81–90 of 145 posts
to be clear, the work you’re doing is only relevant to the extent it produces product nobody cares if you use your brain or not. they do care if you’re efficiently delivering reliable product
> 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…
So, Although age tends to have this effect on how we see the world, and some of it probably not to worry about. I think there is part of this awareness that has some wisdom and is trying to protect our species..
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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.
This is purely a matter of perception. Cooking a meal is a deeply intellectual process. If I buy a meal from a restaurant, yes I am losing a skill. But if making a hollandaise is not a skill I ever need in my life, it's not really a practical loss. 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-intellectualiz…
What about the skill of learning itself? I would suggest that's one of the most important skills humans have evolved. The more integrated AI becomes in our societies, the more it will automate away potential opportunities for learning. I can forsee a world tightly integrated with AI where people are not only physically sedentary, but mentally as well.
As we progress further into the future, we need more educated people than ever to tackle the exponentially increasing complexities of our society. But AI presents an obstacle that many will never cross due to how to convenient it is to skip the messy work of understanding.
Also, this problem is not unique to AI. It existed before the GPTs and Claude's of the world. But it's a problem of scale, and every company on the Earth right now is trying to scale AI up as fast as possible.
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Customer doesn’t give a fuck how long a billing system took to make, they only care that it works correctly. A billing system only truly gets built once, then possibly maintained in perpetuity. This makes the advantage of building it 20x times faster pointless. AI builds it in a day, will it matter 5 years from now if that billing system was instead built by hand in 20 days a long time ago? No. The speed advantage of…
Every billing system in use is constantly maintained with new features, bug fixes ane the like. The system of 20 years ago would apply the wrong tax laws today. the people asking for the new feature today care about how easy those are to add
I think after a while the accretions are going to get slow, and probably unmaintainable even for AI. And by that time, the code will be completely unreadable. It will probably make the code written by people who probably should not be developers that I have had to clean up look fairly straightforward in comparison.
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It’s not insane. They are correct that is the point of civilization which carries information from generation to generation outside the oral tradition in a systematic organized reliable way.
The point of civilisation, however loose that idea may be, if it’s anything at all, is determined by people. Technology exists today in a way that feels like it could be defining its own path in a sense, but much like oral tradition, neither are large enough concepts to describe civilisation.
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Every billing system in use is constantly maintained with new features, bug fixes ane the like. The system of 20 years ago would apply the wrong tax laws today. the people asking for the new feature today care about how easy those are to add
I think adding new features is exactly the sort of place where AI is terrible, at least after you do it for a while. I think it's going to have a tendency to regenerate the whole function(s), but it's not deterministic. Plus, as others have said, the code isn't clean. So you're going to get accretions of messy code, the actual implementation of which will change around each time it gets generated. Anything not clearl…
You have encountered https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
> 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?…
None of these things allow you to turn your brain off while the machine does the work.
I still have to DRIVE the car and all the thinking that goes with that. It's not a robotaxi.
I still have to acquire and prep the food I am microwaving. It's not a replicator.
I still have to know what I want to eat before grocery shopping and prepare the food. It's not a take out restaurant.
I still have to know how to use the power tools to carefully shape something into a fine piece of furniture and not a pile of splintered firewood. Power tools can't operate on their own unless aliens (see Maximum Overdrive.)
These are better analogies:
Do you take a taxi or public transport? Those let you turn your brain off while someone or something does the driving work.
Do you go to a restaurant where you can pick what you want, turn your brain off and wait for a delicious (or not) meal?
Do you order takeout where you can order what you want form the comfort of your home, turn your brain off and enjoy the meal when it arrives? Then reheat the leftovers in the microwave.
Do you use a fabrication service where you send them a drawing, turn your brain off, and they ship you an assembled thing?
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.
Your capitalist side needs to read some Deming. "Your system is perfectly tuned to produce the results that you are getting." Obviously, then, if you want better results, you need to improve your system.
Also "the product" is ambiguous. Is it the overall product, like how the product sits in the market, how the user interacts with it to achieve their goals, the manufacturability of the product, etc.? That is Steve Jobs sort of focus on the product, and it is really more of a system (how does the product relate to its user, environment, etc). However, AI doesn't produce that product, nor does any individual engineer. If "the product" means "the result of a task", you don't want to optimize that. That's how you get Microsoft and enterprise products. Nothing works well together, and using it is like cutting a steak with a spoon, but it has a truckload of features.
> 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?…
Which of these is behind a subscription paywall and owned by another party that would cut off your access immediately?
These comparisons make little sense, which is the problem with comparisons. They are soundbites from enthusiasts who don't know or understand how this technology will actually affect or shape us, but feel entitled enough to misinform the rest of us.