time next year, the power will be more evident, making the position harder to take.

iii - to your point - the real answer is 'abstractions'. We used to write machine code by hand as well, until someone came up with FORTRAN and C etc. Now, people have 'forgotten' how to do that, largely, because we don't need people to do it.

AI is crudely that abstraction. You don't have to know a lot about some things.

Now - it's very fair to highlight the fact that the abstraction isn't very clean (!!!) but that will come over time.

So yes - for writing software today, we're '1/2 a layer abstraction up' - and it's 100% essential to keep an eye on the code, the architecture etc. - it's 'not fully there' but it's better to look at this through the lens of growing capabilities because over the horizon, the argument starts to tilt.

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

#136

Post by fdsajfkldsfklds »

If your job can't easily be done by AI, then you can pick it up and get "up to speed" any time you like.

If it can be done by AI, then you have no hope of competing with the quantity of AI output that anyone can trigger in very little time.

As my job seems pretty secure, I can ignore AI for as long as I like.

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

#137

Post by abustamam »

> Why wouldn't you aim to be better, to learn how to be or do something that AI would never?

Because it doesn't make sense to be better than a tool. A woodworker could use a hand saw and take an hour to cut wood... Or he could use a buzz saw and cut it in a few minutes. Is the woodworker any less of a woodworker when he uses a buzzsaw vs a hand saw?

Outsourcing thinking to AI is not healthy, and certainly if everyone used AI like this we're doomed.

I still think it's true that those who don't use AI will be left behind, but it's a bit tautalogical because the thing they're behind left behind on is AI. A lot of the biggest companies on earth are putting a lot of money in AI, but if you're OK with working for a company that is not putting all their money in AI that's perfectly fine.

Just like block chain was everywhere ten years ago and now is just kinda _there_. If you got in before the hype you could have made a lot of money. If you didn't, you were left behind. I was left behind and I'm OK with that.

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

#138

Post by LaGrange »

buffalobuffalo wrote: post #114
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…

I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech. Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone…

> I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been.

There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them.

I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT.

> But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult.

No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much).

> Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.

Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.

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

#139

Post by Unmotivator2677 »

scrumbledober wrote: post #91
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…

6-12 months ago I felt like i was constantly behind the curve with all the different things people were doing to get more out of their claude code. as the year has progressed though, all of those features keep making their way into vanilla claude code, at a faster and faster rate. Now someone working on the bleeding edge is using things that i'll be using without having to think about them a month from now. It has re…

That's the thing, any "advancement" you might discover will be integrated into main tools soon enough, I am going to say that in fact, you probably shouldn't even learn them before they are integrated. Helps you filter through all the noise and avoid wasting time on learning something that isn't going to take off.

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

#140

Post by dudisubekti »

greenchair wrote: post #127
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.

Sounds like you haven't used it much. It starts small with you forgetting the arcane params to commonly used tools that you don't need to type anymore. Where it will stop nobody knows.

Well, I forget arcane params all the time before AIs too. I rely on terminal history search and google.
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