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> certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" Actually it's quite possible that being a business manager/owner is actually addictive (having power over people), we just don't recognize it as such.
All gambling addiction is addiction, not all addiction is gambling.
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> certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" Actually it's quite possible that being a business manager/owner is actually addictive (having power over people), we just don't recognize it as such.
All gambling addiction is addiction, not all addiction is gambling.
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How is this different from hiring a designer, telling them "make me a website" and then waiting to see if they resolve the uncertainty into something you like or not? I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
It is different because for humans, it takes time to produce some result, while AI does it instantly. So if you tell a programmer to do X, you have a week for your adrenaline to cool off. If you tell AI, it will do it in minutes.
If you're making the argument that LLMs are gambling simply because they're faster than humans, I'd like to see some evidence.
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All gambling addiction is addiction, not all addiction is gambling.
Then you miss the point - AI use is being compared to gambling because it is addictive, partly due to same mechanism - the results (and rewards) are somewhat random, but it makes you feel as if you're completely in control of the outcome.
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Then you miss the point - AI use is being compared to gambling because it is addictive, partly due to same mechanism - the results (and rewards) are somewhat random, but it makes you feel as if you're completely in control of the outcome.
Yeah, that hasn't been my experience. The outcome, for me, is extremely consistent. I ~never have to "reroll" by wiping work and doing it again.
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The gambling part is because of the (hopefully emergent and not purposefully designed) intermittent reinforcement due to the limits. You don't get that with regular hires.
Really? All the hires I've seen had an 8-hour/5-day limit, or you had to pay through the nose for extended usage outside that window. Where do you get your 24/7 hires from?
You can play overextending the hire analogy all you want but it is simply not the same.
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Yeah, that hasn't been my experience. The outcome, for me, is extremely consistent. I ~never have to "reroll" by wiping work and doing it again.
Strange. I tell Claude Code to do things differently all the time.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
It's to the point that I just push the output of that to production and know it'll be OK, except for very large changes where I'm unlikely to have specified everything at the required level of detail. Even then, things won't so much be wrong, as they'll just not be how I want them.
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It is different because for humans, it takes time to produce some result, while AI does it instantly. So if you tell a programmer to do X, you have a week for your adrenaline to cool off. If you tell AI, it will do it in minutes.
I don't think the difference between a designer and a slot machine is that one gives you results more slowly, "therefore it's not gambling". If you're making the argument that LLMs are gambling simply because they're faster than humans, I'd like to see some evidence.
No I am not. It's more addictive because of the timescale. The comparison of AIs to gambling is through addiction mechanism, as I explain elsewhere.
My aunt used to put in (the same) lottery numbers every week. It was gambling, but probably not an addiction in the clinical sense. If she had played slot machines, god forbid, it could have been more problematic. AI is a slot machine, a hire is a lottery ticket.
It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis.
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To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.
So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines. So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products…
The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!). It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
If you know what you're doing, know how to spec a problem space, and can manage the tool competently enough to churn out good results, then everything's fine, and you're maybe being productive or increasing your productivity by some degree. (Professional "Gambler")
If you DON'T know what you're doing, and you're just vibe-coding, then I would argue that it is at least a form of gambling (Amateur "Gambler")
Both of these conditions can also be applied to "hiring people to do a job" however there we can also observe things like reputation, credentials and so on.
"It's just paying to get stuff done..." is, with respect, superflous.