51–60 of 145 posts
Latecomers lack the hundreds of iterations and the experience that comes with it. The senses haven't been trained.
There's a business here. Not one I want to be in, or one without major ethical drag, but a viable one. Fend off extinction, get fit.
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…
The line is fine. Even if I use GPS a lot, I still try to keep my ability to interpret maps and find my way. Same with calculators, even when today are dirt cheap, are not allowed in school, and being able to do math without it is a valuable skill. So maybe there are like 2 groups of things: one where using it you are losing nothing, some where you lose some valuable ability.
How different do you think your life would be if the combine harvester did not exist?
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…
Douglas Adams really put it best: > “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” writes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt. > 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. > 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can proba…
don't grow up too set in your ways to not learn the new. But do grow up fast/young to get some cynicism for everything. now that I'm in my 50s the first is important but when younger the later was important.
Who else struggles with both sides of this? My engineer side values curiosity, brain power, and artistanship. My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. My formula is something like this: product = money, process = happiness, money != happiness, no money = unhappiness. I think the optimal solution is min/maxing this thing. Find the AI process that minimizes unhappiness, and maximizes money.
While I applaud her and wish her well — writing like this reminds me of a couple of things. First my aging father insisting on navigating using his unfortunately fading memory instead of Google maps. Some people just won’t pick up technology out of habit or spite, even if it hinders them. Second, a quote I read here that I’ll paraphrase “you can be the best marathon runner in the world and still lose a race to a guy…
I don't think this diminishes your point, but, for a thing like memory, your father may be maintaining it by insisting on relying on it. It may diminish regardless, but its diminishment may slow down. At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professi…
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea...
Who else struggles with both sides of this? My engineer side values curiosity, brain power, and artistanship. My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. My formula is something like this: product = money, process = happiness, money != happiness, no money = unhappiness. I think the optimal solution is min/maxing this thing. Find the AI process that minimizes unhappiness, and maximizes money.
I wrote an article about this, but honestly I don't think I really captured the totality of my feelings. I really haven't decided where I land. I'm definitely using the tools for economic purposes, and I even have some "pure-fun" side project stuff where I'm getting value from it.
Here's the article if that sounds interesting, would love to discuss the whole topic with anyone who's finding themselves of two (or more) minds on these sorts of issues: https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-m...
I would pay money to read rants on a forum like Hackernews but in 190X when cars started sharing the roads with horse carriages. I bet it would look something like the posts we are seeing today with developers and agentic AI.
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…
The problem is that you're likening fundamentally unlike things. AI isn't like a microwave or an automatic car or a power tool. It does not augment you. As I said elsewhere: AI is not a bicycle for the mind, it's an easy chair. You will lose more than you ever gain.
AI is taking problems and putting them in a drawer so we never have to think about it again. Matches de-intellectualized making a fire. A washing machine de-intellectualized doing laundry. These are now solved problems.
Our brainpower spent on them is effectively worth nothing. The only reason we need to learn to make a fire from scratch is for the intellectual satisfaction or for emergency situations. The same reason we would choose to work on the problems that AI can now solve.
It only a loss if you think the skill and ability you are losing is intrinsically valuable, and the only thing you are going to replace it with is leisure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The line is fine. Even if I use GPS a lot, I still try to keep my ability to interpret maps and find my way. Same with calculators, even when today are dirt cheap, are not allowed in school, and being able to do math without it is a valuable skill. So maybe there are like 2 groups of things: one where using it you are losing nothing, some where you lose some valuable ability.
It's quite difficult to tell exactly the extent your life depends on technology. How different do you think your life would be if the combine harvester did not exist?