Building better AI tools

Mental skills (just like motor skills) also degrade with time. I can’t remember how to do an integral by hand anymore. Although re-learning would probably be faster if I looked it up.

> find my way driving without a GPS. Reading a map? lol

Most people would still be able to. But we fantasize about the usefulness of maps. I remember myself on the Paris circular highway (at the time 110km/h, not 50km/h like today), the map on the driving wheel, super dangerous. You say you’d miss GPS features on a paper map, but back then we had the same problems: It didn’t speak, didn’t have the blinking position, didn’t tell you which lane to take, it simplified details to the point of losing you…

You won’t become less clever with AI: You already have Youtube for that. You’ll just become augmented.

True. It isn't literally present as that sentance in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), but is a summarization. Amputation is mentioned 15 times and augmentation twice.

The concept that "every augmentation is an amputation" is best captured in Chapter 4, "THE GADGET LOVER: Narcissus as Narcosis." The chapter explains that any extension of ourselves is a form of "autoamputation" that numbs our senses.

Technology as "Autoamputation": The text introduces research that regards all extensions of ourselves as attempts by the body to maintain equilibrium against irritation. This process is described as a kind of self-amputation. The central nervous system protects itself from overstimulation by isolating or "amputating" the offending function. This theory explains "why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation".

The Wheel as an Example: The book uses the wheel as an example of this process. The pressure of new burdens led to the extension, or "'amputation,'" of the foot from the body into the form of the wheel. This amplification of a single function is made bearable only through a "numbness or blocking of perception".

etc

Tangent, there was this obnoxious effect for typing in editors the characters would explode, makes me think of a typewriter as you're banging away every character for some piece of code.

I imagine people can start making code (probably already are) where functions/modules are just boxes as a UI and the code is not visible, test it with in/out, join it to something else.

When I'm tasked to make some CRUD UI I plan out the chunks of work to be done in order and I already feel the rote-ness of it, doing it over and over. I guess that is where AI can come in.

But I do enjoy the process of making something even like a POSh camera GUI/OS by hand..

The only mention I see of early-career coming up in the article is "matches how I would teach an early career engineer the process of managing an incident". That isn't a claim that only early career engineers learn this way or benefit from working in this style. Your comment implied that the primary people who might want to work in the way proposed in this article are those early in their career. I would, indeed, disagree with that.

Consider, by way of example, the classic problem of teaching someone to find information. If someone asks "how do I X" and you answer "by doing Y", they have learned one thing (and will hopefully retain it). If someone asks "how do I X" and you answer "here's the search I did to find the answer of Y", they have now learned two things, and one of them reinforces a critical skill they should be using throughout their career.

I am not suggesting that incident response should be done entirely by hand, or that there's zero place for AI. AI is somewhat good at, for instance, looking at a huge amount of information at once and pointing towards things that might warrant a closer look. I'm nonetheless agreeing with the point that the human should be in the loop to a large degree.

That also partly addresses the fundamental security problems of letting AI run commands in production, though in practice I do think it likely that people will run commands presented to them without careful checking.

> none of it is plausibly destructive

In theory, you could have a safelist of ways to gather information non-destructively. In practice, it would not surprise me at all if pople don't. I think it's very likely that many people will deploy AI tools in production and not solve any of the security issues, and incidents will result.

I am all for the concept of having a giant dashboard that collects and presents any non-destructive information rapidly. That tool is useful for a human, too. (Along with presenting the commands that were used to obtain that information.)